TheTheater of Fashion

By JAY COCKS

Suiting up or standing pat, high style holds center stage hatisthiswaitaminuteldon'tget-itexplainthistome."

Shock. Amazement. And a nice side order of hauteur. Disorientation at first: Where's the runway? How about the front-row seat? No music? No lights? And ... no ... models?

Then it all begins to settle in. Videotape, what do you mean, videotape? Is this the show? This is the show?

Disbelief edges closer to disdain. No models. Mannequins. Metal mannequins with plastic hips. And no heads! Unbelievable. Now try it again, slower.

"What is this? Wait a minute, I don't get it. Explain this to me."

And so it was done. One of the world's greatest designers took one of the world's fashion press by her unyielding arm and steered her through his fall collection, explaining. Pity the poor woman. She looked as if she had just been concussed by a cinder block from the Twilight Zone. Pity the poor designer. He was paying the price for doing something different.

"Different." "New."

And--deliver us--"directional." All these concepts are greatly honored in the world of fashion, even when they may not be recognized. Show clothes that are funny, disrespectful and touched by madness, as Vivienne West wood did, and you risk not being taken seriously. But show without a show, as Giorgio Armani did with his mannequins and video, and you JE risk being taken no way at all. You may default on your lifetime role in that seasonal display of glamour, giddiness and social scrambling that travels from country to country like a medicine show offering cures for which there are no known diseases.

All this world's a ready-to-wear runway. From early March, in Milan, through late March in Paris and ending just last week in New York City, the fashion corps turns up for the yearly ritual of checking out what's new for fall. The action they see, and, indeed, of which they become part, has the trappings of drama, the slow-motion choreography of a dream, the bleary musicality of an after-hours club at dawn. It also has the conviviality of a carnival, the commercialism of an appliance convention, the congenial corruption of a sideshow. The theater of fashion.

At no event since the woolliest days of the Living Theater has the audience been such an integral part of the action. That is one reason why everyone--even the poor marginals there at the back of the room, even the desperate ones who have paid a scalper $40 or $50 for a Saint Laurent or a Montana invite--comes suited up for the part, often in something made by the designer who is showing. About 45% of the audience are buyers, another 45% press and the remainder an overdressed congregation of friends, fans and fashion groupies. There is great mutual gawking across the runway, even during the shows. The runway makes a fragile border between celebrators and the celebrated that is meant to break at the end of the show, when the designer is led out by his corps of models for cheers and accolades. "It's the worst moment," reflects Gianni Versace, who showed successfully in Milan this year after three seasons of apostasy. Then he adds, "But I force myself to do it for the good of my business."

The audience does not suffer from similar reticence. After a hit show, the crowd clambers onto the runway and storms the backstage area, offering kisses, hugs and congrats. The press often gets in on the act too. Although it is difficult to imagine any member of the New York Drama Critics Circle jumping onstage to plant a big wet one on Carol Channing's cheek at opening-night curtain call, this sort of thing happens with regularity in the theater of fashion. After the show, fans review the designers with the kind of blurbs that usually run in block letters in movie ads. Lagerfeld was tops, Ferre was a knockout, Armani's still the master, Montana was wild, Mugler was a kick, Saint Laurent is still the high priest, and what about these Japanese, anyway? America tends to a greater uniformity of style, mostly because of heavier commercial pressure from a larger market. So Bill Blass becomes classic, Ralph Lauren classic, Calvin Klein classic, Perry Ellis classic, and what about these Japanese, anyway? Orders are written, and stories filed, accordingly.

Fashion shows delimit a small slice of cultural space that a designer can claim and redress as personal property. The fashion press gives the designer title to the territory, and the store buyers advance the loan. Everyone, of course, is staking out real estate in the ozone. Fashion is an arbitrary and slightly irrational concept that needs all the buttressing it can get. Fashion shows not only describe a look, they perpetuate a myth and keep a fantasy airborne. A designer has to be dead sure of himself and certain of his reputation, like Armani, to take the radical step of discard-big all the trappings and still come away with a full order book. A younger, beginning designer would never take such a risk. And, young or old, most other designers do not want to.

"I want people to see the clothes in says Gianfranco Ferre, whose designs, carefully focused but not fussy, seem to capture an entire geometry of motion. "I believe clothes are living things," insists Claude Montana. Accordingly, his line of racy, kiked-up cycle-slut couture (a leather ensemble can go for as much as $3,000) is presented with some of the most elaborate and amusing theatrics in Paris. Karl Lagerfeld, whose beautifully wrought designs for Chloe, Fendi and Chanel Couture continue to bring the press to its knees, is characteristically canny and bemused. "People have just lost interest in seeing dresses in normal circumstances. They have been trained in recent years to view them onstage as part of a production."

