The Hamster Ball

Yesterday evening, having gazed upon the latest offerings of the sartorial art in Milan, I watched the new season premiere of America's Next Top Model, having been forewarned by a certain blog (namely Jezebel) that it would be tremendously stupid.

So it was and yet not repellently so. This time the group of obligatorily shrieking girls who were anointed unto the "Top 13" were told at first by the cryptic medium of a blank piece of paper in an envelope that they were unanointed, so that their shrieks were muted into sobs amid the shrieking of, presumably, actresses, who it was pretended were the successful contestants. Tyra Banks magnanimously explained to the pseudo-rejected girls, as they meditated the ignoble heap of their suitcases in the staircase, that they were through after all, and that she had only been trying to give them the experience of rejection. Why she would consider that the girls had not encountered rejection yet, particularly those who had already worked as models, remained unexplained; so it must be surmised that this little trick was designed for the benefit of the television viewer. Anyway, she pulled away a curtain to reveal their home — perhaps due to the vagaries of the camera lens the atrium looked roughly the size of a high school gymnasium — and with piercing cries they revelled in their material surroundings.

The perennial circus of the contestant interviews was not broadcast this time, but Tyra exercised her actorly predilections by imitating three common contestant types. I consider it a little unprofessional to make fun of young people half your age who are guests on your television show, as it were, but the second impersonation was good.

The next morning, at least in terms of artistic compression, the girls were hailed out onto the lawn where they met Erin Wasson. Her status as supermodel and stylist and jewellery designer was elucidated; and I could have sworn that she also had a fashion line which showed during New York Fashion Week and which was discontinued due to fiscal pressures — this, at any rate, was not mentioned.

Erin and the fashion shoot director Jay Manuel announced a runway fashion show in one of Alexander Wang's lines and Erin Wasson's jewellery. So far, so good, I suppose. As a clincher, however, the models were to walk on a 12-inch-wide transparent strip jutting into a pond and they had to walk inside a plastic bubble where bits of reddish material would drift along the bottom like confetti in a hamster wheel. Why self-respecting designers would participate in a runway show set up to be more or less impossible, humiliating for the contestants, and too fussy or weirdly arranged to permit a good view of the fashion which the models are supposed to be modelling, remains another unanswered question. In the event two or three of the contestants fell, could have hit their heads on the edge of the runway and been knocked unconscious (a litigator's dream) but fortunately didn't, and had to crawl inside the sphere until it bobbed back to the runway where their feet could gain purchase. Idiocy, I say!

Behind the scenes the photographer Russell James staged what is called "beauty" photos at Style.com. I think it is a public relations invention intended to humanize the models and by extension the fashion industry, and to counter the nasty insinuations of cruelty (invented as it were by the rational people amongst us who don't think that fashion transcends the human right to comfort and dignity) against the latter. Models obligingly pose with a sandwich, a respectable book (no Harry Potter, though I guess that would be endearing), curling-irons, make-up brushes, mirrors and each other, and smile with the serenity which inevitably accompanies 12-hour-workdays, painful high heels, hair extensions which it will take hours to remove, and other stresses perfectly natural for people who are deracinated from their homes and not yet old enough to graduate from school.

Based on these backstage photos or on the desired narrative of the show's producers, the girl named Angelia was sent home. I was pleasantly surprised that some of the contestants did look like they could be models. This also means being as slender as possible; to the fashionable mind I don't think that models are ever too slender for the runway and only perhaps for print work it might be awkward to have the lateral dimensions of a piece of paper.

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Last cycle was the first "high fashion cycle," where presumably by grace of André Leon Talley — a friendly giant of sorts — designers from Diane von Furstenberg (who was really impressive and a revisitation of the 1940s and 1930s, European-accented American high society) to Zac Posen were hooked into appearing. Karolina Kurkova made a slurried drink of healthy, healthy fruits and vegetables, which though it ended up tinted a respectable blueberryish lilac was greeted with muted enthusiasm, and evidently inspired less enjoyment than the batch of deep-fried Oreos with which the contestants were likewise regaled by one of their number.

Franca Sozzani made an appearance too as the editor of Italian Vogue; I think I would like her, but I do find it a bit tiresome how she is part of the handful of fashion industry members (also like Emmanuelle Alt, Carine Roitfeld and children, etc.) which is always photographed everywhere. Then there was a painful non-conversation between a model raised in rural America who was unable to decipher Gallic-accented English and the photographer Patrick Demarchelier, both bored and on edge. As high fashion television I thought the season was a bit of a bust, though a painful degree of ambition and kowtowing permeated it, which doubtless resonated with the target audience of 13-28-year-olds who are enduring or still able to recollect the vicissitudes of attracting the favours of the fashionable clique in their schools.

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Lastly and somewhat unrelatedly, I've been keeping track of the fashion weeks in New York and London. New York's week was so excessively tasteful and at times boring that one or two years ago I would have made sage remarks about the Recession; and for once I looked to London for relief, eager for the heady dash of discombobulating vulgarity by way of contrast, only to find that here too was a sad dearth of offensiveness. In Milan so far some conspiracy is going on, too, because the shows I've seen so far tend to plunge into "jewel tones," which means intense and saturated cobalt, amethyst, emerald and so on and so forth. At least familiar model faces like Natasha Poly and Anna Selezhneva and Coco Rocha have reemerged there; they had not much appeared elsewhere and I didn't know whether they were superannuated, keeping out of the spotlight for a while on a publicist's advice so that their allure remains fresh, or bound by exclusive contracts to make Milan Fashion Week (which has been a trifle moribund) particularly attractive. By the way, I have not seen Anna Wintour anywhere. Maybe this means that Carine Roitfeld, so newly deposed by Emmanuelle Alt, will be at American Vogue after all, or maybe it means that I haven't been looking at the relevant front row photos. As for the season's fads, the one I've noticed most is the colour scarlet.

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Anyway, despite the pretentiousness of my statements and the scarcity of qualifiers, I am evidently not inside the heads of the people who put on New York Fashion Week, London Fashion Week, Milan Fashion Week, or American's Next Top Model, so the preceding may be pure invention.