Tales from the Back Row (9 page)

You're surely dying to know if I've ever been banned from something. Well, yes, I have been banned from some things! And received a few threats about being banned from other things, all for similarly silly reasons, but I do love when a good ban threat letter comes through. Here's a sample.

Hi Amy,

I have to say I was greatly saddened to see that you chose to include [REDACTED DESIGNER]'s name in the article you ran today on the Cut headlined “[REDACTED].”

[BOSS OF LETTER WRITER, REDACTED] is personally quite upset about your continued insistence on reporting a rumor that is not only yesterday's news, but has been denied multiple times by [REDACTED LABEL] and its parent corporation [REDACTED]. [CEO OF REDACTED COMPANY] . . . has been quoted in
WWD
as strictly denying the rumors that [REDACTED DESIGNER] was at all in risk of losing his job. Quite on the contrary, he invited [REDACTED DESIGNER] to [REDACTED PARENT COMPANY]'s financial results meeting and credited him with helping turn [REDACTED LABEL] around. The
New
York Times
also ran an article recently completely denying the rumors.

In continuing to spread these baseless rumors, you are not only practicing bad journalism, but you are offending [REDACTED CEO] personally, and [REDACTED PARENT COMPANY] as a company. Additionally, to mention [REDACTED DESIGNER]'s name in any
capacity in an article that is about substance abuse, drugs, etc., is further unfair and unnecessary defamation of his character.

There is absolutely no truth to these claims. Should these sort of articles continue to run on
NYmag.com
, [REDACTED BOSS OF LETTER WRITER] has vowed to make it his personal mission to not only exclude
New
York
magazine from all [REDACTED PR FIRM]'s news and events, but also to make sure that [REDACTED PARENT COMPANY] & [REDACTED PARENT COMPANY'S CEO] are made specifically aware of the poor journalism practices taken by NY Mag as an organization.

I hope you can understand our frustration,

[REDACTED]

Fun! Right? I also got into some trouble with a designer after I did a blog post foreshadowing what we
might
see in his show. He and his company president freaked out and threatened to ban the whole magazine, which had nothing to do with my blog post, from all their shows—because we were excited enough about his fashion show to even bother uncovering that he might have socks and low heels on the runway. We (but mostly
me
, who knew a model walking in the show) are such bad, bad people. I haven't been invited back since.

• • •

Famous fashion people are like Tootsie Pops. On the outside is a hard shell composed of publicists and assistants and those publicists' publicists and assistants, and it's only through much persistence and considerable work that you'll get to the human core at the center of it all. Considering Rachel's history, I can see why her Fortress of Protection is more like a jawbreaker that maybe, if you're lucky, has
gum inside. First, she has, like,
double
the celebrity cred of most famous fashion people, being at once a fashion person (first stylist, then designer) and famous in her own right. She entered the tabloids as a villainlike character once everyone found out
she
was ­responsible for making Nicole Richie look like a beautiful, elegant, slim Los Angeles fairy princess instead of the person she used to be when she was Paris Hilton's sidekick, and dressed as though all her clothes came from mall kiosks and she lived in a Las Vegas pool. I don't know why making Nicole Richie an iconic person of style turned Rachel Zoe into an object of tabloid hatred. I think everyone was just jealous that once Rachel came into Nicole's life, she suddenly had baby-smooth J. Lo skin, lost weight, and could wear a hippie scarf as a dress and look completely spectacular. If there's anything people—especially LA people—wanted in the early 2000s it was J. Lo's skin and a certain bohemian
je ne sais quoi
. Even if that certain
je ne sais quoi
is purely derived from people forgetting your hair used to be two colors: brunette and bleached. Anyway, you can see why Rachel would be wary of reporters. Her good work in La La Land transforming hopeless celebrities into people who had the strength to just say no to denim shorts cut off at both the waistband and leg holes was making everyone spiteful.

It's not always necessary to go through a major fashion person's hard shell. There is a highly scientific method I use to avoid this very thing, which I have practiced and perfected over the years: it's called “stalking.”