Lagerfeld's productions, indeed, are often part of what seems to be an elaborate prank. In Milan, he sent his models out in Fendi furs wearing necklaces that looked like lumps of coal. In Paris, his Chloe girls wore accessories that were miniatures of plumbing apparatus, a motif that was sometimes grafted onto his most luxurious evening wear. "The accessories really give these shows their operatic effect," Lagerfeld says. "In a living room they're a joke. But onstage they make a fashion statement large enough for the 2,000 people there to appreciate." Lagerfeld, who seems to be on a lifetime lark, also appears to be sending up the entire institution of fashion, including his best customers, most loyal friends and anyone else who might consider buying (for $4,300) an evening dress with two beaded faucets down the back.

The world of fashion enjoys a portion of mockery, as long as it comes from one of its own, someone who plays by the rules. But fashion shows are an expensive way to get a joke around. Lagerfeld figures that his Chloe show, with 30 models and dozens of backstage hairdressers, makeup artists, technicians and assistants, cost more than $400,000. And if the reviews are good, French Fashion Industry Spokesman Jacques Mouclier estimates, Lagerfeld and his peers may be getting more than their money's worth. By his count, 1,500 journalists attended the more than 60 official Paris shows, 50 of which were staged in four tents in the courtyard of the Louvre, "and that means there are potentially 1,500 pages of press publicity of every designer showing. They'd have to pay $7,000 a page for the same coverage."

"We're trying to sell and show clothes," says Bill Blass, adding, "The shows have become more of an entertainment. If there was some way to dispose of them I think most of us would do it." Issey Miyake, the Japanese designer who has had a formative influence on fresh Western interest in Asian style, is practical. "People want to see excitement in our Paris shows, like the Lido," he says. "But I don't think that's totally a service to us designers. The show's like a festival, but you can't see the fabrics or the details."

The Paris shows of Miyake and his compatriots Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo showed the most tempered theatricality and seriousness. Their clothes, different in details and particulars, share an adventurousness of fabrication and a boldness of shaping that seem, to newly familiar Western eyes, like a radical reinventing of shape. Yamamoto's clothes, outsize, funky and welcoming, seemed to achieve a special kind of inchoate elegance, but the Japanese designers all have a kind of understated theatricality that shows their clothes off to best advantage.

Their presentations do not look like the ordered extravagances of Lagerfeld or Saint Laurent, but they are after the same thing, to give everyone what Claude Montana calls "a living expression of how the clothes were made to look." "It's the garment we are all trying to sell," says Nando Miglio, Milan's most adept stager of fashion shows. "The clothes must have priority over the show business and the decor."

The models hold dual citizenship in both those worlds. Many work Milan, skip over to Paris, then hop the Atlantic to do the New York shows. They turn into a traveling troupe of players, familiar faces in strange makeups, going through endless modifications of the same paces. Just as there is a basic order to most shows--suits, knits, day, then evening wear--there are certain basic models' skills. There is, of course, that walk, expendable for studio work but crucial for the runway. Everyone knows the stride: the funny lope where one foot goes directly, precisely, in front of the other, as if trying to crush a slow-moving beetle with one toe. Then there is aura. The black model Iman, high of cheekbone and impossibly long of neck, has it. So does Pat Cleveland. She says engagingly, "I like to play-act," and she has a freshness, audacity and unpredictability that have made her a perennial favorite. "She's the best runway model in the world," says Lagerfeld. "There are certainly more beautiful women. By sheer instinct she interprets the designers' ideas." One of her interpretations of Lagerfeld was a runway striptease ("All I was left modeling at the end were the shoes"), a characteristic if uniquely exuberant Cleveland flourish. For a top runway model, the going fee is $250 an hour, from first primp to final bow, a very tidy sum that can see the girls through until the rag-trade revues for the spring season begin again in early autumn.

Those shows, in scope, will very likely be like the ones just ended. Most of the fashion Establishment is stuck on large-scale productions, even though the tradition is just over a decade old. Before that, most shows had been confined to the haughty precincts of haute couture (clothes made to measure, mostly by hand). Models moved like gilded glaciers around the rooms of a fashion house, carrying the style number of each dress on a card, while the audience took notes and applauded. European ready-to-wear had nudged haute couture out of its place of eminence by the early '70s, but it took showmanship a little longer to catch up with salesmanship. It was Kenzo, a young Japanese designer living and working in Paris, who forced the connection and raised a rumpus. In October 1972, Kenzo went for broke: he hired the 19th century commodities exchange market, had rock music, big crowds and dozens of models strutting their stuff under a skylit dome. Recalls Claude Montana: "It was a shock. It made all of us think more seriously about the importance of spectacle."

