“Fashion and Society,” by Julia Reed, was originally published in the October 1990 issue of Vogue.
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When Marilyn Bender published The Beautiful People in 1967, she defined the term as "the marriage of fashion and society." Until then there had been society: style-obsessed ladies such as Mrs. William Paley, who embodied her own motto You can never be too rich or too thin." And there had been fashion. But until the 1960s the dressers and the dressees, with few exceptions, did not mingle, much less marry. Everybody knew Balenciaga was the greatest couturier of his day, and everybody knew Mrs. Loel Guinness wore his clothes. But who the hell knew Balenciaga?
Now, of course, the whole world knows the leading American designers. In a country where social standing is interchangeable with celebrity, they are recognizable by their first names (Bill, Oscar, Calvin, Carolina). They appear in their own ads and control their own lucrative empires. And ever since Oleg Cassini danced with Jackie Kennedy at the White House, they have been everywhere their clients have, usually with them. They dine with them at the restaurants Bill Blass once called the La s (La Grenouille, La Cote Basque, La Caravelle. and now, Le Cirque and Mortimer s); their names appear in the same columns; and they have danced at all the great parties of the past three decades (Truman Capote s Black and White Ball for Katharine Graham; almost every night at Studio 54; the Metropolitan Museum of Art s Costume Institute galas). Today designers no longer seek out clients; they are sought after. As early as 1968, Nora Ephron noted that Blass had become one of the Beautiful People for whom he designed. And last year, in a literal marriage of fashion and society, Annette Reed, socialite, heiress to the Engelhard fortune, and protegee of Brooke Astor, wed Oscar de la Renta.
When I first got here Seventh Avenue wasn t social then. It was practically a dirty word. Now Bill Blass is almost the mayor and Oscar is as social as you can get. Oscar had Francoise, of course, but it s also because the designers are so rich. And if you re not rich in New York, forget it. —Slim Keith, 1986
In the beginning, social designers were social first. "There were social ladies who dabbled at fashion houses, just like ladies who dabbled at interior design," says Bill Blass. Pauline Potter, later the Baronne de Rothschild, toiled at Hattie Carnegie. Ceil Chapman, who specialized in "late-day dresses," first started a business called Her Ladyship Gowns with her friend Gloria Vanderbilt (mother of the jeans designer). Mainbocher, originally from Illinois, made the leap—but not until he had run a couture house in Paris and designed the Duchess of Windsor s wedding gown. While Mainbocher lunched every day at Le Pavilion (until he switched to La Grenouille), his colleagues remained stuck in the back rooms. People—society people—would not even claim to know them, much less invite them to dinner. Early on when asked if she knew Oscar de la Renta, renowned hostess Kitty (Mrs. Gilbert) Miller said, "No, whenever I saw him he always had pins in his mouth." "Before I had a name or a label," says Bill Blass, "I would go out socially all the time, but I would never tell anybody what I did."
As usual, money changed everything. In the 1960s a name and a label began to translate into a lot of cash. De la Renta and Blass both took over at the houses where they had been designing. Halston graduated from milliner at Bergdorf s to head of his own business. The rise of sportswear opened up the market and made way for designers like Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. But most important, designers began to license their names for less expensive products ranging from sheets to chocolates—at increasingly lucrative fees. Today Blass and de la Renta both preside over half-a-billion-dollar empires; Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren each take in well over a billion. "Designing became respectable," says Blass, "when it started to make money. The husband began to realize that this designer was a hardworking son of a bitch like himself. It lost its effete aura." These days Blass rarely leaves his office to schmooze with clients—he ll lunch with them, but more often he has dinner at their houses.
When their husbands leave the Ladies, the designers are the first to fill their shoes. Chessy Rayner rarely goes out without Blass, Ivana Trump without costume jewelry mogul Kenny Lane. But they are not mere walkers. In 1980 when Brooke Astor gave a small private dinner for the president-elect and Mrs. Reagan, both Blass and de la Renta were in attendance. And earlier this year when Oscar de la Renta won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Henry Kissinger was the presenter. Brooke Astor got out of her sickbed to watch.
Money has brought more than influence and respectability. Designers now have Gulfstream jets (Klein and Lauren) and houses in all the right places. In 1987 when the Duchess of Windsor s jewels were auctioned, Klein bought his preppy new wife two pieces. When the queen of England dined at the White House, Blass was in attendance. Arnold Scaasi, among the first to market the connection between fashion and society, has for years posed in his ads with the most famous of his well-heeled Ladies. Now Carolyne Roehm, herself a social star, simply poses alone, as does the beautiful daughter of Carolina Herrera.
