8.4/The Lived Worlds/Fashion and Material Culture

Heroin Chic, the Luxury Return, and the Office Siren, 1996–2001

The Wasted Look

The same pages, in these years, were selling a version of the body the obituary desk was declining to name. A model who ate normally, slept enough, and used no drugs could still be paid, by the middle of the 1990s, to look on a magazine page as though she had done neither for months. The fashion press had settled on a specific grammar for the effect: pallor under flat gray light, the visible clavicle, a hollow left under the eye rather than concealed under it, hair that read as unwashed, a bathroom or a rented flat standing in for a location scout’s more expensive choices. The look acquired a name that borrowed from a drug most of the people producing it were not using to produce it, and the borrowing was the point — the picture wanted to look like evidence of something rather than like styling.³ Another piece in this part follows the photographers who built the grammar and the death that ended its run as a serious style.

The look had a second reading, as a class signal: the emaciated body photographed as if starving was the performance of a poverty its wearers and its audience were both too secure to experience, a downtown cousin to the recession minimalism the same decade had already made fashionable further uptown.⁴ What that second reading left outside the frame was the audience doing the reading — the fashion floors of the magazines running the pictures, staffed in 1996 by people for whom a wasted body, a flat gray light, and a young person disappearing were not, first, a photographic style.

The grammar crossed the Atlantic inside the same year it was invented, reproduced in the American glossies whose fashion desks had spent the preceding decade watching an epidemic hollow out exactly the kind of body the pictures now simulated for a fee. A British editor running the images in 1993 was working from one set of associations, formed by a national epidemic that had followed its own separate calendar and its own separate press coverage. An American fashion editor reproducing the same grammar on assignment eighteen months later, on a floor that had buried colleagues to the disease the pictures gestured toward without naming it, was working from another. Neither association made it into a caption; captions in these years described lighting and credited a photographer, and did neither more nor less than that.

The Department’s Own Losses

The fashion trade’s exposure to the epidemic was not evenly spread across the magazine business; it concentrated in one department the way the epidemic itself concentrated in one professional class. A national newsmagazine that took up the subject directly in 1990 pointed to the reason without needing to argue it at length: the industry ran, at every level from top designer to hairdresser to the assistant steaming a rack of samples, on the labor of gay men, and a magazine’s fashion desk sat closer to that labor market than its politics desk, its books desk, or its foreign desk ever would.⁷ A magazine’s fashion pages in 1989 sat inside a trade already short several names. Perry Ellis, president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and the most visible American sportswear designer of the 1980s, had died in May 1986, officially of viral encephalitis, at 46.¹ Antonio Lopez, whose fashion illustration had run for two decades in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Interview, died the following March at 44; the Times’s own headline called him simply “major fashion illustrator,” the customary phrase for a career the notice did not otherwise explain.⁸ Willi Smith, whose sportswear label grossed over twenty-five million dollars a year and who was, at his death, the most commercially successful Black American designer working, died in April 1987 at 39, days after an autopsy following a buying trip to India found him HIV-positive.⁹ Work of exactly this kind — sportswear photographed on assignment, illustration commissioned by the page, a designer’s collection reviewed in the well — had filled the fashion sections of the prestige monthlies for two decades before any of the three died.

The losses did not stop at the decade’s opening; they continued through it at a rate a fashion desk could track by chair. Halston, the name most associated with American fashion in the 1970s, died in March 1990 at 57.¹⁰ Patrick Kelly, the Mississippi-born, Paris-based designer whose buttons-and-humor collections had made him the first American admitted to the French prêt-à-porter’s governing body, died in Paris on New Year’s Day the same year, at 35.¹¹ Tina Chow — model, restaurateur, jewelry designer, a fixture of magazine society pages through the 1970s and 1980s — died in January 1992 at 41; her case, reported at length because she had contracted the virus heterosexually, complicated a public narrative that had assumed the industry’s losses ran along a single line of transmission.¹² Franco Moschino, the Italian designer whose satirical house had become a fixture of the American trade press by the early 1990s, died in September 1994 at 44, officially of cardiac arrest following surgery, understood in the business as AIDS-related.² Below the level of the byline — the photographers’ assistants, the fitting models, the illustrators who never signed their work — the named deaths were the visible fraction of a larger, uncounted one.

What ran in the magazines instead tended toward profile and retrospective rather than pattern. The accumulating loss registered issue by issue, death by death, and seldom added up in print into the single larger fact it was; a front row with an empty chair and a name card left standing was a thing the editors filing into the next row over could read without a caption, and without an assignment following from the reading.

