It’s a dreary evening outside the West Side pier where the Alexander Wang show is being held, but the rainy twilight hasn’t deterred Getteline Rene, Nyasia Burris, and Trevor Swain. The three LIM College students are exhibiting all the signs of people who are desperate to attend a fashion show but do not have tickets—they are gazing nervously at the guys with clipboards, they are edging toward the check-in desk, then losing their nerve and retreating. And they are, despite the fact that they are clearly all dressed up, maybe just a little too young to be legitimate guests.
Not that they are without a plan. “You go to the Internet and get the list of all the shows, and then you Google Map it and find out every possible way to get in. You dress the part! You try to have a shill inside! You try to fit in. There’s a fashion lingo,” explains Rene.
Across from this trio of hopefuls, Jenny Weinstein and Jayme Cyk, sporting a mélange of Coach and Topshop, are similarly lurking. Though I see them rebuffed by staff more than once, the girls—both students at Parsons—exude self-assurance. “We’re going to be successful here,” Weinstein tells me. “I can just feel it.” And she is, which I find out later when I see her account of the night on her blog, called Ohmondieu.
If the crashing situation has changed in the years since I began covering fashion (and this season the desire to sneak in, however fervent, appears to be less widespread), you can blame it on the Internet. Anyone who has a blog can be a fashion critic—sometimes a pretty good one—just by logging on to style.com to see all the looks from a show and then offering his or her opinion. Back in the day, you really had to be there to get the information first; now it’s available five minutes after the show ends. (And sometimes even quicker—thank you, live bloggers.)
Television personality Robert Verdi hasn’t crashed for years, but he still remembers his most successful tactics. He’d chat up a friendly editor—Polly Mellen, he recalls, was always a good mark—and just keep talking to her as he slid into a show. He describes himself as “a ninja warrior” when it came to snagging a seat at “all the big ones”—Marc, Calvin, Ralph, Donna. “You had to know when to strike. Right after they let the standing room in, as the runway begins to clear, was the time to get an empty seat in the front row.”
Outside the Marc Jacobs show on Monday night, held in the literal fortress that is the Lexington Avenue armory, Nick Palacios, with his yellow bow tie and battered vintage Vuitton briefcase, looks as natty as Verdi ever did. Waiting on a line for non–ticket holders, he tells me that the key is “you’ve got to look confident.” He fondly recalls the first show he ever crashed, a Bruno Pieters Hugo Boss event at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. When the MJ PR tells him there’s no standing available, he shrugs, says, “There’s got to be another way in,” and disappears down the block.
The next day, at the same seemingly impenetrable site for the Marc by Marc Jacobs show, Petra Koivisto (above left), hair in a chic topknot, camera slung around her neck, stuns me by confessing casually that she managed to slip into the Rodarte show that very morning. “I got in line with the crowd, took some pictures. Then I walked right in and just enjoyed the show.” William Terseimes (above right) is also hoping for a way into Marc by Marc. While he waits, his outfit—homburg hat, camouflage vest over undershirt—is intriguing numerous photographers who are gathered outside the armory gates. Terseimes says he worms his way into shows because he is so open and social. “In Paris, I hang out in front and take pictures of the models. The designers like my clothes, and they let me in.”
I go around the corner to see if any hopefuls are lurking at the photographers’ entrance, and am shocked to see Jacobs (center) himself, resplendent in kilt and diamond studs—if a bit exhausted-looking (Lady Gaga didn’t take the stage at his fete the night before until nearly one a.m.)—catching some air before his show starts. Jacobs confesses that when he started out, he used to sneak into places as a matter of course.
“What didn’t I crash? Parties, clubs—I was a New Yorker! I went to everything, and they all seemed transcendent at the time.” When asked how he feels about kids who try to crash his own shows, he says, “I think it’s great! They should be fearless and do what they want to do. To have no boundaries—that’s the beauty of youth.”
—Lynn Yaeger
Take a peek at her blog
Hopefully one day I will be invited to the shows....and not be a crasher.
A girl can dream :)
xoxo
Jenny