No longer are there immutable standards by which to judge ourselves. Image has overtaken reality. —Barbara Goldsmith, "The Meaning of Celebrity," 1983
In 1961 when Jackie Kennedy watched her husband take the oath of office, she wore a Halston pillbox hat and a sable muff on the advice of Diana Vreeland, and every woman in the country had to have both. For the first time, Americans had a national standard of taste and style but no generally agreed-upon standard of society. American society, particularly as embodied by the Kennedys, was increasingly about glamour and wealth and ambition. And when the old guidelines—the Social Register, the Junior League, the Episcopal Church—are rendered virtually meaningless, people are forced to find new ways to identify themselves as people of consequence; to create, in other words, a new image of importance. And in a world in which image is all, the image maker is king.
The image maker s power has been best illustrated by the phenomenal rise of the vendor. The right florist, caterer, decorator, and hairdresser have risen to heights of social stardom. All are indicators of a social correctness vital to those Edith Wharton once referred to as the Invaders. But no one has gained as much power as the fashion designer. Without a proper old guard to grant an imprimatur, the designers—the clothes themselves—provide one. Halston said, "You are only as good as the people you dress." He also knew that you are only as good as the designer you wear.
First, the right designer gets you into the right columns. Everybody in Manhattan today knows that a real estate agent named Alice Mason wears Galanos to her famous dinners—and not because they know Alice Mason. Suzy (Aileen Mehle) is on hand to tell us, just as she told us in the sixties that "Gloria Guinness is already in New York sweeping around town in her Givenchy midi skirt." For those just coming out into society, at whatever age, this attention is especially important, and a serious dress is the most direct way to be seen and mentioned. Even the august Katharine Graham needed a designer to aid in her debut as a player. In 1963, when she emerged from her late husband s shadow to run one of the country s largest media empires, she was a shy middle-aged woman who needed a look. She found one in Halston, and at his memorial service earlier this year she delivered a heartfelt eulogy. "Before Halston," she said, "I was one of fashion s one hundred neediest cases. . . .By the time he closed the doors at Olympic Tower, I had come to rely on him so greatly. . . that I found it difficult to move on."
Of course, clothes have always been a key to identity. In the nineteenth century, the old rich—the Boston kind who wouldn t acknowledge a Kennedy—had such a fear of ostentation (and of upsetting the masses) that their clothes were often threadbare. At the turn of the century, Thorstein Veblen described the clothes of the rich as an insignia of leisure, the same insignia that Ralph Lauren so brilliantly markets and that Calvin Klein incorporates into his Waspy designs. Today clothes do not supply Veblen s distance from the filthy old marketplace but indicate the opposite: one s intimate involvement in the hurly-burly world of finance and society and fashion. They mean that you are among the privileged who keep the wheels of fashion turning; that you have caught the right plane to the right show, to the countless fittings; that you know who is in and who is out, who Women s Wear Daily has christened king or queen designer of the moment. Imagine the pride of the Ladies who donated their dresses for Diana Vreeland s 1983 Yves Saint Laurent retrospective at the Met s Costume Institute. Their names were on the cards at each mannequin s feet, just as the year before at the Belle Epoque show the cards had read the Duchess of Marlborough, Queen Alexandra, the Comtesse Anna de Noailles.
But merely having the clothes is no longer enough. The designer himself must lend his approval. In the early sixties Blass had the idea of including his most devoted clients at the shows of his collections, previously attended only by the buyers and the fashion press. Now so many come that Blass has two shows, one for the press and one for the social pack, which also comprises some husbands (Mark Hampton, the interior designer, and Henry Kravis, who is after all married to Carolyne Roehm), the hottest photographers (Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber), actresses (Candice Bergen, Sigourney Weaver), and social media types (Jann Wenner, Kathleen Sullivan). Not to turn up would be like not having trekked to Morocco for Malcolm Forbes s birthday party. To study a seating plan at a New York fashion show is to learn the social hierarchy of the city. Last spring when Mercedes Bass cochaired a Carnegie Hall benefit with Oscar de la Renta, it was a sign that Mercedes had made it rather than the other way around—even though she had first been married to an ambassador and is now the wife of one of the world s richest men.
If being in with the right American designer lends social status, becoming a European couture customer puts you in the stratosphere. In the early-eighties days of the high dollar and the 727s of all the new tycoons, entire planeloads of American women went to Paris for the couture. Ivana Trump took Ladies on her jet; some took the Concorde. So many attended that British fashion journalist Nick Coleridge remarked that American women hadn t so much "resuscitated couture as raised it from the dead." At the height of the mania, a spokesman from the Chambre Syndicale said that two-thirds of all couture dresses were sold to Americans. The designers in turn pampered their new clients with dinners in their honor and the very best seats at the shows. "They re richer and more beautiful than anyone else," said Ungaro director Germaine Labarthe in 1986. That s why we give them seats always in the front row.
