We Are Fabulous
The Age
Saturday March 8, 2008
God's gifts to fashion are abroad in Melbourne, reports Janice Breen Burns.
We are the Frock People. We like a nice canape. Mumm or Moet champers; we're not fussed. Make it French. Or a fancy cocktail by your sponsoring alcoholic brand. Perfectly satisfactory. We don't mind a nice sponsor. We love a freebie. You can't discern this love, however, on account of our nonchalant, icy-cool persona. For instance, as champers and canape-bearing waiters cruise past. "Seared Tokyo tuna with hand-slivered ginger straws on wasabi cream with an eye of Ottawa sturgeon roe, madam?" "Oh, (gentle sigh) I suppose so."Another thing. We can dish a meticulous and critical review of every catering company contracted to any major "glamour" event in Melbourne. We flock to them all. We know by the door list who is catering this one. Who is breaking new ground with their canapes and cocktails. Who is faltering, cutting corners, piking out with the same little pie-lets and bun-lets. "No thank you. (As if!)" Our daily calorie and carbohydrate quota is simply too small and precious to squander on any old fad-let. Any old canape. "But you can send over more Moet, thanks." And, while we're on the subject; death is a Frock Person with a post-show cheap champagne headache. (You might want to jot that down.)On the lip of winter and the brink of spring, we swarm like wasps to Melbourne's Fashion Festival (as we did this week) and Spring Fashion Week. This is our natural habitat. Big, bolshie, frocky circuses with thousands of excited hoi polloi and mere hundreds of icy-cool us: Very Important (Frock) People. We like the ratio.We sit front row. We get freebies. Gift bags on our seat with skin creams, hair gels, pencils (pencils?), another-bloody-lipstick and what-all else we don't need. Nonchalant Frock People R Us, of course. We feign disinterest but slip out post-show, bag loosely looped through manicured fingers anyway. Score!We like to sit stoney-faced through your most frantic efforts to entertain us. It amuses us. Bring your 45 metre up-lit catwalk, your screens as big as drive-ins suspended along walls as wide and long as an aircraft hangar's. As you did this week. Your doof-doof bone-shaker back-beat and storm troops of glamazon models. Bring on your flashing crystal fringes of light-sucking "stalactites". Your giant, really-very-clever curved silver sculptured panels, strung to swivel curiously on the catwalk. Call hundreds of hours of tech meetings with Your People to discuss and fine-tune state-of-the-art everything but we Frock People will still sit through that resulting, crucial 25-odd catwalk minutes expressionless, like we're waiting for a bus.Mind you, ask us later in the right context "What did you think?" and that's different. That's when a theatrical, emotional response is useful gush-fodder. We'll wax liberally lyrical with many "fabulous!s" and "amazing!s" and stump you because you watched us on the front row and thought we didn't give a toss.We know stuff. This, when you come right down to it, is why we are the Frock People. We know instinctively, say, that girls won't touch that collection but women will and we know why: the colours, the cut, the fabrics' fleshy handle, the psycho-baggage one market brings to a rack of frocks that another market doesn't. We know that colour is two shades off "right" and this designer's fabrics are weighted several grams too lightly for the drapery techniques in her collection to work their visual and tactile magic. We know about subtle puckering and misplaced darts and internal structure and nice finishes and crappy finishes and all about the price/quality dichotomy here, and in markets rooted in centuries-old fashion and tailoring and knitwear traditions. We know that this designer is lagging dangerously behind the Zeitgeist but this one is two strong strokes ahead of it - and it makes us FIZZ with excitement.We know why models don't smile, dammit. And we scream inside every time another bleeding heart whines: "But, why don't they smile? What's wrong with looking a bit happy, eh?" Well, you try stomping down a 45-metre catwalk and back again, Buster, with 1400 punters' eyes on your every trembling move without losing your micro knicker-flasher slip frock, or falling off your brick-high platforms, and without your sunny whatsit hardening to a nasty cast of concrete. Go on. A corpse-like composure is simply more doable. Only supermodels smile because they're PEOPLE (Frock People, technically) not glorified clothes hangers. That's the law.And finally. We are very social, we Frock People. With each other. For lesser mortals, we reserve the concrete corpse-like expression of a catwalk model (see above) but for each other we reserve gushes and kisses. We are very demonstrative. We have a code. It's complicated but here are the basics, FYI: first meeting, no kisses; second meeting, two - left, right - kissed cheeks; subsequent meetings, carte blanche but one kissed cheek is intimate, two kissed cheeks is a centuries old formality. Hugs - la greeting du jour - should be rationed and accepted carefully. They can trigger a jolt of pleasure for their rare and genuine intimacy, or an iffy-icky moment to ponder later.N.B.: On Sunday The Frock People will return with a certain relief to the neglected homes, husbands, wives, girl and boyfriends, dogs and drastic detox diets as the last light winks off the Melbourne Fashion Festival's Independent Runway show at Central Pier, Docklands.LINKS? Imf.com.au
© 2008 The Age