Everything was up for grabs after that. Montana put on a show with so many scenery changes it assumed the dimensions, he says, "of the Folies-Bergere." Lagerfeld staged one show in a garden created inside the Palais de Chaillot, started another with models behind the bars of cages ("beautiful wood and a fortune to construct"). In those days, Nando Miglio brought on the models of a Complice show from the depths of an ice-covered replica of an aircraft during a mock blizzard.

These extravaganzas of DeMillean dimension have fallen into disfavor with cost-conscious designers and jaded audiences. The shows have been slightly scaled down, but are diminished only in dimension, not purpose. Their rhythm, far from stately, is a touch slower, just as the rate of stylistic change may generally have been tempered. "The slower-paced changes in men's wear are moderating the rhythm of women's wear," says Gianni Versace, "which seems right to me, given the hard economic times we are living through."

It is less clear, though, who gets the most out of these shows. Department-store types, impatient with any nonscheduled creative process, frequently say that these many-splendored displays give the designers a hard deadline to fix on. "They're an exam, an essay, a resume," agrees Gianfranco Ferre. "They mean I have to get my point across in 20 minutes." The point can become blunted by both visual glut and fashion overkill, however. When the eight weeks of fall fashion previews are over, a member of the fashion corps could easily have seen more than 100 different shows, some pitiful and many derivative.

One has one's favorites: Yamamoto, Armani, Ferre, Miyake. One also has one's diversions (Lagerfeld, Montana), one's objects of respectful admiration (Saint Laurent, Kenzo, Blass, the knits of Sonia Rykiel that move over the body like a Slinky toy) and one's comers (Vivienne Westwood or the Tunisian-born Azzedine Alaia, whose clinging, deep-dish dresses could make even a mermaid look like Rita Hayworth in Gilda). But one also and ultimately has befuddlement, an impression of satiation that dwindles only gradually. Ellin Saltzman, fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue, points out very sensibly that "fashion shows are done for press value first and foremost, not for the buyers. I can't get word out there to all our customers that Bill Blass, for example, has all these great black dresses. But as soon as the press writes about them, I get calls."

The press, an agreeable and often fawning conduit, exacts its price for this service, just like the buyers and the fashion freaks. Everyone has to feel important. Armani cut to the heart of this when he remarked, "Ready-to-wear clothes blew away the pretensions of haute couture, but the shows have assumed the same social functions. Where am I sitting? How much time do I get alone with the designer? Will I be invited to dinner? For myself, I want people just to look at the clothes."

That ought to be quite enough, especially when the clothes are as beautiful as his, but fashion is also about social positioning. When Ferre talks about the ideal place for a showing, he mentions "a long, narrow theater, like a gallery, to hold 900. You get so many complaints from those who don't get an invitation when you use a small room." At fashion shows, gripes drop as often as hemlines ("Since when does she put [Bloomingdale's vice president] Kal Ruttenstein in front of me? That doesn't happen in Paris!"), and indignation is as handy as a spare pencil. In this atmosphere, a seating chart becomes as valuable as bloodlines at a horse auction. "I know that the front row is not visually the best seat in the house," says Lagerfeld Aide Dorrie Davis, "because you can't really see as well, but the editors from American and French Vogue, the New York Times, the Washington Post, all want to be seen there." Favorite friends and favored clients of the designer are usually mixed in with the press, but what they are all seeing, besides each other, is a reconfirmation of a kind of continuity.

Fashion is supposed to foster and mirror change, being reckless and very silly about it in the process. But all the shows and all the models on all the runways of three countries confirm an older truth, that there are no new ideas about clothes, only new ways to treat old ideas. Designers show such a variety of length, drape and detail that any trend can be picked from a collection, just the way an outfit is assembled out of a closet at home. The idea of chic may swing back and forth erratically, like the pendulum of an unsprung clock, but fashion itself remains a very constant, very conservative enterprise. And dubious as it is, that is what fashion shows celebrate and reassert: the idea of fashion itself.

"There's no business like the fashion business," says Lagerfeld, keeping one ear open for Irving Berlin. Like the Oscars or those star-studded fund raisers in which show biz toasts itself, fashion shows are rituals of refracted glory. They may or may not be good for business. But they are business, dreamily going about itself.

#151;By Jay Cocks.

Reported by William Blaylock/ Paris and Leonora Dodsworth/ Milan

With reporting by William Blaylock/ Paris, Leonora Dodsworth/ Milan This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.