As a form of fundraising, charity balls are not going out, and those of us in the fashion business would be ill-advised to want them to. They are one of the reasons why women buy a new dress. —Bill Blass, 1969
Nothing has accelerated the merger of fashion and society like the charity ball. In the past two decades causes that no one had known existed were suddenly being supported by the gala event: the Met s Costume Institute, the long-neglected New York Public Library, the writer s group PEN, dozens of new AIDS research centers and hospices. Getting involved provides the surest route to the top rungs of society. (When Brooke Astor says, "New blood is good—transfusions keep the things going," she isn t talking about transfusions of wit and charm.)
Charity has always justified so much: the parties, the jewels, the nonstop going and being seen, and most of all the clothes. So entwined have charity and fashion become that at Nashville s Swan Ball, a fashion show (Pucci, Blass, Roehm) alternates with a singer (Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash) as each year s entertainment. Christian Lacroix s American debut in the fall of 1987 was actually a benefit for Memorial Sloan-Kettering s AIDS research unit. The event put Blaine. Trump on the map as the Gala Girl of the Moment—she rated a front-page profile in The New York Times Living section and everybody in New York knew that her very own Lacroix gown was stuck in customs until the hair-raising last minute.
But Blaine also earned ink of a different kind. New York magazine ran the Lacroix party on its cover under the headline "Dancing on the Lip of the Volcano." It was a moment frozen in time: old and new revelers, a week after the stock market crash, wearing mad Ungaro poufs and bootlegged Lacroixs amid real fireworks and thousands of votive candles. The party guard. Hebe Dorsey, the late International Herald Tribune columnist and Lacroix s biggest booster, moaned that her charge didn t even know who the Buckleys were. He knew when he left. Bergdorf s sold $330,000 worth of his clothes in the week he was there, not to mention every last accessory in the windows—the shoes, the bags, even the earrings on the mannequins. More than one pundit compared it all to the period just before the French Revolution—the clothes and coiffures weren t too far off—and questioned if anyone could remember exactly what it was they were there for.
The drumbeats had actually begun as early as 1986 when Felix and Liz Rohatyn appeared on the cover of Manhattan, inc. attacking the succession of galas as "conspicuous consumption without conscience." Women s Wear shot back that Liz had had Blass whip up a special number for her appearance at the previous year s Carnegie Hall benefit and ran a page of photographs of the Rohatyns whooping it up at charity shindigs through the ages. In the end Felix gave Brooke Astor $200,000 for the New York Public Library so people would leave him alone, but he had raised a pertinent question. A question that by 1990 even Oscar de la Renta would acknowledge: "What has happened is that people have lost sight of the things that are really valid and important. They are not giving money to help a hungry child. They are giving money to have a great time. Perhaps it s easier if they know by giving something they will be recompensed, but. . .people must now find milder ways to live."
We are not the sum of our possessions. They are not the measure of our lives. —George Bush, January 21, 1989
With those words, George Bush ushered in the kinder, gentler era. He also reminded his well-heeled inaugural audience of the importance of "loyal friends and "loving parents, of quieter, deeper successes that are not made of gold and silk but of better hearts and finer souls." Bush had a speech writer with instincts—the Reagans were gone, the eighties were almost over, greed was out. The headline writers loved it.
"Soft Society" proclaimed the cover of John Fairchild s W. "Intimate" is in, "grand" is out, decreed the late Washington Post fashion writer Nina Hyde. Her annual list pitted clothes against fashion, lace against leather, dads against trophy wives. W preached against big jewels, dog-collar chokers, overcon- sold out. Decorator Mario Buatta fell backward into a potted plant but refused to go to the emergency room until the last dance was over. Joursumption. Bush Blue replaced Reagan Red, Kenny Lane became the new Harry Winston. No more black tie, eating out, or pledging and not giving. The media ushered in the New Retreat. Of course, we had heard it all before. "They tell each other how tired they are and that they long for an evening at home with a tray and television—but everybody knows they wouldn t be caught dead there," Suzy wrote of the 1967 Shiny Set, and not a thing has changed. In 1968 a tired Bill Blass told Life magazine he intended to reduce his nights out from five a week to three. Eighteen years later Carolyne Roehm uttered that same sentiment to New York magazine, along with the fact that what she most longed for was "a baked potato in bed.
There have been a few well-timed retreats. During the postcrash New York ready-to-wear collections, Gayfryd Steinberg was notable by her absence. New York magazine dubbed her the New Intellectual—a swipe at her sponsorship of PEN—and reported that she also opted out of the Lacroix fest, buying no frocks and skipping Blaine s lunch for the designer. Susan Gutfreund, an avid couture buyer and French speaker whose husband, John, is the chairman of Salomon Brothers, took almost permanent cover in Paris;—a prescient move in light of Salomon s near takeover and subsequent lay-off of 12 percent of its work force.
