March 29, 2010 Issue

Who is The New Yorker’s best fashion writer? I think it’s still Judith Thurman, but Lauren Collins is coming up fast on the inside. Take her “Check Mate” (September 14, 2009), for example. Dig that “tufting scarps of millstone grit” in her opening paragraph. My test for inspired fashion writing is simple; it’s the same one James Wood uses when he’s fondling narrative detail: palpability. Here’s Collins’s description of a Burberry tote bag: “It was made of yellow leather, pale as sorbet, and its surface had been shaved, or chiffonaded, so that it appeared to be covered in thousands of eyelashes.” Now I ask you, is that not one of the loveliest, most palpable things you’ve ever read? Alas, Collins is not in this week’s “The Style Issue.” Thurman is. Her “Face It” didn’t do much for me. The best thing about it is the red-pink-orange Laurie Rosenwald illustration. That and Thurman’s magnificent subjectivity. Her “I” is never very far away from her subject, and I love that. In “Face It,” she takes us with her into an aircraft lavatory and lets us watch her put cream on her face. Not just any cream; its “Boot’s No. 7 Protect & Perfect Intense Beauty Serum,” don’t you know. Thurman gets a smile from me when she says, “I started to protect and perfect myself in the plane’s lavatory, despite a long-standing personal security procedure – I never look in the mirror by that merciless light.” Okay, that’s funny, but it doesn’t pass the test. Where’s the palpability? There’s a smidgin of it in Rebecca Mead’s flyweight “The Prince of Solomeo,” a profile of Brunello Cuicinelli, a sweater maker who lives in a cashmere cocoon of unreality on a mountain top in Umbria. Here’s the smidgin: “In cream-colored velvety corduroy pants and an oatmeal-colored cashmere sweater, he had the plush and contented aspect of a pampered cat.” I confess I could not relate to this pampered puss in the least. Consequently, I only skimmed the rest of the article. Call it palpability; call it tactility; whatever, I’m still in search of it and the magazine this week is damn short of it – which for a so-called “style issue” is surprising, nay, shocking! Let’s look in Alexandra Jacob’s “Fashion Democracy,” shall we? Nope, not there, either, unless you count her marvelous parenthetical “At barneys.com, one must navigate the Clipper around a cone-headed mannequin.” I really like that, but it’s more surreal than it’s palpable, and right now for me it’s either palpable or it’s nothing. Might Patricia Marx’s “Four Eyes,” have what I’m looking for? It contains lots of great eyeglass descriptions, that’s for sure. Consider this beauty: “Some of the riches include sunglasses with taxicab-yellow visors over the lenses; aqua butterfly frames with rhinestones your bubbe might have worn in Miami; folding silver wire rims from the twenties; and a pair of circular specs from the eighteen hundreds whose temples end in loops so that the wearer can pin them to his wig.” But let’s face it: if you’re looking for descriptive texture (and we are, we are), glasses are not where it’s at. For sheer palpability, fabric description is unbeatable. And no one writes fabric better than Judith Thurman. Here’s a sample from her great 2005 Chanel piece, “Scenes From A Marriage”: “the ivory cocktail suit of spun-sugar bouclé, with a dissolving hem; the romantically tiered evening dress of black tulle, with a trompe l’oeil cummerbund of silver threadwork and rhinestones.” I don’t know about you, but I find that “spun-sugar bouclé” in combination with the “dissolving hem” pretty damn ravishing. And I don’t even know what bouclé is. Forget palpability; edibility is the real test.