An Evening at the Big House: Fashion Succumbs to the Atavistic Lure of Giant Ta-Ta's
Johnson's statement sounded too much like "Thank God I got fake boobs!" This, combined with the news that she would be using busty Playboy bunnies for her Spring 2001 runway show because she "needed a very specific type of woman; ultrafeminine, sexy and glamorous," made her comments sound like an endorsement. Not only did she live the fantasy (and back pain) of being a size D?those air bags saved her life!
My personal history with the fashion world is uneventful and thankfully brief, being comprised entirely of the three weeks I was an intern at British Vogue. To get through being an intern at a major fashion institution?where even the ad reps walk the halls as if they're mounting the catwalk, and one's ability to participate in the current affairs chatter rests entirely on seeing _____ at _____ in a pair of _____ open-toed shoes ("Those weren't toes, sweetie, they were hooves")?one has to make a very elaborate game out of things. I, having roughly the same build and haircut as the assistant art director, went shopping in the men's department at the Gap across the street my second week, and consequently started dressing exactly like him. The look on his face those first few days was worth the money it cost to provoke, and his intense, Hitchcockian paranoia kept me going through hours of picking out terra-cotta plant holders.
The other thing that kept me going was Mark Holgate. While it's fair to say I met some of the most catty, shallow, Sloaney individuals in the industry within those walls, it's also fair to say that in Mark I met one of the nicest. Unlike others at the magazine who ordered interns around, Mark treated us like humans. He invited us into the editor's office for drinks after work one day, comforted me when my student loan fell through, gave me probably the nicest pair of hose I will ever own in my life and, most memorably of all, asked my opinion on his wardrobe.
When I came to New York, I got an appointment with a friend of Mark's, the fashion director at a weekly, who kindly offered me the role of her assistant during fashion week coverage. I'd be going to the shoots as well as doing some writing. "You're sure to get a job straight away after that in the fashion department at one of the glossies," she told me. I told her I'd think about it and never called back. No doubt there were plenty of others who'd love the opportunity to get a foot in such an exclusive door, but after my stint at British Vogue, I knew I wasn't one of them.
?
Fashion brings out the worst in people. Or at least it brought out the worst in me as I lined up on that Tuesday in a tent off 42nd St. For karmic reasons too sordid to discuss here, someone else had taken the seat reserved for New York Press at Betsey's spring fashion show, leaving me to stand. Initially, I was just glad I gained entry to the event at all. But after spending half an hour watching celebrities, fashion royalty and other reporters (all of whom I was separated from by a red velvet rope) brush past me and all the other Jane Sixpacks hoping to squeeze into the plebe section, I slowly morphed into the girl next to me?tapping my foot, craning my neck to locate the guy in charge and cursing under my breath that I'd been reduced to it.
"I should've gotten a seat, but I RSVP'd too late," I declared, trying to distance myself from the suburban mom on my right who kept squawking, "Who's that! Who's that!" every time a flashbulb went off, and align myself with the more frustrated and cosmopolitan creature on my left.
"I know," she answered, taking time out from looking pissed off and beautiful. "How badly do you wish you'd called earlier now?" She looked familiar, and I was on the verge of asking who she was. I stopped myself, not because the query would have been too gauche for our surroundings, but rather because it would have been far too philosophical.
A large majority of the somebodys who did show up, like Ric Ocasek and Steven Tyler (whose knee bounced anxiously through the entire show), fell into the "rocker" category of clientele Betsey's clothes typically attracts?or as the fashion industry terms them, "funky." I wasn't shocked to see these two at a Playboy event. Is there a bigger boys' club in existence than rock 'n' roll? Other snapworthy celebs on hand included a Victoria's Secret model and Lauren Holly, who, currently experiencing not nearly as much popularity as Jim Carrey's new girlfriend Renee Zellweger, has been making the rounds.
The "Betsey girls," as Johnson's employees are referred to, were all wearing hot pink tanktops with the symbolic "BJ" emblazoned across their chests. It was they who, finally, were instructed to let us inside. The place was packed, and after I fought my way to the front (and someone's elbow out of my ass), I got a good look at the huge backdrop situated behind the runway. The most distressing thing about it wasn't that the Playboy logo was above Betsey's, but that the whole thing was done in my signature color, pink.
