Hair, Fur, and Nothing Else

New York Fashion Week passed without incident, which is its own kind of failure. London, at least, gave us something to actually look at.

Charlie Le Mindu is a 24-year-old hairdresser and wig-maker from France who had already made a name for himself before London—designing the real-hair fur pieces that Lady Gaga wore, touring with Peaches, building elaborate architectural hats with a fervor that suggested a genuine calling. Which explains, if not quite justifies, why he sent his models down the catwalk wearing his hats, his wigs, his fur, and nothing else. He was proud as a man who has just solved a problem nobody else was working on. The crowd laughed. The models stood there calculating, with great professionalism, exactly how much money made this acceptable.

There’s a logic to it. He’s a hair and headpiece designer. Clothing was never his department. Sending models down the runway wearing only his actual product is either a rigorous conceptual statement or an excuse to see naked women in a professional setting—and I find both interpretations equally compelling. The feminist response was presumably forming somewhere offstage. The question of why Le Mindu didn’t extend his generosity as far as a pair of underwear is worth asking. But I confess I mostly admired the commitment.

Sometimes I think I should have gone into fashion. The brief is simple: expose what needs exposing, call it a collection, take a bow.