So we've read it twice now.
Does she like it? Does she not like it? Does she almost like it?
Today's Thursday Styles finds Cintra Wilson in a reflective mood as she wanders into Adam on Hudson Street. designer Adam Lippes is something of a fashion It-Boy these days as he has morphed a luxury t-shirt company into a contemporary lifestyle brand to great acclaim from press and retailers.
Keeping her claws retracted, La Cintra moves through the store like some sort of fashion medium, touching a garment to be transported to whatever vision it evokes in her fertile, if occasionally mystifying, mind. Look what happens when she comes across a sale rack:
They transported me to Oscar nights in the mid-to-late 1960s: back
when the Oscars meant something. Real men with sideburns wore butterfly
bow ties and were fighting drunk, and women back-combed their hair into
ice sculptures and painted Cleopatra eyeliner halfway up each temple.
This
rack brought to mind the movie ⿿Darling,⿿ a portrait of London right as
its behavioral pendulum was swingin⿿ away from the repressions of the
ruling-class establishment into a breezy decadence (that proved as
clunky and as bloodless as the old mores it was subverting). New
cultural adventures were swirling around those dresses; wars were
beginning to end. Captain Kirk kissed Lieutenant Uhura in a space
beyond race. Barbra Streisand
strapped on a Nefertiti headdress, with no irony whatsoever. Colors
were bleeding and minds were beginning to open. It was the tipping
point of suggestion that girls still locked in their Goldwater girdles
might want to burn their bras in a few years.
Star Trek? Streisand as Nefertiti?
Whoa! What are those dresses made of? Mescaline? 'Shrooms? We have some Adam t-shirts, and that never happens when we put them on.
Maybe it's a new development in the collection, in which case, we look forward to the psychedelic experience awaiting us upon our next visit to the shop. There are certainly worse places to go than inside a Julie Christie movie. Listen, every designer has to have some kind of gimmick, an angle, a hook. Lippes' is, apparently, mind-altering, and who doesn't love a good trip?
Don't answer that.
Critical Shopper: Do You Get Where He⿿s Coming From? by Cintra Wilson (NYTimes)
Adam 678 Hudson Street, Meatpacking District
