AnOther invites literary writer and novellist Ned Beauman to review the recent Resort collections of Céline, Givenchy and Stella McCartney in New York...
AnOther invited literary writer and novellist Ned Beauman to review the recent Resort collections of Céline, Givenchy and Stella McCartney in New York...
Writers, unlike models, do not have training in inscrutability, so whenever we’re obliged to hand someone a story we’ve just written and sit there while they read it, we tend to adopt a sort of trembling android rictus in the attempt to seem nonchalant and inattentive. Watching the sylphs line up for inspection at Céline’s presentation in Chelsea on Monday, I tried to keep in mind that although they inhabited and actualised and in some sense became the outfits, they did not design the outfits themselves, and so they wouldn’t be anxiously scanning my face for microfluctuations of favour and disfavour as I strolled along with my notebook, but I still found my objectivity crumbling away. Like the Grenadier Guards at Buckingham Palace or Marina Abramović in The Artist is Present, there’s something eerie about a human being who is not permitted to acknowledge you but who nonetheless must be fully aware of you As I felt more and more self-conscious about my amateurism, the polarity of evaluation seemed to flip inside out, so that I was now watching for their reactions to my own performance as a critic, or at least I might have been if I was capable of meeting their eyes and if they were capable of showing reactions.
"The atmosphere in the room was of a nerve-wracking, disastrous job interview"
In other words, from my point of view, the atmosphere in the room was of a nerve-wracking, disastrous job interview. Which, luckily, was pretty perfect, because Céline’s resort collection this year was redolent of nothing so much as an elite 1960s recruitment agency. "So, Miss Graham, it says here you spent a year as an air hostess on the Prince of Monaco’s personal airline… Another year as a masseuse at a spa in the Arctic… Karate instructor to Howard Hughes’ nephew… Nine languages… PhD in Space Medicine from MIT… No, I’m sorry, Miss Graham, but you just don’t quite meet our standards." Flared trousers, transparent boots and a Formica shade of orange were all reminders that you dress for the job that you want, not the job that you have. Then again, I neither have a job nor want one, and in the circumstances I’m not sure how I feel about turning up to this sort of thing naked.
Givenchy’s presentation later in the afternoon should have been a lot less stressful, since there weren’t any models there, but the truth is that the novel experience of pawing through a rack of very expensive women’s clothes made me feel as if I were in the process of burgling a dowager’s summer house. Here, I was struck by the print on one piece of a Byzantine Christ surrounded by angels with all their faces blurred as if they were pedestrians on Google Street View, and also by a neoprene blouson patterned with broken chequerboards and antic paisley, but most of all by what I can only describe as a strappy black apron-like entity towards the end of the rack. Even to look at a model is often to be perplexed by her existence as a coherent volume in Euclidean space, so to postulate one inside this thing was like one those three-dimensional reasoning tests they give you before you can become a DARPA engineer. No matter how many times in your life you’ve mentally disrobed a woman, it’s no preparation for mentally womaning a robe. Fortunately, one of the other journalists was more courageous than me, and asked if she could see a couple of looks on a couple of models to get a better sense of how this collection might actually behave. When a tall girl appeared from nowhere in a chiffony white gown, an abstraction suddenly made concrete, it was as if a unseasonal flurry of snow had settled over the room.
"No matter how many times in your life you’ve mentally disrobed a woman, it’s no preparation for mentally womaning a robe."
So what was it to be? Models or no models? Neither seemed satisfactory, but surely I wasn’t about to conclude that the best context for showing off these frocks was the preposterous ritual of the runway show? I’m glad to say the dialectic found its synthesis at the Stella McCartney presentation off East Houston Street that evening. The theme was an English summer fete, complete with kids, brass band, home-made lemonade, and even an appropriately leaden sky, which must have been expensive to arrange. Here, the models were simply guests at the party – dancing to the band, queuing for ice cream sandwiches, and helping each other in and out of hammocks, just like the rosy-cheeked Home Counties girls the collection ambivalently evoked. Your first sight of them was out of the corner of your eye, which is the best and most natural introduction to any striking outfit, and also the easiest way for McCartney’s variations on the aesthetic to make themselves comfortable in your consciousness: the hems like badminton nets, the pastoral prints that looked as if they’d been rendered on a ZX Spectrum, the neon moire of the shoes bodging a sort of false iridescence to match the true iridescence of the clutch bags. Any writers present were not just permitted but professionally obliged to hang around in the corner thinking of lyrical things to say about ambulant beauty – the one part of this assignment for which we’d all had a lifetime’s training.
Ned Beauman's first novel Boxer, Beetle won the UK Writers' Guild Award and the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Desmond Elliott Prize. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident, is pulished this month.
Read AnOther review of the Resort 2013 collections here.
Text by Ned Beauman
