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.
PHOTO: AFP
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.
At Madison Square Garden, as at many fashion shows, a chasm yawns between those who are blessed by nature and those whose job it is to prepare Cinderella for the ball. At Madison Square Garden, as at fashion shows, the anointed beauties perform for a moment and then rush to let down their fur. At Madison Square Garden, there are many reasons to envy dogs their essential nakedness.
These reasons include metallic brocade jackets, novelty jumpers, purple sweatsuit ensembles, sweat shirts with dog portraits outlined in Swarovski crystals, trousers with origami pleats and lug-soled walking shoes of a sort one associates with the lady ornithologist in Hitchcock's The Birds.
"Her coat is called oyster brindle," said Juan Miranda, a Mexican breeder, as he methodically used a hot comb to straighten the fur of an Afghan bitch known as Dolce
Gabbana of Damos. Unlike many of the handlers at Westminster, Miranda was simply attired, in a trim D&G suit. He was three hours into a grooming process, he explained, all for perhaps a half-hour in the ring.
In this way, too, dog and fashion shows are alike: orgies of effort yielding transitory effects. "It's about eight hours altogether," explained a groomer slumped in a chair beside Remy, the white standard poodle formally known as Brighton Minimoto. "It's three hours just for the bath and a couple hours more to clipper her," the groomer went on, adding that two more hours would be devoted to washing the hair spray out of Remy's tortured Bret Michaels (frontman of the band, Poison) bouffant, using Dawn dish soap.
Although a favorite to win Westminster, Remy was ultimately beaten by the little beagle Uno. And even in this unanticipated result could be detected elements of fashion.
With her topiary hairdo and visual allusions to the go-go 1980s ("a masterpiece carved with a pair of clippers," in the words of the Associated Press), Remy's was probably the wrong look for tough economic times. She was a Christian Lacroix pouf, to strain the analogy. And Uno the beagle was an honest cloth coat, much like the ones Michael Kors showed a week ago in Bryant Park.
Oct. 14 to Oct. 20 After working above ground for two years, Chang Kui (張桂) entered the Yamamoto coal mine for the first time, age 16. It was 1943, and because many men had joined the war effort, an increasing number of women went underground to take over the physically grueling and dangerous work. “As soon as the carts arrived, I climbed on for the sake of earning money; I didn’t even feel scared,” Chang tells her granddaughter Tai Po-fen (戴伯芬) in The last female miner: The story of Chang Kui (末代女礦工: 張桂故事), which can be found on the Frontline
There is perhaps no better way to soak up the last of Taipei’s balmy evenings than dining al fresco at La Piada with a sundowner Aperol Spritz and a luxuriant plate of charcuterie. La Piada (義式薄餅) is the brainchild of Milano native William Di Nardo. Tucked into an unassuming apartment complex, fairy lights and wining diners lead the way to this charming slice of laid-back Mediterranean deli culture. Taipei is entirely saturated with Italian cuisine, but La Piada offers something otherwise unseen on the island. Piadina Romagnola: a northern Italian street food classic. These handheld flatbreads are stuffed with cold
President William Lai’s (賴清德) National Day speech was exactly what most of us expected. It was pleasant, full of keywords like “resilience” and “net zero” and lacked any trolling of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Of course the word “Taiwan” popped up often, and Lai reiterated the longtime claim of his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), a claim that now dates back 30 years on the pro-Taiwan side. But it was gentle. Indeed, it was possible to see the speech as conciliatory, leaving room for the PRC to make a gesture. That may have been one of its purposes: if
In the tourism desert that is most of Changhua County, at least one place stands out as a remarkable exception: one of Taiwan’s earliest Han Chinese settlements, Lukang. Packed with temples and restored buildings showcasing different eras in Taiwan’s settlement history, the downtown area is best explored on foot. As you make your way through winding narrow alleys where even Taiwanese scooters seldom pass, you are sure to come across surprise after surprise. The old Taisugar railway station is a good jumping-off point for a walking tour of downtown Lukang. Though the interior is not open to the public, the exterior
RSS