About That Met Gala... And More Fashion News
Bring on that sweet, sweet red-carpet #content.
Welcome to the first-ever edition of Back Row. This installment – all the fashion news you need to know and some you don’t – will go out every Friday. I’m thinking of other sorts of posts to send out as this gets going, such as a review of literary classic Karl Lagerfeld’s 2004 diet book, in which he confesses to – at least for a single day of his life – feeling like an average person: “One fine morning I woke up and decided that I was no longer happy with my physique.”
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The Met Gala Returneth: Here’s What We Know So Far
Anna Wintour, saddened that she had to cancel the gala last year and probably still sad that she couldn’t have it as usual this week, is holding a “smaller, more intimate celebration” to honor the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s next exhibit, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.” The second part of that exhibit will open in May of next year, when the Gala plans to return to its pre-pandemic form. Her co-hosts in September include Tom Ford, reigning queen of this country Amanda Gorman, actor Timothée Chalamet, tennis player Naomi Osaka, now-blonde Billie Eilish, and Instagram head Adam Mosseri. The dress code is “American Independence.”
You know diffusion lines – the cheaper versions of fashion lines that you think you’ll be able to afford before realizing, oh, dresses are $900 instead of $2,000 and no, I can’t afford that either? Well it’s unclear if this year’s event will be thusly diffused, Kate Bosworth showing up in something off-the-rack from Intermix. After all, nothing about the hosting committee or prices for admittance – $30,000 for individuals and $275,000 for tables – suggests reduced fanciness. It’s unclear if it will be a pandemic event, requiring masks, hand sanitizer everywhere, Anna perched at the top of those steps with a temperature gun.
If the glam served at this year’s bizarre socially distanced Oscars is any indication of where the red-carpet winds are blowing, attendees will probably serve up some full-on LEWKS, surely some flag manis, for we, the people.
Anna herself has forecast a spike in demand for luxury goods at the end of the pandemic, a proper roaring twenties-style boom, and she’s probably right. For all the talk this past year about fashion being wasteful and the system being broken and making too much stuff and marketing too much stuff and asking too many people to fly around to see said stuff, it’s hard to see any of it changing, given that, oh right, this industry exists to sell us material goods. (The best article on the pandemic exposing the weaknesses of the modern fashion system ran in the New York Times Magazine nearly a year ago, and I still recommend it.)
I miss red carpets. I am more than open, at this point, to being sold a Dior mascara via Instagram photos of a ballgown.
Netflix’s Halston Show Looks… Surprisingly Good?
In one week, Netflix will premiere the five-part limited series Halston, starring Ewan McGregor. The problem with fashion in fictionalized TV and film is that you so often get something cartoonish and silly, as though Hollywood filmmakers just can’t bear taking the industry seriously enough to learn how it actually works. This show might do the opposite, throwing McGregor as Halston against the backdrop of Studio 54 seventies glitz. “He worked with our costume designer to learn how to drape and cut and pin,” writer-director Dan Minahan, who tried to get this show made for 20 years, told the Hollywood Reporter. “When you see him make the dresses in the show, he’s literally cutting the fabric, pinning it and making it.” That seems, like a math teacher knowing how to add and subtract, like the least he could have done for this job, but ok let’s lavish him with praise.
The Brouhaha Over Billie Eilish’s British Vogue Cover Shoot
Billie Eilish is on the cover of the new British Vogue in hues of dusty pink and nude, wearing a sexy outfit that perhaps harkens Madonna, with her new bleached hair. The photos, which are lovely, look very much like editor-in-chief Edward Enninful’s British Vogue: there’s a softness, carpet, a sultry retro feel.
However, given this was Eilish’s unveiling of her reinvented look, people have feelings. Eilish previously wore baggy clothing to make a statement about non-conformity and body image, and position herself as an atypical pop star. The New York Times now writes that “some may well question her agency, asking if, at 19, Ms. Eilish has the sense or sagacity to weather the possible fallout” and concludes: “Her transformation would seem to suggest that Ms. Eilish is content these days to abandon her formerly maverick stance in favor of a fetish-tinctured bombshell look that seemed hackneyed when Madonna was a girl. If her reinvention poses a risk, it is that of becoming just another cliché.”
