Did you know that Apparel is now a leading New Zealand export, just short of wine. In the year to this June, total apparel exports were $302 million, up 7.5 per cent in a year (compared with the 2 per cent the country's exports grew overall).

Check out the live streaming of Fashion Week at their website www.nzfashionweek.com

Image: Turkish architecture meets green pixie land in Mild Red at Fashion Week 2004

Luvvies, it's that Fashion Week time again

Runway 2004Did you know that Apparel is now a leading New Zealand export, just short of wine. In the year to this June, total apparel exports were $302 million, up 7.5 per cent in a year (compared with the 2 per cent the country's exports grew overall).

Check out the live streaming of Fashion Week at their website www.nzfashionweek.com

Image: Turkish architecture meets green pixie land in Mild Red at Fashion Week 2004

Luvvies, it's that Fashion Week time again

Runway 2004Designers, Models, Socialites and Two Little Dogs, Too

The New York Times

GUY TREBAY
Published: September 9, 2004

To say that Fashion Week is by its nature surreal may be, one admits, a big "no duh." But periodically it bears repeating. While there are undoubtedly some unusual things going on at the average Renaissance Weekend or World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, it seems safe to assume that little occurs at those Big Thoughts gatherings that is half as nutty as a typical day in this city when the style flock alights.

A day during Fashion Week might begin with, say, the Tamsen show, held on a 150-foot yacht berthed by a pier in the Hudson River on which models disported themselves in print jersey dresses designed by a multimillionaire who drew her inspiration from another multimillionaire, this one a beauty who married into the Getty family, became a heroin addict, died and bequeathed her doomy bohemian style to fashion posterity.

And it might continue at the opening of a Pucci store on Fifth Avenue, a mirrored jewel box dedicated to selling designs inspired by the whimsical archive of a Florentine aristocrat who flew fighter planes for the wrong side in World War II; more or less invented print logo dressing; and designed clothes for Barbie and Jackie Onassis, as well as the plastic bubble helmets once worn by stewardesses (they were called that then) on Braniff Airlines and a flag that the Apollo 15 astronauts took to the moon.

And it could easily continue to a late-night party held in a onetime carriage-trade department store in Chelsea, now transformed into the MAO runway space, where a buxom stripper called Bob perched in an enormous plastic Champagne coupe blowing kisses to a crowd of downtown types, who yawned as they awaited the main attraction, the diet-products spokeswoman and reality TV disaster Anna Nicole Smith.

It was at the Pucci party, on Tuesday night, that this reporter encountered Paola Isabella Rocha Tornito, a beauty of mixed Puerto Rican and Philippine ancestry and of a certain age, whose business card (which she was liberal in dispensing) gives her e-mail address as Socialitelady@hotmail.com.

That Mrs. Tornito was wearing a dress from Pucci was not surprising. So were many of her fellow guests. But, unlike those of Beth Rudin DeWoody or Debbie Bancroft or Muffie Potter Aston or Valesca Guerrand-Hermes, Mrs. Tornito's Pucci dress came with a history lesson that, while charmingly garbled, was anything but off the rack. Mrs. Tornito's dress, which she had a tailor make, was actually an amalgam of several Pucci dresses, cut and refashioned into a facsimile of the so-called butterfly dresses favored by Imelda Marcos. "The traditional dress is made of pineapple or banana fiber and then the stiffened sleeves are heavily embroidered, but that's not very high fashion," said Mrs. Tornito, who has similarly had Emanuel Ungaro and Roberto Cavalli dresses repurposed. "We call it the butterfly dress," she added, "because after independence from the United States in 1947, Filipino women could really fly."

Unlike the wives of deposed dictators and fellow wearers of frocks with butterfly sleeves, Anna Nicole Smith is an earthbound type. Rather than fly to New York to inaugurate the MAO public relations company's space on West 18th Street and to celebrate her appearance as Marilyn Monroe in the latest edition of the MAO Fashion Week magazine, Ms. Smith came from Los Angeles in the TrimSpa bus.

"She just decided at the last minute that she didn't want to fly," explained Mauricio Padilha, who owns MAO with his brother, Roger. "So she came with her entourage," Mr. Padilha said. The gang on the bus was a mixed one that included Ms. Smith's son, her hairstylist, her makeup artist, her dresser, her lawyer and her two dogs, Marilyn and Sweetie Pie.

Ms. Smith was scheduled to appear about 10. Being a woman well versed in the ways of empty celebrity, her arrival was considerably delayed. This gave a reporter time to ponder the contrast between the TrimSpa spokeswoman and what Emilio Pucci's daughter, Laudomia, described as her father's feminine ideal. "For my father," Ms. Pucci explained, "a woman had to be feminine, elegant, graceful without being boring, not too doll-y and very sporty. Basically, he adored people who had chic and an exciting life."

And the time lag also gave a reporter space to canvass a room packed with fashionable young women in full-skirted party dresses and sideshow tattoos and androgynous young men dressed like hip lesbians and to consider how wondrous and durably odd fashion can be.

"I designed it myself," said Alexander Wang, a young man who had recently dropped out of Parsons School of Design to design a line of cashmere hoodies like the one he was wearing with his Yohji Yamamoto sneakers and shredded vintage Levi's cutoffs.

On the back of the sweater was the image of the model Angela Lindvall. Why Angela Lindvall, Mr. Wang was asked. "I love her," the young designer said. "She's fantastic, she's an icon and she's done so much for fashion," he added. Now you know.