Articles

Vogue Plays Fairy Godmother


A WEEK before the Costume Institute party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the actress Elizabeth Banks, needing a gown for the event, arrived at the offices of Vogue. Editors had assembled a rack of eight dresses, and Ms. Banks tried each one on, had it pinned around her slender frame and posed for a Polaroid camera.

A floral-print Oscar de la Renta was dismissed as too “bridesmaid.” A strapless Dior wasn’t significant enough for the gala evening, which is tomorrow, a highlight of the New York social and fashion calendar.

Eventually, Ms. Banks, who appears in “Scrubs” on NBC and in “Spider-Man 3,” narrowed it down to a trapeze dress by Vera Wang and a satin Prada.

Meredith Melling Burke, a Vogue editor, whisked the Polaroids of the two finalists in to show Anna Wintour then quickly returned from the editorial mountaintop: “She said you should pick whatever you feel great in.”

It may not have been the advice Ms. Banks was hoping for, but really, with gowns so beautiful and thematically appropriate (all of them had the dusky colors, feathers and relaxed silhouette that were hallmarks of Paul Poiret, the early-20th-century designer who is the subject of the Costume Institute exhibition that opens on Wednesday), Ms. Banks could not have blundered. That, in part, was why she had come to Vogue, said Ms. Melling Burke, the senior market editor. “She wanted to have a fashion moment.”

No other evening in New York offers the fashion moment of the Costume Institute gala, long known as “the party of the year” and now, in tribute to the clout of Ms. Wintour, Vogue’s editor in chief, as “Anna’s party.” The gala benefits from Ms. Wintour’s enormous influence over fashion and celebrity, raising $4.5 million last year for the museum. This year, with tickets at $6,500, even more is expected.

Ms. Wintour heads the event, along with Cate Blanchett and Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga. Besides encouraging the likes of Tiffany & Company, Chanel and Saks Fifth Avenue to buy tables from $65,000 to $150,000, and cajoling European designers and Hollywood actresses to fly in for the night, Ms. Wintour’s presence signals that guests are to dress to Vogue’s exacting standards.

To that end, the magazine staff helps about 10 high-profile women to chose their dresses, including this year Kate Bosworth, Zani Gugelmann and Byrdie Bell, the 22-year-old girl-about-town. In addition, editors play matchmaker to another 10 or so actresses, models and socialites, directing them to designers who have expressed a desire to dress a photogenic guest. This year they include Joely Richardson and the quirky, hip model Irina Lazareanu.

For the women, the designers and the magazine itself, the relationship is symbiotic. Guests are given or lent expensive dresses not yet in stores, while the designers receive publicity for a fraction of the cost of advertising. Photographs of the glamorously attired women appear widely, not least in Vogue (the magazine dedicated eight pages to the gala last year).

“Our goal is to have more fashion statements,” Ms. Melling Burke said. “We put a lot of effort into every aspect of it. We like to have the fashion up to par as well.”

Phillip Lim, the designer to whom Ms. Lazareanu was referred, said: “It’s an opportunity for us to present who embodies our clothes. It’s almost like having a live billboard or live campaign.” Mr. Lim chose a short tuxedo-jacket dress from his holiday collection for Ms. Lazareanu.

As the model’s fashion fairy godmother, Lauren Davis, a contributing Vogue editor, said she had sent Ms. Lazareanu to Mr. Lim (who is a Vogue favorite) because she “loves that masculine-feminine look, and I knew Phillip’s whole last collection was very much like that.”

On Tuesday, Ms. Davis, a chairwoman of the Friends of the Costume Institute (“a small and select group of people” who support the Met’s fashion collection, she explained by e-mail message) had her own fitting for the party. She planned to wear a made-to-order Nina Ricci gown, a gift to Ms. Davis from the fashion house. It is a show-stopping number featuring deconstructed tiers of gradating chartreuse silk. (Its retail value, according to Nina Ricci, is $27,900.)

After asking for a few Polaroids so she could show Ms. Wintour, Ms. Davis said she was busy helping Tatiana Santo Domingo, a niece of Ms. Davis’s fiancé, find a dress for the party. “I was talking with Billy Norwich about what she would wear,” she said, referring to William Norwich, Vogue’s society columnist. “We went through Style.com and then found out what was available and hadn’t been sold yet.”


Although Ms. Davis had secured a Christian Lacroix dress for Ms. Santo Domingo last Wednesday, she said they were going to visit other designer showrooms.

