“Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life,” the endlessly quotable Diane Vreeland once opined, and you can’t help but wish that Calvin Klein designer Francisco Costa would now and again add a splash of something really tacky to his impeccably conceived garments. His show is classic CK — butterscotch leather dresses, creamy shifts — but the only thing even minimally surprising is that the models’ bare knees are showing, since this has been a season of long lengths and covered legs (sometimes wackily so, as in the striated black affairs at Prabal Gurung, which I loved, but many people hated.)
You know how sometimes by a miracle you meet someone and the attraction is so immediate, the atmosphere so charged, that you can barely look at the person and have to turn away? This is apparently what has happened between me and Mick Jagger, a man I have been convinced I will marry since I was 12 years old. Mick can barely bring himself to glance in my direction at the L’Wren Scott show, which he attends because Scott is his girlfriend (well, at least for now — it certainly has been a week for Glimmer Twin consorts). Maybe because it is the last day of the New York presentations, but everyone is in a celebratory mood — and not just since the show comes with a free lunch, though that certainly helps. As we eat our chicken pot pies — lots of crusts left untouched on plates in this crowd — a purple brigade, a veritable mauve decade parades in front of us, all trussed up in Scott’s trademark ultranarrow, tailored silhouettes. And if some of the sequined extravaganzas lay on the glimmer with too heavy a hand, who can resist the naughty Goth child bride who closes the show, in a beaded black and gold number, a bit of black veiling askew on her dazed empty head?
