Genart Hosts the Nice Fashion Collective

My life consists, right now, in raising children, writing, and wiping up our new yellow lab puppy’s pee. And have I mentioned child rearing? Whole weeks go by when I wear my yoga clothes until my husband sniffs at me and orders me, firmly but gently, to take a shower. So it was with vast, oceanic pleasure I found myself invited to the GENART Nice Fashion Collective Show.

On arrival, we were whisked through the line of plebes into the special portal for those invited by GENART. We were given seating tickets and then ushered through a red carpet where photographers snapped pix. I was really glad to have pulled the spinach from my teeth and shaved my legs. Actually I was wearing a black skirt, suede boots with 4″ heels, and the Spanx hose that make my tummy look as if I haven’t had 3 children. I’d also taken care with my make-up. I’m humbly hopeful that I didn’t look as old as Methusaleh, who seems like a youngster to me on all those mornings where I’ve been up once, twice, or thirty times during the dusky hours of night. If my 4 year old isn’t having a bad dream and needing cuddles, or the puppy doesn’t need to pee, or my 18 year old isn’t returning from a night of debauchery at 3:00 am, then I wake up to see why not.

There was free alcohol and lots of it, and swarms of people with strangely lacquered hair and high contrast eye-liner. My husband sniffed and claimed everyone looked like art students from an art college. There were goody bags on our chairs filled with eye cream and tequila, and naturally the tequila prompted the notion of a strip-tease. I reined myself in and instead hollered risque things at a man in an aviator hat who was climbing the rafters. I think he was supposed to be performance art. I mentioned this supposition to my husband, who snarled, because he was checking out Aviator Man’s biceps and feeling jealous. Maybe I shouldn’t have been screaming, “Take it all off, nakedness is more artsy” ?

“Yes,” my husband the Renaissance sculptor spat from between clenched teeth, “this is the difference between artsy and art.”

But who cares, it was fun!

Then the clothes: Dickensian pickpocket chic with a twist of Afghani rebel and urban ghetto ‘tude. There was lots of smeared gray eye shadow, matted hair, and angry ‘do rags. A couple of models sauntered through with their faces covered, so I called, “Robbed any banks lately?” It made my husband snicker.

But I did like the monochromatic vesty, bowler hat Oliver Twist look; it seemed to fit the gray economic times. Brought up images of dark bleak London filled with coal smoke. I wasn’t quite as thrilled with the union suit look and I was pretty sure one of the models was stuffing his codpiece. If not, I feel sorry for his boyfriend. Nor did I love the shiny white scuba pants on the female model, but they could have been white leather, hard to tell. Either way, they’d be hard to wear if you weigh more than 85 pounds and have the body not of an adolescent boy, but of a woman with curving hips and an indented waist.

All in all, an enjoyable evening, a break from the usual fare. There was still plenty of kid & puppy stuff waiting for me at home.