The DJ cued the standard, swanky, a-little-more-from-the-horn-section-boys striptease music and the T and A hit the floor. Betsey said she wanted her line to appeal to all women?short, fat, tall, thin, skinny. Yet the models themselves were identical: long manes of hair that looked as hard to hold up as their breasts, all of which were at least D-cup in size, although not all of them jiggled. Betsey's theme, aside from clothes dedicated to "Playboy fashion," was, obviously, spring, with each set of bunnies representing a different month. Some wore sailor suits, a few were cowboys, a handful debuted as blushing June brides, and many of them sported ears and tails.
But the common dominator for all the outfits was their lack of...well, outfit. Just like the magazine, most of the girls were blonde and all but one was white, and I remembered catching a glimpse of a black girl in a Kangol-style hat with the Playboy bunny on it when I first walked in. When Betsey announced she'd be using Playmates as models, she stressed "voluptuous, Marilyn Monroe" types. (In her defense, understand this is a world where supermodel Gisele is constantly described as "curvy.") "Well, at least these girls won't be sticks," my roommate commented. "At least they'll have some meat on them and look more like the average woman."
Problem is, when Betsey designed her spring line around the Playboy image, she designed that line around a man's idea of voluptuous, which means gigantic ta-ta's. Therefore, while one of the models even had visible cellulite, the majority of them were size 4 white girls with no asses and cement DDs affixed to their fronts. So now women's fashion is at the mercy of a straight man's idea of beauty, as opposed to a gay man's. ("Yo, we don't want the bitch to be fat, but I mean come on, she's got to have big tits. And I want those nipples pointin' to the ceiling, know what I'm sayin'?") How revolutionary.
The sight of one bunny in particular, whose arms and legs looked like limbs from The Karen Carpenter Story, was particularly unsettling. When she shook that bleached blonde hair she must have considered it a personal victory that the dry, damaged, frizzy mop didn't fall right out onto the floor. Her theatrical makeup, combined with those fashionably washed-out lips smiling at the cameras, made her closely resemble a laughing, taunting skeleton from childhood nightmares. This, along with the fact that I myself was plagued with eating disorders as a teen after the death of my mother, forced me to cringe and turn my face away. Is this really what men masturbate to? Necrophilia seems more appealing. If nothing else, I now know where most of the cheerleaders from my high school ended up (at least the ones who weren't debilitated by crabs after fake-and-baking nude on the same tanning bed before the prom).
?
I suppose Betsey's baby-doll motif, in theory, would look great on women with large breasts. But as every girl over a B-cup knows, the first thing your mama teaches you to look for in lingerie is support. Reinforcement. When your breasts are real, they start sagging pretty early. Like as soon as they begin developing, at which point you spend hours in your bedroom listening to the Smiths and practicing which way to position yourself on a bed during make-out sessions. Sit up straight? Might as well tuck 'em into my belt. Lie on my side? Wait, now they've both fallen into my left armpit. Flat on my back? We have a winner!
Any large-breasted vet, seeing the thin pieces of fabric?which weren't even lycra or spandex, and didn't have built-in underwires?Betsey was suggesting we wear, would scoff. Toward the end of the show, as "Magic Man" came on over the speakers and I couldn't help but think of Hef, I noticed a familiar face across the catwalk. Those black-framed glasses, that devil-may-care attitude...it was Mark from British Vogue, whom I'd been thinking about earlier for the first time in years. He was sitting very unaffectedly next to a woman in her 50s with shaved eyebrows, died orange hair and 5-inch heels; I half-expected her to pull a robotic arm out from under her coat at any moment.
Mark, now the Fashion Director at New York magazine, remembered me when I approached him after the show. "Betsey Johnson has never subscribed to some neurotic, tortured, existential theory," he told me. "I mean at times you did feel a bit like you were watching Wash & Go Barbie in there, but she just goes for it. And you know that's really what Betsey Johnson is about. Having fun."
If fun is being a 22-year-old-girl sharing a 70-something year-old man with three other women, as Hef and his four concubines (who are presumably living out the ultimate goal of bunnydom) are said to do, then that's not fun. It's just funny.
