Fashionistas (26 page)

K
rystal Karpfinger wants to open an outdoor shopping mall in New Jersey.

“In one of those places redolent of suburban New Jersey like King of Prussia. We’ll put down cobblestones and recreate the layout of Soho exactly. Prince Street south: Face Stockholm, Mimi Ferzt Gallery, Olives, Reinstein/Ross, Harriet Love, Pleats Please, etc. Prince Street north: Replay, the Met shop, Club Monaco, Myoptics, Camper, etc. With the right streetlights and some well-placed scaffolding, shoppers won’t even notice the difference. They’ll save on sales tax for items more than $110—and, really, what in Soho costs less than $110—and they won’t have to deal with Holland Tunnel traffic. It’s win-win,” she says conversationally. But this isn’t a conversation; it’s the first act of her one-woman show. “And we’ll call it Faux-Ho.” Pause here for laughter.

I don’t laugh, but I smile politely and glance around for someone to save me from the gallery owner’s wife. Maya is standing less than three inches away talking to a hipster in black, but right now she’s useless. She’s too engrossed in the
woman’s story to care if I live or die of boredom and ignores my pointed looks as though I were a complete stranger with a twitching-eye problem.

Gavin, who is also a few feet away from me, isn’t in the mood to throw me a lifeline either. He’s here and he’s playing affable host but he’s quite happy to watch me dangle over hot coals. Krystal Karpfinger at the Jesus party is almost worse than no Jesus party at all.

The gallery owner’s wife launches into act two—how to spot a suburbanite at a hundred paces—and I grab the arm of a passing waitress. The woman is startled by my attention and tries to brush me off like I’m an unwanted fly, but I hold tight.

“I’m sorry, did you just say that the band refuses to play unless someone removes all the green M&M’s from the candy dish?” Before the waitress can voice her denial or call me insane, I turn to Krystal. “I have to go. Band emergency. You know how it is with temperamental artists. One minute they’re like self-sufficient human beings, the next they’re helpless babies in diapers. You do understand, don’t you?”

It’s clear from her expression that she doesn’t understand anything—three cards have been shuffled quickly under her nose but it all happened so fast. While she’s trying to find the dollar, I make a beeline for the other side of the room. I get a club soda and a puffed pastry filled with lobster and stand quietly in a corner next to Jesus in a blue Badgely Mishka. I’m watching the crowd mingle when Jane taps me on the shoulder. The room is thick with people, but Jane finds me easily, as though there’s some sort of computer-chip homing device in my right top molar. “Vig, you’re supposed to be controlling the press,” she says angrily over the conversational din. A woman slinks behind Jane, causing her to spill white wine all over my silk dress. Jane doesn’t apologize. She is too annoyed with me to care about my dry-cleaning bill. I shouldn’t be standing by while Paris is burning. But the only thing burning here is her rage: The photographers are tak
ing pictures of Gavin against the Karpfinger banner. This is unacceptable.

Jane darts off, clearing a path through the crowd with her shoulders, and I make my way to the press area slowly. The room is packed, and you have to slither between socialites and art-world critics to cross it. The huge crowd—glittering and unexpected—are here in support of freedom of speech. They are defending the First Amendment and having their pictures taken as they push through the angry mob that lines the streets. This is not turn-of-the-last-century China and the protesters are not Boxers, but it feels as though the gallery is a mission under siege. Outside the demonstrators chant and hurl insults and we try our best to ignore them like picnickers on the edge of a storm.

Gavin is standing in the middle of the gallery’s banner, so that from whatever angle you take the picture you see either
K-A-R
or
I-N-G-E-R.
Our more media savvy backdrop—the word
fashionista
repeats in forty-four-point type from one corner to the other—is on the adjacent wall being neglected. Gavin is supposed to stand between the two, but he’s feeling rebellious and not at all willing to comply. When he looks at me, the corners of his lips turn into a smile. Smug bastard.

Jane is behind me, with a hand on the small of my back. “Go on. Fix it,” she says, as if this were an easily solved problem like a loose lightbulb or an uneven hem. “Go on.”

I look around, wishing Kate or Sarah or even Allison were here. This was their plan; things like this should be their problem. But it’s my problem now, and as I consider my options, I realize there’s only one thing to be done: I must make a fool of myself. Taking a deep breath, I walk behind Gavin, lose my balance and clutch on to the banner for support. We both tumble to the floor—the banner with more grace and enthusiasm than I—and Anita Smithers rushes in and adjusts Gavin’s position. She doesn’t want her client being upstaged by an editor with two left feet.

Once justice is served, Jane rushes to Gavin’s side and grabs the attention for herself. She is not just a sponge, she is a leech, and every moment she sucks belongs to someone else. Her smiles are bright as she flirts with reporters and cameras, but her knowledge of art is appalling—she cites Rodin as the greatest living painter—and I stand there watching Gavin flinch.

Jane’s thirst for the spotlight is ardent and brazen and is the sort of compulsion that doesn’t acknowledge boundaries. She will stand there on that makeshift stage until the prop guys carry her off and the stage manager locks the doors. I’m not one of the prop guys and I don’t think I can lift Jane, but I approach her anyway with resolve. We have taken enough from Gavin and I’m determined to leave him this.

“…and if I had to compare him to only one artist of the twentieth century, I’d have to say Seurat. They both have the same cleanness of line,” Jane explains, falling back on a common
Fashionista
cliché, even though
Sunday in the Park
is not a modern sofa or a sleek Calvin Klein dress.

