There was never any acknowledgment, but I felt like I’d done everything I could to put the matter right. And thankfully, I never heard a peep about any of this again. When I met Patrick in person sometime later, I told him, “I am so happy to see you. I was afraid that Anna had hurled the floral arrangement at your head and you were in a coma somewhere. It’s good to see that you are alive and well.”
He laughed, and I felt like I had closure on the whole ordeal. But it made me think that perhaps the devil really does wear Prada. I couldn’t believe how sweet she seemed in that great movie The September Issue.Of course, she did know the cameras were on …
When Times Square was shut down the day before New Year’s Eve in 2009, I suspected it was something inside 4 Times Square, which houses Vogue. As in: She huffed and she puffed. Although it turned out to be a suspicious unmarked van, there exists on that corner a more constant source of fear.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE REST OF the Voguestaff follows in her Manolo footprints when it comes to haughtiness.
On September 12, 2006, I was on a panel at the New York Public Library with Vogue’s André Leon Talley, as well as the photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and PeopleGroup’s Martha Nelson. I don’t know how much the audience learned about fashion, but I certainly learned a bit about how ridiculous people can get when they live in the fashion-world bubble.
André Leon Talley arrived with a sizable entourage. And this was not a large greenroom. The NYPL’s director of public programs, Paul Holdengräber, a lovely guy, comes in and says, “We’d like to have a sound check.”
We’re all filing out to go do the sound check and André says, “I don’t need a sound check!” and he stays with his crowd of hangers-on. Fine. The rest of us do the check. Everything sounds great.
When we return to the greenroom, we see that someone has spread a translucent barber’s bib over André and he’s reclining, his arms at his sides. He’s being fed grapes and cubes of cheese one by one, like a bird in a nest.
I can’t believe we’re witnessing this,I thought.
Well, the best was yet to come.
André is cleaned up. The bib is folded. It’s time to go do the panel.
“The room has been cleared,” André says. It’s not a question; it’s a statement.
“Cleared of what?” Paul says.
André clarifies that he means of people. Apparently he doesn’t like to walk down the aisle of a full auditorium; he prefers it be empty.
Paul is in shock. He says, with a bit of a tone, “Empty? It’s standing room only. We have no place to move these people to.”
The room starts to get tense.
“It doesn’t matter,” I interject. “We don’t have to walk down an aisle. There is a stage door.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” André asks in annoyance.
“I’m telling you now,” I said, “and if you’d come to the sound check, you would have known that, too.”
At the panel, André made a lot of very bizarre pronouncements. Someone in the audience asked why larger-sized women weren’t represented on designers’ racks or in magazines. “Obviously, I’m a large woman,” she said, “and I feel like I’m not marginal, although I think that large women are marginalized.”
It’s a good question, and a common one, but André began praising Mo’nique. “I think there’s no woman more fashionable than Mo’nique,” he said. “I love Mo’nique. And I think that Mo’nique does for the full-figured woman what Rosalind Russell used to do in those wonderful 1950s Technicolor films, and I love Mo’nique, and I say that seriously. That show she had for the large woman, the contest, I thought that was really wonderful, and I always think she’s great on her own show. I think she’s wonderful.”
I couldn’t stay quiet any longer. I tried to tell the woman something useful about sizes in the industry and was glad when Martha Nelson agreed with me.
“Yeah,” she said, “let’s be real.”
At the end of the panel, I let André and his crew go first in the elevator so I wouldn’t have to ride up with them. I just couldn’t handle another moment with him.
Well, I thought I’d seen everything, but then walking through the freight exit on my way to the subway, I pass André’s Maybach parked in the freight room. Apparently, he couldn’t even walk from the sidewalk.
Don’t get me wrong: Vogueis an essential read for all fashion lovers. Anna and her team are very talented, and they are on the cutting edge of trends. But when I see what a bubble they’re all living in, how detached from reality they are, how much money and time is wasted in the course of their work, I worry about the example it sets for people coming up in the fashion world, a world that—let’s face it—is now a lot more crowded and a lot less moneyed than it has been in years past.
I hope that Project Runway,which encourages hard work, thrift, and skill, is part of the solution to that unsustainable excess and hauteur. I am heartened that, by and large, the thousands of young designers I come into contact with are simply trying to make beautiful things to the best of their ability, rather than attain a lifestyle that allows them to be bibbed and hand-fed grapes.
And yet, maybe not. I thought the recession would have more of an impact on the industry, but there’s still a fleet of limousines over there in front of 4 Times Square.
I look forward to seeing what the next generations of fashion designers and magazines look like. Between the demise of so many publications and the decline in fashion company fortunes, I wonder whether we’re heading for a new age of decency and diligence. I would certainly rather the industry not go broke, but if that’s what it takes for everyone to acquire some values and lose that sense of entitlement, maybe a little belt-tightening wouldn’t be so tragic.
Take the High Road
I DON’T KNOW IF PEOPLE have gotten ruder or if my tolerance level has declined. I recently spoke to a group of high school juniors and seniors at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s Teen Design Fair. Those young people are our future, and I believe in them. I love being part of the annual event.
We had a Q&A afterward, and one of the teens stood up and asked what advice I had for them.
“I’ll give you some life advice,” I said. “The first piece is: Listen and listen intentlywhen you’re being spoken to about something. The second: Take the high road. When presented with frustration or anger or discontentment with a situation or a person, don’t reduce yourself to that level. Don’t get into a conflict in that moment. You’ll feel better about yourself for it.”
Well, to my surprise, this created a near frenzy in the room. The students were aghast. I was surprised by the reaction, so I said: “Tell me more about why that seems like bad advice to you.”
“I believe I should stand up for myself!” said one student.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t stand up for yourself,” I said. “I’m just saying, in the heat of the moment, walk away from it.”
One episode of Project Runway’s Season 6 speaks to this. The challenge was for each designer to do a look that complemented his or her best look on the show to date.