As part of the New York Times' continuing effort to have each and every article relate to 9/11 somehow, this article from the fashion section focuses on how the Ladies Who Lunch just don't have it in their heart to shop any more. Thanks to Debbie for pointing this one out. Excerpts follow:
"I would not like to be a retailer right now," Marian Rivman, a public relations consultant, said. "Ever since the attacks, I have no heart for shopping. The whole notion that we have too much is totally confirmed when you know you have sweaters you put away two years ago and forgot and the news is full of people in Afghanistan climbing mountains with their feet in rags."Ms. Rivman's wardrobe concerns have veered sharply toward the pragmatic, or at least toward clothes that can seem that way in unreliable times. "The first thing I did was check my shoes," she said. Almost anything not suited to running for one's life was tossed.
Even Dara Perlbinder, an Upper East Sider who moves in a sphere where wardrobes are strategized with war room precision, and where the two least often heard words are "last year," found herself suddenly "not caring as much," she said. "I feel like I already have lots of things in my closet I can wear," she continued.
Soon after the terrorist attacks, Barbara Heizer started mining her closet. "I found myself saying, `What do I need that for, I've already got so much?' " Ms. Heizer, a freelance editor and writer, said. Seated beneath a 1970's Andy Warhol portrait of her, in her TriBeCa loft, Ms. Heizer wore a pair of decade-old Manolo Blahnik equestrian- style boots, a "very old" but revamped Donna Karan motorcycle jacket and a 1996 Chanel dress. For some time now, she explained, so-called vintage clothes have seemed to her "much cooler than anything coming out in the stores."
When this reporter called Amy Fine Collins, a fashion writer whose deeper purpose might be confirming the need for an International Best Dressed List, she said, "You dialed the right number." Speaking from a cellphone while having a pedicure, Ms. Collins said that, since Sept. 11, she had been "having recurrent dreams of going into my closet and discovering clothes and shoes there that I had entirely forgotten about."
It is, Ms. Collins said, "an entirely fresh thrill." It is also, she went on, something that actually occurs.
In mid-September, on one of "those insanely surreal blue skies days," Ms. Collins explained, she had left the house not wearing one of many Geoffrey Beene outfits that have caused some people to refer to her as the muse of that particular designer, but a cotton striped blouse and a straight narrow linen skirt and low heels, a little ladylike uniform, the kind of clothes she might have pulled from the closet in her dreams.
The response on the street to Ms. Collins is always worth noting, since few people can approach her stylization in both grooming and dress. In this case, however, Ms. Collins was startled to find that "so many people stopped me on the street." The reason, she concluded, was that "there is this desire now for some kind of simple feminine uniform" to replace "the kind of aggressive, chaotic, androgyny" that characterized the spirit of capital fashion with a capital F.
"The last thing anyone wants to see right now is camouflage or any kind of savagery expressed in clothes," Ms. Collins said earnestly. "Let's face it. You can't play at camouflage now. Either you're fighting for civilization or you're not."
| Fashion | New York Times |
