I see naked people. This is not because I have the uncanny powers of Haley Joel Osment or because I own X-Ray Specs. It is because looking at naked people is part of my job. Twice a year for a month or so I find myself spending a great deal of time backstage at fashion shows. And few other settings come to mind in which observing or standing alongside or quizzing people who are wearing next to nothing is an occupational … well, hazard is not the word.
That these people happen to be among the world’s most beautiful does little to diminish the surreal dimension of the circumstances. Consider what it is like to take notes as Gisele Bundchen holds forth while dressed in nothing but a G-string and you will get the idea. Picture interviewing Chad White — a model from whose torso statues could be cast — as a makeup artist strokes bronzing gel on his thighs, and the odd dimensions of the task become clear.
What is strangest, perhaps, about this particular form of employment — for which there is no comprehensive job description — is that being around rooms filled with unclad women and men is anything but stimulating. At least this is true for people in the fashion business, who are either puritanically decorous about nudity or so involved with clothes that often they can barely see the naked limbs for all the glorious weeds. And it is true for me.
It is not as though one is unaware that wandering backstage at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show is a died-and-gone-to-heaven dream for some people, or anyway, most Maxim readers. And it was plenty exciting when once, in a backstage scrum, Helena Christensen brushed against me with her breast. Still it must be said that, as in pro-sports locker rooms and on pornographic-movie sets, after a while you stop being shocked.
“It’s all context,” said Tim Blanks, a contributing editor for Style.com and Men.Style.com, who over two decades of backstage reporting has watched generations of models stripping down to their skivvies. “When you see some doll walking down the catwalk in some sheer thing or nearly naked, it’s fashion,” Blanks remarked in Paris earlier this month. “If you saw that same girl pole dancing in a club, it would be hot.’
It is certainly true that the atmosphere at most fashion shows is weirdly unerotic. It may seem strange to say so, but even in a season like the one just ended — during which designers offered sheer blouses, peekaboo skirts, dropped crotches and bared breasts — sensuality seemed far from central. The parts that were revealed seemed no sexier than the parts that remained covered. Nakedness was less provocation than another design tool.
And backstage at the shows the atmosphere is always so frenetic and focused, the deadlines so tight, the volume of tasks to complete so improbable within the time allowed that Eros is the last thing on anybody’s mind.
“We’re here for the clothes, and so there’s nothing erotic about it,” the model Raquel Zimmerman said before the Chloe show in Paris. “If you think about it, in Europe everyone goes topless on the beach and it’s not a big deal,” she added, noting that the naked pictures that surfaced from Carla Bruni’s modeling days did not exactly hinder her transition to first lady of France.
Things weren’t always so relaxed, of course. Anyone who remembers Unzipped, Douglas Keeve’s 1995 documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, will recall the lobbying required to persuade people like Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford to change clothes in front of a fashion show audience, while silhouetted behind a theatrical scrim. Nowadays, they would be lucky not to be asked to appear stark naked, as one model was in the designer Hussein Chalayan’s spring 2007 show.
RSS