Interview

Twenty girls without deformity or blemish in any part of their body . . . The Vestals wore a white robe . . . and, on their heads, fillets ornamented with ribbons. Metamorphoses, Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 A.D.

Worlds collided when New York Fashion Week bumped up against the Academy Awards this year. Blame it on the first lady, but several big names on Oscar night dressed primly in white, like Vestal virgins, at the Kodak Theatre: Miley Cyrus, Anne Hathaway, Sarah Jessica Parker (ample cleavage cinched in virginally), Taraji P. Henson, Penélope Cruz, and Marisa Tomei. As the anything but prim Girlina (now DJ Lina) used to say to my Fashion Week buddy Mickey Boardman, “Honey, she has no la-la up in her swirl!” (No fun at parties.) This reporter also noticed a Vestal chorus of bleachy-blondes in Fashion Week’s front row this season. (Who are they kidding?) In the face of a trend of such terrible, Moby-like whiteness, I have adopted Girlina’s colorful dialect (Girlingo) to discuss society’s latest developments.

Vanity Fair Oscar party (move cursor over images to read captions)

February 22, 2009, at 10:18 a.m., on crimson carpet at the Kodak Theatre, Tim Gunn practice-interviewed a middle-aged bouffant with a sign around her neck that read Anne Hathaway. At 10:48 a.m., fat fans donned red T-shirts that read Bleacher Creatures, or BCs. As Girlina used to say in Girlingo, “Not the Jordache look!” Or NJL (meaning, not fab). The BCs then clapped on command, yelling, “We love you, Ryan,” as Monsieur Seacrest speed-walked the red plush. At 1:09 p.m., helmet-headed Vestal wannabe Mary Hart did a setup shot with a life-size Oscar while wearing a crumpled-up Christmas tree of a dress from Mon Atelier that blended with surrounding topiary—very NJL. You couldn’t tell where the boxwood stoppedand Hart began.

The Oscar arrivals moved like molasses, so let’s rewind to the zippier runways of New York. Of all the BCs at Fashion Week, Lauren Santo Domingo could be the tallest and thinnest. “They tell me I’m the first girl in New York to have chrome nails,” she said of her bumper-shiny metallic talons in an elevator after the Phi show in the Meatpacking District. In row three at Phi, I was surrounded by bleached BCs, a flaxen field of Vestal-processed blondes, platinum, and blown-out. On the runway, models were zipped into black leather Avengers leggings, projecting a medieval-modern feel, with fur shoulders and arm-long leather gloves.