This is not to be confused with the scary, can-get-you-arrested kind of stalking, like where Miranda Kerr gets home and—surprise!—you're in her kitchen smelling her washcloth and jerking off to her family portrait. Legal stalking can be done by any member of the media with an email in-box.

There are two steps to legal stalking: Step 1. Pay attention to boldfaced names publicists claim will attend the events they are constantly inviting you to. Resist the impulse to delete the invites for things as silly as teatime in honor of Charmin toilet paper and the cat fashion show for Meow Mix. You never know what famous persons will show up to these things, slightly drunk and willing to run their mouths. Step 2. Once you have identified your targets, show up to those places and accost them with a recording device.

Without this method, I would have never come face to face with one of the most important designers of our time, Karl Lagerfeld. Long before I got that call from Rachel's publicist, when I had just started at the Cut, I received a fateful invitation for face time with his fashion majesty.

It read:

Peter MacGill

and

Gerhard Steidl

invite you to the launch of the book

KARL LAGERFELD

METAMORPHOSES of an AMERICAN

A CYCLE OF YOUTH 2003 – 2008

Reception

Friday, May 16, 2008

7:00 – 9:00 pm

And underneath all that, in the tiniest font on the whole invite, completely without ceremony or exclamation points (or any correct punctuation at all, because I guess that was out this season) or the big glittery arrow it surely deserved, was this:

KARL LAGERFELD WILL BE PRESENT

Now, when someone as famous and unusual as Karl Lagerfeld—who basically lives in a bubble where his eccentricity is heralded as genius—swings through town, you go, and you do not think twice about what else you could be doing. Especially when all else you'd be doing is drinking at one of many nightclubs where both the male and female patrons wear the exact same jeweled belts.

A bit of background on Karl: Karl is important to the world because he's created fashion that mixes the classics with camp, most famously for the house of Chanel, which people said was a lost cause when Karl took it over. He not only revived the label by making it feel luxurious, sexy, and exciting in the early '80s, but he also turned it into something that tween starlets were just as hungry to wear as people like Anna Wintour. Pause to consider how remarkable this is: can you think of a single place where you, your mom, and your grandma all want to shop, aside from the grocery store?

Karl Lagerfeld is important to me because, as one of the fanciest people on the planet—who lives as though his life were one long black-and-white Fellini movie—he is an endless study in fascination and amusement. He has said he owns “hundreds” of iPods and has been thought to employ a “nanny” to upload music to them, would rather fax than use a cell phone, and wears kimonos during overseas flights. He is also obsessed with his cat Choupette, who
eats fresh seafood off fine china and has been on the cover of German
Vogue
. He goes everywhere wearing a full three-piece suit with a tie, layered silver necklaces, and the occasional diamanté brooch. He is never without fingerless leather gloves and sunglasses, and keeps his powder-white hair in a low ponytail. His look is best summed up as a cross between the Founding Fathers and Michael Jackson.

No matter what he does, he's heralded as a genius and promptly copied by nearly every other important designer. Karl's runway shows have included purses fashioned from hula hoops, full-fur Chewbacca suits, and skirt suits with beaver tails. He has that rare ability to make rich people lust for seemingly terrible things, like clogs, fur boots, and basket-weave purses. This is a very hard thing to do, but also really important for a fashion designer because what's
amazeballs
one decade is highly questionable the next (see: fringed vests for men, overalls with a strap down, brown carpets people had in their homes in the '70s). If designers never convinced us to want the things we didn't already have, we'd never shop. The next time you want something impractical you know you shouldn't buy, like pilgrim shoes, you can probably trace the influence back to someone like Karl, Marc Jacobs, and—if what you're eyeing are really tight pants and you are a man—Hedi Slimane.

