GUY TREBAY ESSAY


“I truly believe that the world is going to undergo a huge transformation in the next 10 years,” Gabi Asfour, of the design collective ThreeASFOUR, said before his show during New York Fashion Week. “No one talks about this, but the masses now have huge access to culture that they never had before. And that access is the real wealth, in a way that money is not. In 10 years there won’t be an elite controlling access to culture, and then things are going to change incredibly fast.”

Until then, this elite is locked in place. It is sometimes startling to scan the front rows of a fashion show and the banquettes at Fashion Week parties and note how unvarying is the cast of “influentials” in a business that makes a fetish of the new.

There, after decades, sits the 60-year-old editor of Vogue, by now a prop without which no show can begin. There, at all the interchangeable late-night parties, is Chloe Sevigny, serving up the same dissolute ingenue pout. There, too, is Olivier Zahm, the French editor of Purple, whose never-changing scruff and leer suggest he hasn’t had time for a proper shower in years.

There, in the front row of every show of note, is the same Vogue posse, the same Bazaar cluster, the same V people and Michael Roberts, a veritable one-man fashion force at Vanity Fair.

Pursuit of novelty may be one of fashion’s most durable illusions. The fact is that very little in fashion is new, in any real sense, nor is it truly supposed to be. (“There’s so much striving for newness now that newness feels less new,” as Marc Jacobs told Style.com.)

Many of the 175,000 people who work in fashion in New York, in the more than 800 businesses that generate $10 billion in total annual wages and tax revenues of $1.7 billion, could probably confirm Mr. Asfour’s proposition that fashion is at heart a conservative business. It is pure fantasy to suppose that each new season represents some advance in evolution. With the recent suicide by hanging of Alexander McQueen - arguably one of the true artists and innovators in the field - the most one can realistically hope for is amusing variations on wellrehearsed themes, some spectacle and a bit of backstage drama.

Loyalty, like ethics in fashion, is largely situational. Ask Iris Strubegger. One of the most desirable models of the moment, Ms. Strubegger seems to have appeared out of nowhere (rural Austria) and is eager to get back there as soon as she can.

“I don’t know how long I want to stay in the business,” she said backstage at Marc Jacobs. “It’s exciting, but only for a couple of years.”

Fashion, she added, is exhausting and not always a business that puts decency first. She was referring to a recent pictorial from an issue of V magazine, for which the photographer Sebastian Faena persuaded her to appear almost naked on the night-dark streets of Barcelona.

“ Now it’s out there and I can’t take it back. You give your body to fashion, you know, but you have to leave a little something for yourself.”

How much do you retain, though? It is not always clear . How often anyone in the garment business is paid monies owed is a tale that was already hoary in 1973, when Jack Lemmon starred as the disillusioned garmento Harry Stoner in “Save the Tiger.”

Before arranging to have his warehouse torched for the insurance, Stoner longs for the earlier, more innocent days of patriotism, baseball and jazz. Once upon a time, he says sorrowfully, a flag was something more than a pattern to put on a jockstrap.

How quaint that notion seems now, when a flag is about equal parts corporate branding tool and national emblem . Could Harry Stoner possibly have envisioned a day when designers would suggest a guy put on a cassock, a corset, high-water trousers with a fat industrial zipper suggestively closing the rear?

Michael Whittaker, a 19-year-old model from New Zealand, rubbed his hand along the arm of his garment at the Thom Browne show and said, “Feel this.” What looked to be an ordinary V-neck woolen tennis sweater was, in fact, hand-knit from mink. A carved banner above Mr. Whittaker’s head read Pro Patria et Gloria (For Country and Glory), a motto for valiant roughnecks of the 107th Infantry during World War I.

“It’s kind of insane,” Mr. Whittaker said - of the sweater, I think, but possibly also the whole scenario. Perhaps, in a way, it was.