I guess the hip reaction would be to remark on how great this bunny's butt looked or how luscious that set of implants was, preferably to a straight man I was interested in impressing. Then I'd be just another Ivy League girl who never shaves her armpits yet gets the mohawk on her pussy trimmed every month. She recognizes the inherent "beauty" and "sexuality" of her gender and isn't afraid to admit it. She's attended strip clubs with her boyfriend and even been known to jump up onstage for an impromptu performance. (Can you imagine the shitstorm if he asked her along on an expedition to the little boy's room at Splash or the Roxy?)
And as far as the Playboy bunny goes, she's come a long way from the dark pre-Steinem days?or rather, full circle. This, apparently, is the new liberated woman. The intellectualized sex kitten. Actually, she's still the same archetypal brainwashed bimbo, only now, much to her partner's glee, she can quote Nietzsche.
In high school I didn't quite fit into the thin, blonde, intensely Germanic mold that dominated my area. Boys never paid much attention to me until I started hanging out with the hesher/new wave/skater/punk rock/gifted-and-talented-program-nerd contingent behind the school next to the parking lot. The only thing that made us a community was the fact that we didn't fit in, or were at least smart enough to admit it instead of trying to hide it. I was shocked to discover that not only did some of these guys want to be my friends, a couple of them wanted to kiss me?with tongue!
One day after class I went to my boyfriend's house where he and all his friends hung out in the basement. As I approached the door to his bedroom things seemed normal enough?a Pogues album was on the hi-fi and they were having an incredibly informed discussion about politics and how much they wished they could join the IRA. When I opened the door I soon became aware that something was wrong, and that something was 4 feet high and tacked to the other side of the door: a poster of Kathy Ireland in a swimsuit with a can of beer in her hand.
What angered me most was that she's the kind of girl we all hated! Her hair wasn't in Flock of Seagulls wings! She didn't wear all black! She wasn't at the Fugazi show last weekend! She didn't want to fight fascism! She probably couldn't even spell it!
Ever since that day, I've accepted the fact that men are going to look at pornography. But that doesn't mean I have to like Playboy, and it sure as fuck doesn't mean I'm going to sit silently by while another woman promotes it as "ultrafeminine."
"Everyone keeps saying, 'Using bunnies is not about porn, it's about kitsch,'" a family friend who works at a Betsey Johnson boutique in Texas told me on the phone. That explanation seems to jive with the poodle skirts and "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" evening gowns I saw on the runway. But more than Betsey's penchant for vintage, I think they mirror, as with miniskirts in the 60s and shoulder pads in the 80s, the mentality of the times. In the last few years I've heard college-educated women in their late 20s refer to feminists as "women who don't wear skirts," and watched a friend who once aspired to run NOW attend Playboy "buzz" parties, staggering home with bunny martini glasses that she proudly displays in her kitchen. And people at the show appeared to enjoy themselves. I even caught Mark tapping his foot to "I Want Your Sex." It's a time when men who look like Ed Norton can land women who look like Salma Hayek (and furthermore, want to), when Bill prefers Monica to Hillary and Madeleine Albright, one of the most powerful women in the world, is continually referred to in this paper as "foggy bottom." As one male Playboy staffer told me, "It's a good time to be a bunny."
I guess that means it's a bad time to be a woman. So it seems everything old is new again, yet some people are regressing in more constructive ways. Like me. In college I was a staunch vegan, before giving over to the red-meat-leather-pants-decadence that comes with the disillusionment of the "real world" and graduation. Now, embarrassingly, I have McDonald's for lunch at least twice a month. (I was glad of it recently, when the prize in my Happy Meal turned out to be a "Paralympic Becky Figurine"?a wheelchair-bound Olympian manufactured by Barbie.) And the other night while I was watching a PBS special on sit-ins at lunchcounters during the 60s, the family friend called from Texas. She'd gotten a $300 Betsey jacket for free from the shop, and thought it would be "perfect for me." After the initial rush of adrenaline and smiles, I realized I had to turn her down on principle. Even though, as she reminded me, it was pink?my signature color.