Fashion Week: Where Stylemakers Vacation
Some looks from Erin Fetherston's spring 2009 runway show.
Photo: New York Magazine
by Eimear Lynch
New York fashion week is a destination unto itself, an assiduously secured world of sharp-eyed skinnies scanning bystanders for clothes and celebrity. It's an event not exactly known for its worldliness--"I'm part Norway-an," I heard a makeup artist tell a model backstage--so over the course of the big week, I asked those at the center of the storm where they go to decompress.
It was Ireland, in the case of makeup master Bobbi Brown, who spent 10 days there in June. She, her husband, and their sons started in Dublin, where they stayed in the the Merrion Hotel and saw the city like true tourists, on a double-decker bus. While she traveled as an American, she drank like a local: "I love whiskey," she told me between surgeon-like makeup applications backstage at the Erin Fetherston spring runway show. While the boys golfed, Brown got an "amazing" deep-tissue massage and manicure at Doonbeg Golf Club in County Clare. She also enjoyed a "fabulous time" drinking tea with Bono's wife, shopping with the help of "the most amazing employees" in Brown Thomas, eating salmon and peas throughout Ireland and touring the Guinness factory. "It was great," she said, amazingly genial given the bevy of hair-twirling twigs awaiting her attention.
Fetherston was surprised to be asked about her favorite holiday spot. "Well..." She surveyed the spring line that had kept her from her travels. It had clearly been a while. "My last great trip was to Mallorca," she said, where she stayed in a friend's house in the "great seaside village" of Deia. "I actually thought about the trip as I was designing this collection. The sky there was full of colors, which helped define my palette," she told me, explaining the pastel clouds that hung from the racks around her. "It became about those beautiful women in the summer with sun-kissed skin, being elegant and chic yet totally at ease and laid back." I asked where she ate while in Deia and she wrinkled her nose. "I just went to the beach," she said, as if there was time for nothing else. Following the show, she hopes, will be a trip to Tulum, Mexico. Will we see hints of the site's Mayan ruins in her next collection? Maybe, she said: "You never know when inspiration will strike."
Backstage at Rodarte, French hair queen Odile Gilbert spent almost two hours on one model's hair while dozens of Aveda stylists crowded around, noting how she brushed, twisted, pinned and sprayed a sleek bun topped with a layer of tin foil. Her favorite post-show locale? Harbour Island in the Bahamas--"incredible, but only if you miss the hurricanes," she said. She could go there with only one product if necessary: Aveda conditioner. Conditioner, of all things, was Gilberts greatest beauty tip. While the French are generally shy of the post-shampoo rinse, she regularly uses it after washing and also waters it down to smooth and de-tangle clean, damp hair. (If she could fit two more bottles in her Ziploc, she'd choose a body scrub and face cream.)
The Rodarte sisters' vacation views, like the young designers themselves, are straightforward and smart. After shows, Laura and Kate Mulleavy retreat to their roots in Monterey, California, where on their last trip, they stayed in "a little beachfront hotel" on Cannery Row. Kate likes to pack light: She brings a few basics and heads to second-hand stores after deplaning to find destination gems. When they tour Europe later this fall, the girls hope to stay in Paris's Hôtel de l'Université, which Kate expects to be "old, little, and antique-y." And what will they do on the long transatlantic flight? Sleep. "If you're asleep, it doesnt matter if you're in coach or first class," Kate explained--simple but true.
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