PRINTHe’s not ready for his close-up
A young journalist learns that fashion is far from glamorous
Courtesy of Steve Wood
Clint Carter (top center) sits on risers amidst photographers and onlookers at the Chanel show during fashion week in Paris. Carter spent hours organizing pictures by adding labels, copyrights and captions.
November 30, 2006 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Most people have an opinion on clothes, or else they pride themselves on their indifference. It’s just fashion, after all. We’re not curing cancer. I used to be indifferent. Then, this September I assisted a photographer at Olympus Fashion Week in New York. On the way to my first fashion show, Miss Sixty, I shared a cab with Joel, executive director of a Toronto-based fashion Web site, fashionWATCH.com. In his mid-30s, Joel has stubbly skin that hung loosely around his jaw. He looked sharp in his dark jeans and fitted blazer, but he spoke as though another fashion show were the last thing he’d want to see.
“It’s exhausting,” he told me. “And it will wear you down quick.” I was surprised at his languid expression. This was, after all, the first show of the season, and he was making a decent career out of fashion.
Related Articles Related LinksAt the beginning of the internship, I thought Joel was just a miserable human being. I didn’t imagine fashion could be so bad. I had spent the previous summer in London interning at the fashion trade magazine Drapers, and I had found fashion to be anything but exhausting. I worked in an office, which was friendly and inviting, and the internship introduced me to Steve Wood, a fashion photographer. He offered to take me to the meccas of beauty and glamour: Fall 2006 fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan and Paris. During the next few months I went to shows, interviewed models and captioned and organized the pictures for his image-for-hire Web site, Stardustfashion.com.
Over the course of Olympus Fashion Week, I crossed paths with Joel several times, including once on the press risers at the end of the Lacoste runway. The big show for that evening was Rock & Republic, and I asked Joel if he was excited. His face very slowly skewed into repugnance before he turned to face me.
“I don’t get excited about any of them,” he said. I stifled a laugh at the melodrama of such a pitiful rejoinder, but it was poignantly honest, and over time I began to empathize with him.
I expected to find people who believed that fashion was wonderful and beautiful and nothing less. Instead, I found an industry as self-loathing as the hapless prospective models who stood outside the shows and starved themselves in hopes that some insider would pass them an invitation. There’s a part of the fashion show that never gets framed in the runway shot. It’s the desperate side, where photo assistants sit in dark corners editing runway stills on a laptop computer.
I don’t think I was the only one to identify with Joel’s apathy. The photographers certainly felt it. I often caught them sitting on the press risers before shows, staring off into space or cradling their tired heads in their hands. As fashion season wore on, the bags under their eyes became darker, their skin more greasy and their hair more disheveled.
I began finding it difficult to get out of bed for another day of poorly ventilated venues and backstage madness. I sorted runway pictures until 2 or 3 every morning. When I went to fashion weeks in Milan and Paris, I saw Italy and France for the first time, but I was hitting the snooze button as if nine minutes would save my life.
The repetition of the runway combined with the trashy celebrity angle made each fashion show look like a cheap tabloid back-issue. Of course there were exceptions, the most notable being Italian journalist Anna Piagi, who always seemed pleased. But even Vogue editor Anna Wintour looked bored. We photographed her at many shows, and in some pictures, as she feigned a smile for the camera, her chin pushed out and her cheeks moved up into painful-looking radishes under her eyes. It was more a cringe than a smile. I wondered whether her sentiments were similar to those of my friend Joel.
The models were no exception. Backstage they were either lying on the ground reading, listening to iPods or staring into the mirror with blank faces as stylists frantically pulled and brushed every lock and eyelash. Their faces had been painted for the sixth time that day. Many were probably bashful early in their careers, but in time they stripped with photographers and strangers standing around. They didn’t notice, and they didn’t care.
It was obvious to me from that first show that the models aren’t there to sell clothes. Show after show, they scale the catwalk in one outfit after another, stopping just feet from a horde of photographers wielding cameras.
Clothing is the commodity, but the most important thing they’re selling is confidence, and there’s no better way to sell it than at the end of the catwalk in a frozen digital image. Nobody sees the bored models backstage with stylists working in a near frenzy. They don’t see designers second-guessing themselves or making changes to the outfit minutes before the show. Nobody has to look at the tired faces of the photographers or magazine editors, and that’s how the industry nurtures its image. All the glamour of fashion lives in the runway picture. Everywhere else it’s dead. Nobody’s going to pay to see that. It’s just exhausting.
