A Samurai in Paris: Suzy Menkes
From The New Yorker
March 17, 2001
By John Seabrook
It was just before noon on a chilly January day in Paris when Suzy Menkes, the International Herald Tribune's influential fashion editor, bustled into the newspaper's headquarters, in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. The evening before, Menkes had filed the last of three stories on the weeklong spring/summer couture shows--stories composed in virtuoso displays of deadline brinkmanship, begun on her laptop in a front-row seat beside the catwalk, finished in the back of a cab, as she and a photographer crept through the Paris traffic, and then transmitted from the cab to the Tribune using a wireless modem, in time to appear on the streets of Tokyo and Hong Kong four hours later......
Last year, Menkes produced about two hundred and ninety thousand words for the paper. She is only the Tribune's third fashion editor in forty years, and, carrying on the tradition of her predecessors, Eugenia Sheppard and Hebe Dorsey, she offers Trib readers verbal snapshots from the world of fashion, written in a staccato and tough-talking journalese--she's a Fleet Street Diana Vreeland. There are vivid descriptions of the clothes ("a masculine pants suit in a carapace of whiskey brown pearl buttons") and piquant judgments of their effect ("If you want a pick-me-up fashion cocktail of color in a tutti-frutti print, gaudy suede Puss-in-Boots and look-at-me accessories, this show was caricatural Versace"), and the occasional devastating put-down (as when Menkes wrote, of last spring's Jil Sander show, that the below-the-knee dresses "looked like something a woman who had lost her waist would choose from a mail-order catalogue"). Her byline is closely read both by fashion insiders--Domenico De Sole, the president of the Gucci Group, says that during the collections the workday always begins with "Did you see Suzy?"--and by the general public. Menkes gives you not just the clothes but the pounding music, the celebrities and society ladies in the front row, the breasts swaying on the runway, and the gleaming bare torso of John Galliano, the Dior designer, as, "dressed for the trapeze," he wriggles and prances down the catwalk at the end of his show.......
Menkes appreciates the humor in a prim and bookish-seeming British woman, whose personal tastes run to a quiet evening at the ballet or the opera, continually finding herself in the midst of "louche" (a favorite word) backstage gatherings of celebrities, half-naked models, and assorted fashion zanies, and unable to resist the revelry. "Like a slightly mad auntie, she is," the model Kate Moss says of Menkes. "Some of these fashion people can be a bit, you know"--she turned her head to one side and looked down her nose--"funny. But Suzy's never like that. When you see her backstage, you can always just have a nice chat about shoes with her." ........
For some designers, Menkes functions as a proud but demanding mother--one who wants you to succeed, and takes it personally when you let her down. Alber Elbaz, the head designer for Lanvin, says, "When I am designing an invitation for a fashion show, I will write Suzy's name on the trial proof. If her name looks good on it, I know I can send it." The night after the show, he has trouble sleeping, waiting for her review, which he will read at 6 a.m. "When we designers do a good collection, Suzy is so happy for us, and when we do a bad one she seems almost to get angry." Several years ago, Menkes wrote that the classic Chanel bag was over, and Chanel took out a full-page ad in the Trib to rebut her. Oscar de la Renta said, "I have gotten as mad at what she has written as anyone, and while I sometimes feel that she is off in her judgments of my collections, and she hurts my feelings--very deeply--in the end I must concede that her knowledge is vast." He added, "She doesn't base her reviews on what she likes--a lot of critics can't divorce themselves from their own taste." .....
We saw a few good shows, like the Dior presentation put on by Hedi Slimane, who Menkes feels is the "buzziest" young designer of the moment. Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH (MoÎt Hennessy Louis Vuitton), which owns Dior, embraced Menkes before the show, and the two chatted amicably. After Menkes's review of John Galliano's women's ready-to-wear collection for Dior in 2001, in which she wrote, "Isn't there enough aggression in the world without models snarling at the audience?" LVMH banned her from all its shows. (The ban had been lifted by the end of the week.) When I asked Suzy about Arnault's apparent change of heart, she reminded me that "this is fashion--people like to make dramas out of things." .....
its so hard to look at both sides... im so glad im not her
