COLUMNISTS Slowly but inexorably over the past few years, a certain type of woman has been dying.
The trend began in 2003 with the demise of CZ Guest, the socialite and celebrity gardener known for her platinum bob and cashmere twinsets. In 2005 came Nan Kempner, super-skinny, raspy-voiced fan of Yves Saint Laurent and author, most recently, of RSVP: Menus For Entertaining From People Who Really Know How. Last month it was the turn of Pat Buckley, the wife of conservative pundit William F. Buckley, who will be celebrated at a memorial at New York’s Costume Institute on Monday, and Kitty Carlisle Hart, widow of the playwright Moss Hart.
These women were otherwise known as the “ladies who lunch”, so named by Stephen Sondheim in his 1970 musical, Company. More simply, they were women married to very rich men, women whose work was primarily looking as though they didn’t work too much. This involved fundraising for charity (Kempner and Buckley helped raise $75m for the Manhattan cancer hospital Memorial Sloane Kettering), dressing the part and eating arugula together in the early afternoon. (Hart was also active in theatre.)
The breed doesn’t really exist anymore, however – not just because the women have been, literally, coming to the end of their lives but because they aren’t being replaced. It is no longer cool for wives of rich men to be seen to like play and no work – or to say, as Buckley once did, “women were born to be taken care of by men”. Today’s equivalent of Kempner et al do other things. They design jewellery lines, like Lauren Dupont; become magazine contributing editors, like Lauren Davis; or write books about style, like Brooke de Ocampo and Amanda Brooks. They strenuously do not lunch.
Some would see this as a good thing: the end of frivolity. I am not so sure. Because one of the things the ladies who lunch did was to act as archivists of a certain swathe of society. Put bluntly, they bought and wore and kept a lot of clothes. As a result, decades of how women saw themselves, and were seen, have been preserved. It’s no accident that Kempner’s wardrobe was recently the subject of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “My husband, Tommy, thinks it’s hysterical,” she said, “because he used to think [my clothes-buying] was an extravagance, and it now turns out that I was an art collector.” Buckley, meanwhile, was one of the great accumulators of Bill Blass, whose party frocks largely defined the American political ruling class of the 1980s,
Before anyone starts harrumphing about fashion not being art, let me simply say that in a conversation a while ago with the curator of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre, I was told that the museum, like the Met’s Costume Institute, sees its mission as exhibiting work that evokes the daily life of a historical period. So that’s where the clothes come in.
Kempner understood this, and meant for her wardrobe to go to just such an institution (or a few of them). But last Monday, as Kempner’s social heirs mounted the red-carpeted steps of the Met for the annual Costume Institute gala, it was hard not to think that many of the new guard – such as Lauren Davis in hot-off-the-runway Nina Ricci – probably hadn’t bought their own dresses.
As members of high society have become more like celebrities, it has become normal practice among many of the oft-photographed young things in Manhattan to simply “borrow” a dress for a party from a designer.
It’s good business. The designer benefits because the girl gets her picture taken and then the picture gets reproduced, along with “dress by” captions, everywhere from InStyle to Hello. The girl, meanwhile, doesn’t have to keep buying new dresses for when she has her picture taken (she has to look current and she can’t wear the same thing twice). She just wears the (usually very expensive) gown and gives it back; voila, no closet clutter!
Besides, at parties such as the Costume Institute’s, fashion brands often take a table and invite the women. Then there is a certain obligation to wear the host’s label and do some unofficial marketing. Sometimes the woman in question might not even want to wear the dress in question again.
All of which is fine, but I can’t help feeling something has been lost in the development, not least because it makes designers their own archivists. This produces different results compared with what happens when it’s the women who wear the clothes in real life who are collecting them. Such a situation was in stark relief during the millennial Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim, for example, which featured mostly clothes from the designer’s archives, with only limited donations. As a result, the show was majority red-carpet pieces and minority suiting – though it’s Armani’s deconstructed suits that changed fashion.
Now, perhaps, you could argue, this kind of sartorial behaviour is simply social evolution: that what it shows is a turning away from conspicuous consumption towards more charitable ways of spending the absurd amounts of money the hedge-fund bubble has created. Perhaps sometime in the future, when there is a big gap in the Noughties section of museum costume collections, there will be as powerful a lesson to draw from the empty vitrines as from the existing late-20th-century wardrobes of Buckley and her ilk. But they won’t be nearly as much fun – or as useful -– to see.
The ladies who lunched aren’t the only nonpareil fashion figures recently departed. Last week saw the death of another legend who was, perhaps, the last of her type. Isabella Blow was known for her penchant for both outrageous hats and outrageous statements. (I sat next to her at a fashion show a few years ago and, apropos of nothing, she turned her lobster-topped head to me and started telling me about a designer whose dresses were “fabulous for fucking”.) Though she was often seen as absurd, she was a star-spotter, championing Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy, and a fantastic promoter, acting as a living advertisement for many designers. The world was a stage and she was a character being costumed in it; she didn’t dress for work, she dressed for the play. It’s hard to imagine the increasingly globalised, corporatised show that is fashion being quite as much of a hit without her.
More columns at www.ft.com/friedman