But it is only recently that the Rohatyns appear to have been vindicated. A scant three years ago Mario Buatta wouldn t leave a party when he was bleeding half to death; now the Ladies can t get the men into black tie. Southampton s staid Parrish Art Museum broke with precedent and did not require dinner jackets at its annual benefit last July; the tables for Manhattan s fall galas are filling slowly. The dollar s a disaster. Now Americans at the couture are known as the nouveaux pauvres; the Germans are the ones to woo. But far more important than any economic factor is the fact that it is thought fashionable to lie low, to be concerned, to care about the air and the animals. The BPs and the QPs. Quality People, have given way to the CPs, Concerned People. They are "committed to doing good"—the phrase comes up over and over again, anew mantra. People are compelled to declare themselves. "I ve never gone over the top," socialite Jamee Gregory told an interviewer. "The eighties had some wildly extravagant parties. . . and it was fun living through that period... but I hate anything that interferes with people."
There, done, officially over. But is it real or is it fashionspeak? "The difference is that a famous formerly free-spending socialite] is toning down because she realizes that if you re going to be a fashionable person, this is the trend," says Oscar de la Renta. "But is that what she herself feels?" Whatever, it works. This year when Lacroix returned to New York, fireworks did not go off, skirts did not flare, and the Whirlers stayed well away from the volcano s lip, at a chic little gathering at the Time Cafe, eating macrobiotic food on Naugahyde banquettes. Blaine Trump had struck the perfect note again; she even won more coverage in The New York Times. Mario Buatta now tells a reporter in the Hamptons that "people don t want to be seen out spending." Indeed, this year Ivana Trump attended the couture but claimed not to buy.
While the Whirlers are learning to adjust, there s a new generation already ahead of the game. Martha, Inc., the moneyed matron s mainstay, has opened Martha International next door to the original Park Avenue salon, hawking witty, young, and— gasp—relatively inexpensive frocks to the daughters of its clients. The first to seriously support such young talent as Christian Francis Roth, the store has also showcased exclusive designs from Michael Kors and Betsey Johnson and four others whose sales went to the campaign to save the rain forests. The customers, says Martha, Inc. president Lynn Manulis, "are a new breed. They re spending their own dollars. They don t ask their husbands or their boyfriends.
Just as the young Ladies don t depend on the designers, the young designers do not depend on the Ladies. But they haven t turned their backs on them. Now the relationship is less social and more curatorial. Chessy Rayner may be one of Bill Blass s best friends, but for Marc Jacobs she is an icon. Blaine Trump wears Mizrahi, but in her crowd it is regarded as clever, not serious. The young designer is less walker or dinner companion catering to his client than anthropologist fascinated by her. "Movie stars are not as glamorous as they used to be," says Jacobs. "These ladies are." Before his fall collection, which was inspired by "favorite socialite" Anne Slater, Jacobs hung out at the Carlyle and studied his grandmother s closetful of Ferragamo T-straps and matching pocketbooks.
Isaac Mizrahi has been called the spokesman for young fashion aficionados, but he too is "awed" by the designs of Norman Norell and Halston, enamored of the best-dressed Babe Paley and Millicent Rogers. Paley and Slim Keith, he says, "never looked as though they were wearing a specific designer, they just looked great." He recalls that C. Z. Guest, a particular inspiration, told him that as a young socialite, she had been horrified when the price of a ball gown was leaked to the press.
Michael Kors also admires the great Paley. "But I also think if she were a young woman today, she d be an editor, she d be putting all that talent and energy to work." Kors s client "goes to restaurants, travels, goes to an office. She does not plan seven months in advance what she is going to wear to a luncheon." His ideal remains Jackie O., the woman who started it all. "The amazing thing about Jackie is that she has truly made the transition with each decade. She s a working woman, she s an active woman. She doesn t look like someone who spends all her time thinking about clothes."
But all is not over for the fashion fanatic on the climb. Ivana Trump may not be buying, but she s hoping somebody will: she s launching a line of clothes and accessories that will hang primarily on her celebrity name. Judy Taubman was spotted with twenty pieces of Vuitton luggage at the Paris airport—before the couture not after. The Parrish Museum party may not have been black-tie, but the theme was Bastille Day. Perhaps in Southampton they re immune to fashion, quiet or otherwise. "Marie Antoinette" stood on a cake and played the accordion, the chair covers were silk-screened with guillotines, LET THEM EAT CAKE buttons were distributed. No one commented on the irony.