When we stepped into the tents on Friday night, we felt as if we’d fallen into a wormhole and ended up in 2007. At Nicole Miller, the media followed socialite Tinsley Mortimer around as slavishly as if she were, well, five-years-ago Tinsley Mortimer. Then an hour later the Tinz’s West Coast equivalent, pop culture relic Paris Hilton, swanned into Charlotte Ronson’s front row and created a frenzy so potent that other actual celebrities were displaced from seats and a couple reporters got backed over on the runway by scrambling cameramen — this despite the fact that we’re blessedly unclear what Paris has even done recently aside from declaring her intention to exhume her music career. Maybe it actually is 2007. If so, someone should warn her about that whole prison thing.
Fug Girls: Riding the Time Warp Express at Nicole Miller and Charlotte Ronson
Miller’s show yielded our second Peter Brant Jr. sighting of the day (the first was on the way out of Rebecca Minkoff). The Brantling watched most of the show leaning far back in his chair, his cocked elbow resting on the seat of the girl next to him. Jane By Design’s India de Beaufort may have been there with her mother, as a lady sitting behind her was her older doppelganger; she chatted amiably with Teen Wolf’s Holland Roden, who later popped up at Ronson’s show in an unfortunate floral romper that we choose to believe was foisted upon her after her pelvis lost a bet, especially because when we chatted with her briefly, she was totally charming. “This is my second Fashion Week,” she told us. “I got Fashion Week Devirginized last time.” She then bemoaned how hot it was — “Greenland is melting,” she theorized — and enthusiastically complimented us on our lipstick. In short, she was adorable. Her pelvis deserves better.
After the relative calm of Nicole Miller’s preshow atmosphere, Charlotte Ronson by contrast was a big old hot mess. Hilton’s arrival created a halo of cameramen so wide that several celebs got up to step away from it — and perhaps to gossip about what made Paris decide to wriggle out of her hidey-hole and come back to Fashion Week. Sports Illustrated model Julie Henderson tried to be as patient as possible while staffers struggled to find her a seat: They dragged her to one section, then another, then another, and she gamely smiled the whole time until being half-pulled in a fourth direction before being told to wait again. “This is … interesting,” she said diplomatically to a friend as everybody scrambled to fit the boldface names around Hilton’s surprisingly well-clad form. Seventeen’s Ann Shoket was plonked in the second row due to zero prime vacancies and seemed unimpressed by the general cluster-fiasco of it all, while Gina Gershon and actor James LeGros were shown to a front-row seat that they then had to vacate for Monet Mazur, who had previously been in a totally other seat. Gershon and LeGros (a buddy comedy we’d like to see in the making, by the way) were escorted over near Angela Simmons next, then evicted for the arrival of Kimora Lee and Russell and their offspring, and finally pulled across the venue and presumably placed somewhere comfortable and hopefully handed ten bucks for a postshow cocktail. Lord knows by then we all needed one.
Well, all except AnnaSophia Robb, who, aside from being underage, managed to stay composed (and keep her original seat) amid the furor of her first — and, to borrow Roden’s phraseology, devirginizing — Fashion Week. “I’m from Colorado, so this is such a different world,” she said. “I’m just happy to be welcomed here, learning everything I can.” Carrie Bradshaw 2.0 — or really, Carrie 0.5, since The Carrie Diaries is a prequel — said she is eager for her show’s January premiere date, despite very early reservations about the clothes. “At first I was like, ‘Oh, the eighties? Really?’” she said, wrinkling her nose. “But Eric Daman is doing the costuming and it’s fantastic, like a whole new mix of eighties and modern. I wore this great vintage dress in the pilot — I think they found it in the Warner Brothers archives, but it was basically falling apart as I was wearing it, and I could literally only wear it for short periods of time because it was falling apart on my body.” She sighed. “It’s gone now.” Maybe not — be on the lookout for that wormhole, kid. If we could spend an hour in ’07 with Paris Hilton, you could easily fall back into the eighties.