October 4, 2005
Fighting Off the Negatinas
By GUY TREBAY
PARIS, Oct. 3 - "J'adoring it!" a stylist pronounced backstage on Monday before the Rick Owens show, her head wreathed in a nimbus of American Spirit smoke, blithely disregarding the many no smoking signs.
The object of her enthusiasm was not altogether clear. Was it the designer's collection, at that moment hanging inertly on racks? Was it the space where the show was held, an exploratorium whose rotunda features bronze portraits of great apes? Or was she speaking of Paris itself, which the fashion army tends to fall upon as if it had arrived safely at the end of a long march?
Who cares? What matters is that she was expressing herself in Fashion Esperanto, the improvisatory, helium-giddy and nowadays endangered dialect of her tribe. There was a time in what one might call the precorporate era when Fashion Esperanto was in constant use. Approval blazed through the language in superlatives. Nothing halfway nice could be described as less than genius! Disapproval was expressed in gutturals like "Ugg!"
Gerunds were used more promiscuously than in a Henry Green novel: Loving! Boring! J'adoring! Ordinary sentence structure was treated as a joke. Articles fell into nearly total disuse. Foreign languages were ransacked for anything linguistically shiny. Pronouns took a drubbing. Verbs became nouns.
"It had all the atmosphere of a specialized-machine-tool trade fair," Haruki Murakami wrote in "Norwegian Wood," describing the Ami Hostel, a place where the narrator's girlfriend is ensconced. Except that the hostel was a mental hospital, Mr. Murakami could have been describing the scene at any fashion show. Come to think of it - well, never mind. "People with a strong interest in a limited field came together in a limited spot and exchanged information understood only by themselves," he wrote.
The point is that Fashion Esperanto has been on the way out. One hesitates to point a finger of blame at Robert Polet, the former Unilever executive who now runs the Gucci Group. Fashion was becoming inexorably corporate long before Mr. Polet was hired away from the food giant to apply the lessons of selling goods with a limited shelf life to those, like handbags, which must be made to seem as if they could spoil.
With the exception of designers like John Galliano - whose eccentricities now seem as contrived for public consumption as the antics of Cantinflas, the legendary Mexican movie clown, to whom he bears more than a passing resemblance - most people in the business are now able to talk in ways that translate well for the boardroom.
The shrewdest can even discuss how to model markets, how to adapt their designs to specific local tastes within a global scheme. (The same Vuitton bag, for instance, is not found equally irresistible in Miami and Kuala Lumpur.) One part of the genius of Marc Jacobs is his ability to make Fashion Esperanto comprehensible at a corporate level without losing his all-important misfit cred.
And it does not pay to underestimate how much fashion is a game played by misfits, people who, as the designer Narciso Rodriguez has remarked, probably would not make it in a lot of other fields. This is not because they lack the intelligence or skills or cunning or endurance. For designers, who face the reality that most of them toil in obscurity for unimpressive salaries, the latitude for self-expression in fashion remain seductively liberal.
Unlike medicine, say, one can become a fashion professional just by claiming it is so. If it works, you can wear a powdered ponytail and starched collar that lends you a resemblance to a bobble-head doll (the designer Karl Lagerfeld) or mince around wearing a miniature clown hat (Anna Piaggia of Italian Vogue) or else plant what looks like the spring molt from a parrot jungle on your head (Isabella Blow, the fashion director of Tatler) and stand around waiting for the paparazzi flashbulbs to pop.
In fashion you can be the ugly duckling from high school and yet find people who will pay you good money to embody their off-kilter vision (Lisette Jansen, the young Dutchwoman whose nom de mannequin is Querelle). You can start out in Porterville, Calif., and wind up one day as a darling of Paris, creating complex, sexy shrouds from pleated jersey, being found sexy and compelling yourself because of, not despite, ironing your hair and wearing sleeveless muscle T-shirts and combat fatigues over high-heeled platform boots (the designer Rick Owens).
"Sometimes the whole thing cracks me up, it's so absurd," Mr. Owens said on Sunday evening as his assistants snacked on persimmon cookies his mother made from fruit picked from a backyard tree in California. "I didn't necessarily expect a big welcome wagon from fashion, but people have actually been generous and haven't slagged me off too much." These people exist, of course. In Fashion Esperanto they're known as "negatinas."
But as Mr. Owens said, "I can't think of too many other fields where you can learn all of this on the job."
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