FASHION SENSE

Not to be interested in clothing is another way of being obsessed with clothing, because, ultimately, there’s no such thing as having no style. After the slapdash post-sixties faux-naturel of naturally torn jeans and rock-band T-shirts (here’s the novelist Howard Jacobson, this weekend in The Guardian: “I’ve never owned a T-shirt… . Things with words on! Can you imagine? On grown-ups! Words are to make books with”), I saw a friend from a similar family and a similar place wearing a light-blue Oxford button-down, and the experience was akin to growing up amidst carved stone pavilions and getting a first glimpse of Bauhaus. Having spelled, in my mind, the trends of the rag trade as “fascion,” I found the rarefied austerity—in effect, the timelessness—that I was looking for, without realizing until later that the lust for simplicity is itself a style.
 Every filmmaker’s personal bearing plays a role in their work. All directors are also actors, though, in many cases, ones who reserve their performances for cast and crew off-camera. What directors do isn’t just a matter of choosing the shots and guiding the actors; their main work is charismatic—creating a world from their personal influence, from the emanations of their presence, from which their sartorial style is inseparable. When I interviewed the filmmaker and primordial New Wave cohort Charles Bitsch a decade ago, I was surprised to hear his description of Jean-Luc Godard around the age of twenty:
 In relation to the others at Cahiers [du Cinéma], he had a little of a dandyish side, with his dark glasses, with his way of dressing… He was a little more “dressed,” in quotes, than we were. He wore a tie, a checked vest, dark gloves—not Saint-Laurent, but a certain class… You could say that, when you saw him, you knew he wasn’t just anybody, he was a character.
 Or a figure, an eminence. It made perfect sense, though, just as it made sense to learn that Howard Hawks was attached to his finery.
 The theoretical science or artistic extreme of the quest for style is high fashion, and this past Saturday, accompanying my older daughter, Juliette, to The Hole gallery on the Bowery for the show of the artful house of threeASFOUR (who I’ve mentioned here before, through the happy happenstance of a collegial connection), I was reminded once more of the imaginative power of radical clothing. The word of the day was “draping,” which, of course, means the way the clothing hangs, and which implies an intimacy with the fabric, a feel for the connection between the material and the body in motion.
 The word that came to mind along with it was “biomorphic”: the swirling forms, the asymmetrical cutouts and the swooping cuts, and the intertwining coils all seemed devised to give the inanimate dresses and tunics and slashed-open pants a life of their own. With the mirror-panelled wedges that all the models wore on their feet and other similar reflective panels that were sewn onto some of the garments, the underlying mood was one of science meeting nature in a mystical communion. It was a line for a time of blended promise and foreboding, of boundary-crossing and wondrous yet eerie interventions. Baudelaire wrote that