Karl's theatrical spirit makes him a natural for putting on fashion shows. (I have never been invited to one because I am not important enough to attend, being neither Posh Spice, a socialite with a
Vogue
column, an Olsen twin, nor J. Lo's child.) For the purpose of dressing ladies in clothes and having them walk back and forth, he's created a faux “airplane,” where the aisle served as the runway, a barn floored with hay and dirt, an iceberg imported from Northern Europe, and a carousel made from oversized Chanel purses. If
Karl ever finds himself bankrupt and without a job in fashion, I'm quite convinced he could make a career out of creating amusement parks for older, rich ladies for whom the word
summer
is primarily a verb. He could charge $200 an hour, and one of the “rides” could involve sitting in the cabin of a private plane while flight attendants serve you low-cal fish mousse. Now, would spendy fifty-year-old broads be into that or what?

One of my other favorite fun facts about Karl: he published a diet book with the least useful recipes in history, such as fish soufflé, vegetables in aspic, and ham and raspberry mousse. Naturally, it worked fabulously for him and utterly failed for everyone else who would rather not eat than either try to prepare vegetable aspic or actually consume it.

I wrote the art gallery immediately to find out if this was really going to happen, Karl Lagerfeld strutting his fish-soufflé-eating self into this exhibition. I was assured that, yes, Karl was in fact supposed to appear in the flesh to fete an exhibition of photographs of Brad Kroenig he took for a book that consisted entirely of photographs of Brad Kroenig. The
Amazon.com
description of
Metamorphoses of an American: A Cycle of
Youth 2003–2008
reads:

In
Metamorphoses of an American,
Karl Lagerfeld documents the physical and emotional development of Brad Kroenig, the world's most sought-after male model . . . Lagerfeld discovered Kroenig in 2003, making his first photographs of the young man in Biarritz; since then, he has diligently observed Kroenig through the photographic lens, month by month.

The weirdest part of this whole event was that Karl would spend five years photographing one male model in order to put his
obsession on full display in an art gallery in, of all places, midtown. (There were likely also openings in other exotic cities like Venice and Seoul, but let's just focus on New York City.) Being in midtown feels like being in a never-ending line at Starbucks. Isn't that why publishing houses like Hearst maintain such glamorous in-­office cafeterias? So that their beautiful employees don't have to subject themselves to the distress of midtown for any extended length of time?

Of course, the problem with the opening being in midtown was that Karl Lagerfeld now had a really good excuse not to show up. But I had faith that it was my destiny to meet Fashion's Santa in the flesh, and so to Karl I went.

I recruited two companions for Operation Stalk Karl Lagerfeld at Random Midtown Art Gallery: (1) My friend Chris, fashion enabler and endearingly speechless in the face of any meaningful celeb, most especially Madonna. Necessary for moral support in case I found myself speechless in Karl's presence. And (2)
NYmag.com
's videographer Jonah. Necessary to capture an interview for the website and the personal files I'd need if I ever felt like bragging about this occasion over the next several decades of my life.

We arrived that misty Friday night and rode the elevator up to the gallery, which had gray walls that were absolutely covered in photos of Brad Kroenig. There was Brad looking out a window, there was Brad looking at his sleeve, there was a collage of wallet-­sized images of Brad's face. We were all willfully trapped in a chamber of Bradness. Fortunately, they were serving free wine.

“What are you going to say to Karl?” Chris asked, eyes wide.

“Omigosh.” I was beginning to get tipsy and forget my plan, which amounted to engaging Karl in a brief but rousing discourse about sexism as it relates political candidates' sartorial choices. All
I could think of, though, was, “Do you only have acquired tastes, or do you like normal things, too?” and “Does Brad come with vocal cords? If so, does it matter?”

So, we waited. Chris and I decided Brad was attractive. Worthy of five years of documentation and an entire $80 art book attractive? Well, that at least gave us something to talk about. Seven o'clock turned to seven thirty, which turned to eight, which turned to . . . nine. Friends came, gave up on Karl, and left to go fist pump at nightclubs. One glass of wine turned to three. We forgot that it was weird that the face of one man surrounded us on all sides. I longed for the ordeal to end. Though I believed in Karl—have
always
believed in Karl—I started to wonder if he would materialize in this gray cell of his own imagination or if Brad would simply whisk him away to an Olsen twin's house for a nice cold meal of aspic.