Now that Uno, the 38cm beagle, has captured the crown, becoming the first of his breed to win best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, and now that more than 2,600 other canine competitors have been leashed and crated and hauled home to familiar kennels and sofas, it seems fitting to consider an overlooked aspect of this crowd-pleasing sport: the strange collision of fashion and dog shows.
"You want something sparkly," Teri Rosenblatt-Tevlin explained Monday as she circled her dog through the sawdust of a fenced enclosure by the staging area at Madison Square Garden. "But tasteful," she added. "You want to look classy but not draw attention away from the dog."
The dog in question was an Afghan hound named Poseidon of Mountain Top One, known familiarly as JP, and based on what he was wearing before the show, he would be a hard dog to outshine. There were the patterned snood and the glossy belted jumpsuit, custom made by Rosenblatt-Tevlin's mother to protect the dog from his urine stream.
He also had a luxuriant coat, combed to the texture of the cascading tresses in a L'Oreal ad. The coat was his own, of course, developed to help cope with the frigid winters in mountainous Afghanistan.
While nature provided JP with a reason for his foppish appearance, dog show humans have no such excuse for the strangeness of their attire. The rule of thumb at dog shows is "for handlers to be invisible, so they don't take away from the breed," said David Frei, the director of communications for the 132-year-old Westminster Kennel Club show.
And for the final night of judging, that rule was generally observed. Under the bright lights in a packed arena, the dogs shone and the handlers, in their dark suits and rubber-soled shoes, tended to recede. Or most did, if one omits Alessandra Folz, who appeared to be making a style statement by wearing a suit of bubble gum pink to conduct the 4-year-old Weimaraner called Marge through the ring.
And why shouldn't she wear it? Dog shows are essentially fashion shows, after all, demonstrations of the many ways that selective breeding can be used to accommodate alterations in taste. Despite all the marketing and mythologizing about bloodlines extending backward into antiquity, many canine breeds are relatively modern and man-made.
In more than one sense, Westminster bears a resemblance to the New York fashion shows that folded up tents just days before the dog show rolled into town. Both are hybrid forms that marry entertainment to merchandising. Both have a tendency to stir up questions about the relationship between aesthetics and genetics. Both take place in a setting one associates with a circus, although they sell hot dogs at the Garden, and that will never happen under the big top at Bryant Park.
Replace the poodles with Latvian giantesses and the staging area at the Garden could have been any backstage segment from Full Frontal Fashion. Everywhere you looked there were fur-bearing divas parked passively on tables, surrounded by adoring handlers who primped and arranged their coiffures. In every corner were Jiffy Steamers, blow-dryers, rat combs, curlers, manicure scissors, cylinder brushes, hot combs and all the other weaponry of the beauty arsenal.
As at many fashion shows, a pale nimbus of hair spray floated above the backstage area. And this caused one to think that when people of the future wonder why they are forced to live in underground tunnels, it will be explained that in the early 21st century the hair spray used to make models look like poodles and poodles look like Lady Bunny ate a hole in the atmosphere.
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