Here’s a New Yorker
that deserves not a review but a party. Among its many pleasures – Maira
Kalman’s color-drenched cover (“Spring Forward”), Laura Parker’s delightful
Talk story "Bee's Knees" (“She dunked the bee in a tiny bottle containing her
special blend of ‘bee shampoo’: a few drops of archival soap and deionized
water”), Lizzie Widdicombe’s superb "Barbie Boy" (“At ground level, herds of
strange footwear scurried around: silver Adidas sneakers with wings sprouting
from the ankles, fuzzy ones with tails and tiger stripes, high-tops with green
Teddy bears for tongues”), four excellent reviews (Peter Schjeldahl’s "Laughter and Anger," Dan Chiasson’s "The Tenderness Trap," Jill Lepore’s "After the Fact," and “James Wood’s "Floating Island") – the most piquant, for me, is
Judith Thurman’s brilliant "The Empire's New Clothes," a profile of China’s
first homegrown master couturier, Guo Pei. Thurman’s lines are as textured as
the clothes she describes:
Guo’s Paris début proved to be more of a dessert course than
an entrée. There were dresses for a thé
dansant, dainty and frosted, in a macaron palette. Sabrina might have worn
them. A chiffon poet’s blouse with embroidered cuffs was paired with the only
trousers on the runway. Tabards were a theme, gorgeously bejewelled, but they
seemed extraneous to the clothes they decorated, and one of them looked like a
lobster bib. The first number that Guo sent out, however, announced what she
can do when she pulls out all the stops. It was a strapless gown of distressed
guipure—with scorched edges, stiffened and gilded—that looked like a giant sea
sponge. Salt crystals glistened in its pores. It had the idiosyncratic “hand”
of a great artisan.
Normally, I’m allergic to displays of wealth. But Guo’s gown of distressed guipure is something else. A ravishing Pari Dukovic photo of it illustrates Thurman’s piece. I’m glad to have seen it.
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