It’s hard to imagine that at one time not that along ago, New York was a city awash in fashion, in its own sense of New York style and feeling. Now you walk up Fifth Avenue, and “style” is the Hollister store, the NBA store, H & M, and other dreary corporate dreck-sellers, where the important thing is selling not a look or feeling but the shopping bag that the stuff comes in.
But New York, especially lost gay New York was all about fashion; this sense that you felt fantastic, and sexy, so everything you put on felt that way too—and you could be outrageous with it. One incarnation of this was cranberry red velvet jeans. It seemed that in 1968 they were all over the place. You saw men in them and women in them; they were of a red of such unabashed intensity that it stopped traffic on the street, so walking down New York avenues became like Morse Code: lots of stops and dashes, just looking at this amazing color stretched across the thighs and asses of so many good-looking people. Fashion seer Diana Vreeland once said that the two most stylish periods of American life were the 1920s and the 1960s: she was right. There was this sense of outrage and also just the right amount of money running around—you need money. Fashion needs money, but even more it needs a sense of permission, something that Right-Wing gorgons like Michelle Bachman want to choke the hell out of.
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, still running at the Metropolitan Museum reminded me of this full flowering of youth and excess that is now barely glimpsable. The show, the most popular in the history of the Metropolitan Museum, is both wondrous and sad.
(photo: Alexander McQueen, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)