One thing that is settled for the evening is who will be doing Ms. Santo Domingo’s hair: John Barrett. Mr. Barrett, whose New York salon will see about 50 other partygoers before tomorrow night, said he had received referrals from Vogue editors in past years to style the hair of women such as Lady Gabriella Windsor and Daphne Guinness.

Certainly, the majority of women attending the benefit (700 guests are expected) will be dressed without any help from Vogue. Early last week, Anh Duong, a painter and former fashion model, had the final fitting for her Christian Lacroix haute couture dress at the Carlyle Hotel, while Jennifer Creel, a fixture on the charity-ball scene, had a second fitting in the tulle and jet beaded dress she ordered from Carolina Herrera’s fall 2007 collection.

“Dressing for the Met is a little more theatrical,” Ms. Creel said. “The whole evening is a celebration of fashion, and people do go more over the top. I always dress in what suits me, but obviously you want to stand out.”

To stand apart in a sea of beautiful gowns, a woman must first get her hands on the right one. But how to know which is the right one?

Ms. Melling Burke said that wearing a dress by the lead sponsor (this year it’s Balenciaga) “is always a feather in the cap of a girl.”

Plum Sykes, a novelist and a Vogue contributing editor, said “there probably is a hierarchy” of designers and gowns.

“But it’s not like the designers are sitting there holding a dress in hopes the right girl comes along,” Ms. Sykes added. “Most of your more fashionable women are going to be making their requests early.”

Lisa Airan, a well-dressed dermatologist, in February commissioned Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the designers of the hot fashion line Rodarte, to make her dress.

At a Tuesday afternoon fitting in the SoHo showroom of Thakoon Panichgul, the model Hana Soukupova asked politely about a dove-colored silk dress from the designer, which is featured in a Vogue spread this month on Poiret-inspired contemporary fashions. Too late! “Everyone’s been asking about that one,” Mr. Panichgul said.

The dress has been secured by Lauren DuPont, a New York social figure (and former Vogue-ette).

Sometimes one young woman’s castoff is another one’s treasure. After further deliberation at her afternoon fitting Monday, Ms. Banks, the actress, chose the Prada dress over the Vera Wang.

When Ms. Bell, the girl-about-town, arrived at Vogue on Tuesday, out of the half-dozen dresses set aside by Ms. Melling Burke, it was the Vera Wang that caught her eye. The next day the dress was delivered to the Vera Wang offices and Ms. Bell dropped by for alterations. She appraised herself in a mirror.

“I love this dress so much,” she said, excited about taking her first trip up the long staircase of the Met.

Drop it like it’s hot

When I was 14, my parents packed me and my sister off to the Lycée Molière, a high school in Brussels known more for its roster of aristocrats than its academics. Every spring the school held a formal dance, and for this my sister and I needed dresses.

We called our mother and a week later a package arrived. Inside were two frocks, each marked with our names. As my sister unwrapped hers, a flirty strapless bubble, I tore away the tissue to reveal mine –

a dropped-waist dress with a square lace collar. “This is a child’s dress,” I wept over the phone to my mother. “Please send me another.” She refused. At the party, my sister box-stepped away while I sat scowling on the sidelines. I vowed never to wear a dropped-waist again.

But recently I was at a black-tie ball with my husband when I saw Byrdie Bell, a young New York beauty, rounding a corner in – yes – a dropped-waist dress. In a sea of empire and belted gowns, she looked refreshingly at ease, casual yet glamorous.

“The dropped waist connotes a slouchy, carefree attitude,” explains designer Thakoon Panichgul, who has made dropped-waist dresses in a palate of fabrics.

Yes, but how, as an adult woman, to wear one? Bell is all of 22, and my body doesn’t bear any resemblance to its former 14-year-old self.

I go back to history to find out, specifically to Paul Poiret’s wife Denise, owner of numerous dropped-waist gowns. “Denise gave birth to five children, so her body changed quite a bit over the years,” points out Andrew Bolton, curator of the Poiret show. Still, he says, her particulars – small breasts, slim shoulders, hips on the wide side – were the exact opposite of mine. However, according to designer Angel Sanchez, height, not width, is the important factor when it comes to a dropped waist. “This should be worn by tall women. The proportions will only make shorter women look shorter.” Designer Behnaz Sarafpour suggests wearing the look with flat shoes.

The epiphany happens at the studio of Maggie Norris, who has a dropped-waist dress with silver embroidery. “Try it on,” she goads. It makes my torso look slimmer, my hips narrower. I look chic yet nonchalant. I could have danced all night.