Eilish does not have to dress like a bombshell to be beautiful, but she also doesn’t have to be confined to shapeless chartreuse for the rest of her career, either.
She has the faculty to become a fashion icon – which is not something granted to all pop stars, but probably does strengthen their intrigue and earning potential – and if she wants to capitalize on that, can she live?
Chanel Cruises
The house of Chanel staged its punk-inspired 2022 resort collection in Les Baux-de-Provence in the South of France this week. Select special guests like Vanessa Paradis attended in person this time, but the label plans to host more people for its July couture show. Cruise, or resort, collections – clothes for people to wear on their winter vacations – seem like one of the things we don’t really need in a pared down fashion system, but again, why would the industry pare down? After the pandemic, vacations and buying clothes for them is going to be very much a thing for the travel-deprived wealthy.
Anyway, those shopping this punk-inspired Chanel show can find graphic T-shirts mixed with tweeds, Chanel lip rings, and tiny quilted bags attached to garters, which could go either James Bond for your pocket knife or Pandemic Practical for your hand sanitizer and face mask.
The materials in the collection, Vogue tells us, were “more than 70 percent eco-responsible.” (Unclear what’s up with the remaining 30 percent. Guzzling gas in a corner?) Meanwhile, Vogue also reports that Chanel’s “fashion business,” according to company president Bruno Pavlovsky, “has seen double-digit growth since last summer.” The eco-responsibility of such growth, and whether it cancels out all that sustainable material, has, it seems, not been assessed.
Meanwhile, Chanel President Bruno Pavlovsky Has Other Stuff to Say
Before the resort show he got chatty with Women’s Wear Daily, emphasizing that he’s not going along with the movement to cancel Chanel’s DJ Michel Gaubert who recently posted (and deleted) an Instagram video of him and his friends wearing masks with slanted eyes yelling “Wuhan girls.” “We know Michel well,” Pavlovsky said. “He’s a fine man with real values.” Whose Instagram feed features a photo of a T-shirt reading, “Whore Foods Market.”
Horrific Working Conditions at Kate Hudson’s Fabletics Factory Exposed
Kate Hudson’s Fabletics leggings brand is the subject of a horrifying investigation. Time magazine reports on the working conditions inside the company’s Lesotho factory, run by Hippo Knitting:
“Thirteen women interviewed say their underwear and vulvas are often exposed during routine daily searches by supervisors. Another woman says a male supervisor tried to pressure her into a sexual relationship, while three women allege male supervisors sexually assaulted them. Several of those workers added they are often humiliated and verbally abused by management. Workers say they are forced to crawl on the floor by one supervisor as a punishment. In one recent instance, a woman says she urinated on herself because the same supervisor prevented her from accessing the bathroom.”
A Fabletics spokesperson told Time they were unaware of the working conditions at Hippo Knitting, and that brand has suspended all operations there. Fabletics did $400 million in sales in 2019. Workers at the factory were earning $150 a month.
Now Trending: Mullets. (Shullets?)
The “hairstyle for summer,” in Britain anyway, is a mullet. But we’re not calling it that. Apparently, women are infiltrating British salons asking for a style “a bit long but a bit short, choppier, with more layers, and shaggier.” This shaggy mullet has been dubbed a “shullet.”
One salon owner says this is happening because women are just sick of their long pandemic hair. The Guardian goes on to point out that since April, Pinterest has seen a 75 percent increase in searches for “wolf cut hair women.” Maybe we all just like the ring of “wolf cut hair women.”
Lastly…
Mother’s Day is on Sunday, which, according to many Instagram food accounts I follow, means my children and husband are supposed to macerate fruit for me and throw it on top of a scone or something. (My husband: “You’re not getting anything macerated.”) Who decided that what moms really want on their day is the beginnings of jam? What about a perfectly seared filet? A stiff tequila-based cocktail? Something fatty crassly stuffed into a waffle iron? I’ll wait.
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