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○○○So '80s! A gallery of American Vogue covers that have fired up my imagination as a three-year-old kid growing up in the bombastic and recalcitrant mid-1980s
On slow, lazy afternoons, to amuse myself, the Sears Tower is the most dazzling cocktail dress. In draped silk charmeuse, worn by a model with legs as infinitely long as the Tower itself. That's how much I'm enamored with the world of fashion. In my fertile imagination, the burlesque trees are never less than immaculate and fantastically-clad, no matter the temperature or weather. Fashion for me is an ungovernable passion. But then again, I have a hunch you already noticed that. Further, I come from a fashion-oriented family for whom putting on "of the moment" clothes is the same as breathing. I grew up surrounded by women—my mother, a bevy of aunts, my pageant-worthy cousins—so, as a three-year-old who showed a genuine interest in fashion, I became the fashion police to the women in my family. I vividly remember being five and so voraciously engrossed with old issues of Vogue (I never knew, then, that those hideous eighties fashions would give me nightmares!) and Bazaar scattered around the house like blocks of legos. When one of my older cousins had her 18th-birthday coming-out party, I disapproved of her dress so adamantly, I forced her to change into a dress that I thought complimented her svelte figure. She dutifully obliged. She would thank me years later. (The dress she had planned on wearing was truly hideous: a tangerine chiffon debutante ball gown with an ill-fitting bodice replete with big, disastrous 1980's hair.) I still remember every cut and fold of that humongously ugly dress, twenty years hence! As I became older, my taste grew increasingly, shall I say, sophisticated? Sophisticated in the sense that I discovered the charmed yet decadent and androgynous world of Yves Saint Laurent. The only designer for whom my taste in clothes, women's and men's, continually take inspiration from; YSL is my fashion god. His clothes, so it seems, are proof that one can buy some class, after all! They evoke a world of shocking wealth, yet, at the same time, brilliantly exemplify the styles of the street and the working class. Those safari jackets! The fisherman's smock! The French butcher's uniform! He is the sole designer who has consistently altered the course of fashion around the world. Color is his domain; no other designer mixed teal, magenta, scarlet, cobalt-blue (all in a single outfit!) more theatrically, more whimsically, more correct than Monsieur Fantasy. I owe everything, fashion-wise, to the French haute couture and ready-to-wear icon.
Merci, Yves!