Although she is annoyed at me for blocking her light, I lean over to Jane and whisper into her ear that the demonstrators outside are waiting for her statement. Such a statement was never part of the game plan, but the idea appeals to her. There are five times as many people outside, and she is suddenly envisioning sixties protest rallies that she never attended and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She has a dream.

After fielding a what-took-you-so-long glare from Gavin, I follow Jane through the crowd. The protest outside is loud but orderly, with hundreds of people gathered behind blue police barricades. A short, neat man wearing an unobtrusive brown suit leads the rally, and the street lamps of Mercer shine off his bald head, giving him an odd sort of halo as he stands on a platform with a megaphone in his hand. “No Jesus, no justice, no joke,” he shouts, in sync with his audience. “Respect our icon, respect our beliefs, respect us.”

The man pauses to inhale and Jane takes this as her cue. She climbs the five steps to the top of the podium, seizes the megaphone from the shocked man’s hand and greets the crowd. “Hello,” she says, her voice booming down the cobblestone street. “My name is Jane Carolyn-Ann Whiting McNeill.” She expects instant name recognition from them—it’s what she expects from everybody—and when they cheer wildly she assumes she got it. “My name is Jane Carolyn-Ann Whiting McNeill,” she announces again, because she likes the way it echoes off the tenements, “and I’m a Christian.”

The crowds roars with approval. They have mistaken her for one of their own. They think she has been moved to speak by the spirit, like a follower at a tented revival meeting. “I want to talk about art,
real
art,” she says, reciting the speech she used earlier to introduce Gavin Marshall. “Art that makes us cry. Art that makes us laugh. Art that makes us reflect. Art that makes our hearts bleed. Art that makes us believe in a being greater and better than ourselves.” The applause and yells grow louder, and Jane soaks up the approbation for a moment before gesturing for silence. Jane is good with crowds—only ninety percent of her success is just showing up—and she knows how to play them. “Real art is godly. Real art is pure. Real art isn’t about shock value and offending the most number of people in the least amount of time. Real art doesn’t use gimmicks. Gimmicks are for people who don’t know what real art is. I’m Jane Carolyn-Ann Whiting McNeill and I’m a Christian,” she says, pausing because she knows from recent experience that a pause works well here.

The cheers are almost deafening and Jane takes a deep breath in order to conclude on a high note, but before she can finish her speech—And this is Christian art; it’s devout and honest and God-fearing and insightful and instinctive and a reminder to all of us not to rush to judgment; Gilding the Lily is art,
real
art—she is embraced by the crowd. They lift her off the podium. They take her onto their shoulders.
They parade her around like she’s a beloved trophy, hollering and yelling and hooraying with joy. Jane takes it in stride, with a calm smile and a gracious wave. She’s always known that one day she would be treated like this, like Cleopatra or Elizabeth Taylor.

I watch the proceedings with a sense of awe and helplessness, and the last I see of Jane, she is being carried off by a sea of fellow Christians down the narrow valley of Mercer toward the gleaming lights of Canal Street.

J
ane’s a hit. She’s a media superstar, the go-after get, the name on everybody’s lips. Her image is endlessly replicated and reproduced, and when you turn on the television at eight o’clock the next morning, there are Jane clones staring back at you from the sets of
Good Morning America, The Today Show
and
CBS This Morning.

Sometime during the past twelve hours, she has become an avatar of free expression, a foot soldier on the front lines of liberty. Flipping compulsively back and forth between three stations, I listen to her tell how she won over the demonstrators, opened their minds, raised their consciousness. There’s nothing to support her lavish claims of success, but she makes them anyway. She’s like Napoleon writing reports of victory from Alexandria.

I switch the channel to get away from her but you can’t get away from Jane. She’s everywhere—NY1, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel. Although her outfits change with each demo (black silk for NY1, double-breasted navy-blue suit for Fox) her rhetoric remains the same and she talks
incessantly about moderating the great art debate. Her answers are well organized and articulate her point clearly, and when she embarks on a semiotic interpretation (“
Fashionista
and Gilding the Lily explore the possibilities of gender roles: What is a dress? What does it mean to wear a dress?”), I become suspicious. I become wary and skeptical and examine her closely. Although I can’t see the strings, I know there’s someone behind the scenes tugging on them.

I don’t know it yet, but issues of
Fashionista
are flying off the shelves. By eight-thirty, you can’t find a copy in any of the seven Hudson Newsstands in Penn Station. Grand Central is in similar straits, although the newsstand on the lower level that everyone forgets about has three remaining copies hidden behind a misplaced
Glamour.

Advertisers are calling to pledge their continued support. Even after Jane’s assured performance this morning, they still have concerns, but their customer services departments haven’t gotten angry telephone calls yet from irate Christians and sticking up for the Constitution in this indirect way won’t hurt their brand identification.

The CEO of Ivy Publishing is delighted by the media blitzkrieg. He can’t remember the last time one of his magazines dominated the national consciousness. As a thank-you, he’s taking Jane to dinner this evening (providing she’s not taping
Crossfire
or appearing on
Hardball with Chris Matthews
) and having her to his ski chalet in Vermont next weekend. He will add a sizable amount to her Christmas bonus and insists that she call in any designer she wants to redecorate her office.

Jane’s position is secured. She’s been elevated to status of media goddess, and although it will only last for a little while, the hangover will never go away. Jane Carolyn-Ann Whiting McNeill is now a
Fashionista
fixture. It’s the site of her greatest triumph and she would no sooner leave it than Kurtz would the Belgian Congo.