The contraction reached past the masthead into the mechanics of the pages themselves. A magazine’s photography budget by the late 1990s bought less than the same budget had bought in the middle of the decade, a shrinkage the trade generally attributed to rising studio and location costs and to the earliest digital-production tooling — real causes, and not the whole of the cause. Part of the arithmetic was simpler: the freelance photographers, stylists, and illustrators available to bid for a magazine’s work in 1999 were a thinner pool than the same rosters would have been in 1989, the difference made up of people who were no longer alive to take the assignment.

The general press did, on occasion, say plainly what the fashion trade circled. The same newsmagazine feature ran two weeks after Halston’s death, naming AIDS directly as the reason a decade’s worth of American design talent had gone missing and framing the industry’s toll as news rather than as an obituary column’s private accumulation.⁷ The piece was the exception that proved the rule: fashion coverage itself, closer to the subject and more implicated in it, kept running the individual obituaries while declining, issue after issue, to add them up in the same place.

Money Recovers Its Nerve

Fashion writers of the early 1990s explained the industry’s turn toward austerity — pared silhouettes, no visible logo, a palette that declined to announce itself — as a response to recession discipline and to a street style the runways had chosen to imitate rather than lead. The account left out a fact anchored in the same years: the run of minimalism, roughly 1990 through 1995, was also the run in which the fashion department’s own losses came heaviest, and a wardrobe built to go unseen sat easily beside a business quietly grieving.⁴ The turn away from that wardrobe had a specific date and a specific name: Tom Ford’s Fall 1995 women’s show for Gucci in Milan — jewel-toned satin and bare sternums proposed against five years of restraint.¹⁴

By September 1996 the reversal had a face outside the trade press. At the MTV Video Music Awards, the actress Gwyneth Paltrow wore a fitted red velvet Ford-for-Gucci suit from the house’s Fall 1996 collection — a look photographed, reprinted, and referenced by Gucci’s own runway decades later.¹⁵ The picture did work an essay might have taken a thousand words to argue: money, after five years of pretending otherwise, was permissible to want out loud again.

The reversal in the clothes tracked a reversal already underway in figures the fashion pages did not print. New York City recorded roughly seven thousand AIDS deaths a year through 1994 and 1995; in 1996, as the new antiretroviral combinations reached patients who could get them, the city’s health department counted about five thousand — a decline of nearly thirty percent in a single year.¹⁶ The fashion pages did not run that number beside the season’s runway coverage, and no editor would have proposed that they should; the two facts belonged, that year, to different parts of the same industry’s reporting, one printed and the other not.

For a department that had spent five years in a palette read, in part, as its own kind of mourning, the return to color and shine was not a simple relief. The rate of loss was easing; it had not stopped. A fashion desk photographing a season of red velvet and unbuttoned satin in the fall of 1996 was doing so while still filing the occasional memorial notice, at a slower pace than 1993 but not at none, and the two facts — the loosening of the wardrobe, the still-loosening but unfinished epidemic — belonged, for the people living through both, to the same year rather than to two different stories.

The New Uniform

The look that closed the decade had shed the austerity of 1991 as completely as it had shed the wasted pallor of 1993. High-shine fabrics — satin, a patent or vinyl sheen where the early decade had specified matte, silk cut close rather than draped loose — dressed a body meant to read as competent and available to be looked at in the same glance, an editorial silhouette aimed, in its most legible form, at young women moving up through corporate and editorial floors rather than at the runway’s usual older, wealthier audience. Low-waisted trousers, cargo pants borrowed downward from utility wear, and a pashmina thrown over office clothes for the walk between buildings filled out the same closet at street level; assembled from a fraction of the pieces the runway had shown, the look carried the same intent on an assistant’s salary that it carried on an editor’s.

Reading the three columns in sequence side by side made a case none of the individual seasons had been built to make on its own: that a floor’s wardrobe had spent eight years in retreat from being seen — first as discipline, then as staged ruin — before it agreed, all at once, to be seen again.

The contradiction built into the late-decade look was itself the substance of it. A silhouette cut to be looked at and a silhouette cut to be taken seriously had, by the last years of the 1990s, become the same silhouette, worn by the same young women moving through the same corporate and editorial floors — the two readings running at once rather than in the sequence an earlier era’s dress code would have insisted on keeping separate. An assistant editor dressed for a Monday morning meeting and dressed for a Thursday-night opening no longer required two different closets, and the collapse of that distinction was, on the floor, understood as progress rather than as a problem to be solved.

The dot-com money reaching young people in these last years of the decade bought into the new register faster than the trade could track, putting current luxury on bodies whose income was a year old — a mismatch a senior editor of 1990, dressed to go unseen, could not have priced as a status object at all. What did not change through the closing years was the industry’s own continuing thinness at the level the reader never saw: clients, illustrators, and fitting models kept leaving the pages the same way the designers had, unnamed in the magazines that ran their work.