Fashion is an expression of boredom, of restlessness. The successful designer understands the ferocity of that boredom and provides it with new places in which to calm its rage for a while. Even as Hyperion free-style dresses were displayed in photo spreads in international magazines and promoted in vigorous poster campaigns, the designer was preparing his next step. In his eagerly awaited spring/summer collection, he proclaimed the final liberation of costume from the female body. The new dress completed the urge to concealment by developing the bodice upward into a complete covering for the face and head. Now the Hyperion dress entirely enclosed the wearer, who was provided with artful spaces for the mouth, nostrils, and eyes. The new top quickly developed a life of its own. It seemed determined to deny the existence of the head, to use the area between collarbone and scalp as a transitional element, by expanding the idea of a dress upward to include the space above the height of the wearer. Meanwhile the openings for eyes and nostrils, which had drawn attention to the concealed face and threatened to turn the dress into a species of mask, were replaced by an opaque fabric that permitted one-way vision. Women, who had gradually been disappearing into the hidden spaces of the new style, had at last become invisible.
Commentators welcomed the enclosure dress but were divided over its merits. Some argued that it represented the ultimate defense of the female body against visual invasion, while others saw in it the final liberation of costume from its demeaning dependence on the body. One fashion writer praised what she called the vanished woman and compared the enclosure dress to the development of the boudoir, or private sitting room, in the eighteenth-century house — a secret domain in which a woman could be herself, safe from male control. A rival journalist, ignoring women and their desires, spoke only of the new aesthetic of costume, which at last was free to develop in the manner of landscape painting after it had become bold enough to exile the human figure.
And indeed there now began a period of excess, of overabundant fulfillment, as if the banishment of the face had removed some nuance of restraint still present in the earlier collections. Inspired by Hyperion, dresses became fevered with obscure cravings, with sudden illuminations and desolations, and threw themselves into hopeless adventures. Restless and dissatisfied, they grew in every direction; in some instances they exceeded the size of rooms and had to be worn in large outdoor spaces, like backyards or public parks. The vast lower depths of such dresses encouraged coarse speculation. It was said that beneath those coverings, naked women coupled madly with young lovers in the grass. One dress contained in its side a little red door, which was said to lead to a room with a bed, a mirror, and a shaded lamp. Another dress, designed for the wife of a software CEO, rose three stories high and was attached to the back of the house by a covered walkway. A celebrated fashion journalist with a fondness for historical parallels compared these developments to the fanatical elaborations of coiffure in the late eighteenth century, when three-foot castles of hair rose on wire supports. The new dresses were not so much worn as entered — it was as if they wished to carry the structural qualities of fashion to the point at which clothing began to merge with architecture.
Such excesses were not without a touch of desperation, as if the escape of costume from the female body had created in clothes an uncertainty, a sharp malaise. One summer afternoon during a party at an estate in northwestern Connecticut, an unusual immobility in the lavish dresses became apparent. Had the women taken a solemn vow not to move? The stationary costumes, arranged on a lawn that sloped down to a lake, resembled a form of sculpture. Four men, bored or excited by the motionless women, stood before one of them, talking and drinking hard. Suddenly two of the men bent over, grasped the heavy dress by the hem, and lifted it violently into the air. Voices shouted, cheered. Underneath they discovered only the lawn itself, stretching away.
The four men rushed over to the other dresses, yanking them up, knocking them over, tearing at them with their fingers, but the women had disappeared. Later that day they were discovered in the kitchen of a neighbor’s house, dressed in old bathrobes and talking among themselves.
For a time the new fashion caught on. Women donned immense dresses and then quietly withdrew, wandering away to do whatever they liked. Dresses, freed at last from bodies, became what they had always aspired to be: works of art, destined for museums and private collections. Often they stood on display in large living rooms, beside pianos or couches.
But the complete separation of clothing from women’s bodies created a new confusion. Women no longer knew how to dress, what to wear. Many dressed in a deliberately slatternly way, as if to express their sense of the unbearable distance between the perfection of high costume and the humiliating imperfection of the body it was meant to obliterate. It was as if a superior race of beings had been inserted into the world: the race of costume. A tension was building; there were rumors of an uprising of women, who would overthrow the dresses that had rendered them superfluous. Such talk, however absurd, revealed a longing for something new, for a redemptive leap. People spoke hungrily of new, impossible dresses — dresses worn on the inside of the body, dresses the size of entire towns. Others proposed an Edenic nakedness. As the new season approached, it was clear that something had to happen.
It was at this moment that Hyperion gave his only interview. In it he abjured the fashions that had made him famous; apologized to women for leading them astray; revealed that his name was Ben Hirschfeld, of Brooklyn; and announced his retirement after the coming show. The interview was analyzed relentlessly, attacked as a promotional stunt, dismissed as a hoax. On the nightly news a short, balding man stood under an umbrella as he blinked nervously behind small round lenses and said that yes, his name was Benjamin Hirschfeld, yes, he lived in Brooklyn, but no, he knew nothing about fashion, nothing about clothes, nothing. The public, skeptical and patient, waited.
And the moment came; it was not what anyone had expected. Along the catwalk strolled a tall model in a classic fitted dress, with a trim waist and a full, pleated skirt. Her face, entirely exposed, bore an indolent and haughty look that hadn’t been seen for years. The new, impoverished dress represented a repudiation of everything Hyperion had stood for. At the same time, within the culture of the liberated dress, it struck a radical note. Women hesitated; here and there, in a spirit of daring, someone appeared at a party dressed in the new style. One day, as if by secret agreement, the fashion was everywhere. The monstrous old dresses drifted into attics, where young girls, climbing the stairs in search of an abandoned dollhouse or a pair of skates, came upon something looming against the rafters and stopped uneasily before continuing on their way. At dinner parties and family gatherings, people recalled the old style with amusement and affectionate embarrassment, as one might remember an episode of drunkenness. In memory the dresses became more vivid, more remote, until they seemed like brilliant birds rising in dark forests or like distant sunlit towns. Meanwhile the new dresses grew a little shorter, a little longer; slacks and blouses grew tighter, looser. One afternoon in late summer, on a sidewalk printed with the shade of maple leaves and flickers of sun, a woman walking with her young daughter had the sense that she was about to remember something, something about a dress, but no, it was gone, vanished among the overhead leaves already turning, the bits of blue sky, the smell of cut grass, the chimney shadows sharp and black on the sunlit roofs.