“I forgot to Google how to bang a rockstar,” a friend, let’s call her Peggy, says when she arrives at the Maritime Hotel last night, where we consume pasta before the Guns N’ Roses show at Hiro Ballroom, brought to us by DeLeon Tequila and Nur Khan Electric Sessions. Banging Axl Rose, the lead singer and only remaining member of the original band — who still tours as Guns N’ Roses with a new band — is a lifelong dream of hers. We are trying to figure out how she can accomplish her mission and call in sick to her corporate job tomorrow, which, you would think, can’t be that hard. But alas: “I have no idea how to be a groupie,” Peggy says. Nor do the rest of us.

A number of strategies are discussed, like Peggy initiating contact with a roadie: “But I don’t want to bang a roadie — that happens a lot. The groupies just end up banging the roadies.” Or sending a friend to initiate contact with the roadie to act as a bridge between Peggy and backstage. But the friend: “I don’t want to bang the roadie, either.” Again: nor did the rest of us.

The stakeout began two hours before the band came on after midnight. Fashion people who didn’t get flown to Europe for those shows (London Fashion Week starts today) claimed real estate on the floor. Kate Lanphear, who is so cool it’s embarrassing to be around her, wore a leopard coat and got a spot close to the stage, in front of prepubescent-looking models wearing furs and floppy hats but behind an underage-looking girl wearing Lady Gaga makeup with blue hair carefully moussed to stick straight out from the roots thereby (ironically) increasing the diameter of her head by about eight inches, who got mad when people “flicked hair” in her face. Somehow, just somehow, despite all her trying (and there was a lot of trying, this being a Guns N’ Roses Fashion Week party), she managed to look like a less authentic fan than, well, the people in their thirties milling about who had been waiting for the chance to try to bang Axl for twenty years. And concerts like this are nothing if not a competition to be the most devoted “you’re too young to understand” kind of fan.

Peggy spends much of the two hours figuring out how to get to Axl. A photographer standing next to her convinces her to talk to some bearded men sitting on trunks next to the stage who look like they might be roadies. (Peggy has loudly informed said photographer that she’s trying to bang Axl.) So she scurries over, and we see them laughing at her. “They’re not roadies. That was so embarrassing,” she announces when she gets back. Clearly no one is going to help her get to Axl but herself. She won’t flash him, but after the band comes on, she does manage to remove her bra from underneath her clothes to use as Axl bait. Rather than swing it above her head like a lasso, the way a normal slutty bra-throwing concertgoer would, she folds the cups on top of each other and holds it in her hand like a sandwich. Since we are in the front row, she can reach her arm into the stage area. “Here’s my bra!” she shouted a couple of times. “You have to throw it! Swing it around!” we tell her. After a few pitiful offerings of her bra to the band, she tosses it at the center of the stage. A roadie, who has just kicked an audience member out for throwing a glass onto the stage (Axl called that person a “cunt,” which made for a fun non-altercation altercation) grabs the bra and throws it back into the crowd.

When Axl shouts, “It’s your host, Sir Fucks a Lot!” the security guard standing to our left, who has been filled in on Peggy’s dream of banging Axl, turns to her and says, “Now’s your chance!” Of course, his job is to keep Peggy from rushing the stage so what could she do, really? Eventually Axl touched hands in the crowd, including hers. And the guitar player — the new not-Slash Slash who looked like Criss Angel but with sleeve tattoos and lip piercings — played his guitar in our faces weirdly sexually all night, so that was something. At one point he licked guitar picks and stuck them to our foreheads, which was awesome at the time (thank you, free tequila) but kind of makes me want a chemical peel today.

The security guard tells us Matt Damon and Justin Timberlake are on the balcony, as though he expects us to go try to bang them or, well, care enough to leave our spots on the floor (no, thanks). And Peggy, when she doesn’t have Criss Angel’s guitar or crotch in her face, has the non-roadies from earlier staring at her, which is embarrassing. Our security guard friend even points out, when guitar-crotch gets really close to her face, “I guess you’ll have to settle for him.”

At the end of the show, Peggy had not banged Axl. But “I don’t think I could have done it,” she decides. “I could have had a conversation with him. In a room. But that’s probably it.” She paused for a moment before we left: “Let me just see if I can find my bra.” And, in a heart-warming end-of-Fashion-Week moment, in a pile of wet spots and broken glass bottles, she did.

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Filed Under:
guns n roses
,new york fashion week
,partying after something
,justin timberlake
,matt damon
,kate lanphear

“You won’t want to be leaning on the stage in a few minutes, trust me,” a headset-wearing man at the MAC Viva Glam party told guests last night, minutes before Nicki Minaj and Ricky Martin took the stage. Once the beer-swilling D.J. got the cue, he put on a mix of “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and a song by Nicki Minaj that I’d remember better if it weren’t for the ratio of guests to Champagne-serving Ken-doll waiters hovering, ridiculously and delightfully, at around 3 to 1. Then, smoke shot skyward from holes around the stage with such force that it was actually a little bit frightening, and the stage rotated to reveal a blonde, neon-pink-striped-suit-wearing Nicki Minaj and a very elegant goateed Ricky Martin, posing together on a stagnant motorcycle like they do in the campaign. Judging by the suits they were wearing, whatever they had to do for us would be more business than booty shaking, and so it was: a little speech about the Viva Glam campaign (all proceeds from Nicky’s lipstick and Ricky’s “lip conditioner” benefit men and women living with HIV/AIDS). After a few minutes of that and no singing or dancing from either of them (to which I say, “BOO, Ricky! Booooo.” But Nicki, you can rest), the smoke effect happened again, and the two rotated back around, making way for Benny Benassi. Watch it in the video.

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nicki minaj
,divas
,ricky martin
,m.a.c.
,new york fashion week

Fashion Week invites come in all shapes — metal plates, clear plastic cubes, 3-D pop-ups, and even a rubber claw — but as industry veterans know, the louder the invite, the more unknown the designer. Elaborate invitations gasp for air and spur the question: Who are these new arrivals and who, if anyone, is going to their shows?

The established labels that you already know about — the Michael Korses, Derek Lams, and Calvin Kleins — can easily fill up the eight days of New York Fashion Week. Getting buyers and editors to fit in one more show is not easy if you’re new and unknown, creating a daunting hurdle for every designer trying to establish a foothold in the business.

Turning a label into a business that can stage a show deserving of the industry’s energy is a years-long process, a very small part of which is devoted to actually designing clothing. Sustaining a business and forging relationships with the industry’s veteran players is an exhausting dance that few designers relish, and even fewer master.

“If someone’s standing out in New York Fashion Week, it’s not the first time folks have heard about them,” says fashion publicist Umindi Francis, who is known for her work with up-and-coming labels. “It’s kind of naive to think you can come out of obscurity and all of a suddenly rise to notoriety.”

Designers often need to woo publicists like Francis for a couple of seasons before she decides to take them on. Often they are simply not ready. “Since I’ve launched my company in the last year, so many emerging designers have come to me for representation and it’s simply — you don’t need me at the moment,” she says.

For designers who are just starting out, cracking Fashion Week can be a frustrating process.

Take Maki Obara, 33, whose fifteen years in the fashion industry include gigs at Vivienne Westwood and Céline in Japan.  She debuted her first collection, Maison Murasaki, at the Yotel in midtown on the Monday before Fashion Week began. Friends did hair and makeup for free, and she called in favors so she could use the space without paying, but she didn’t have the resources to hire a publicist.

“To be honest, not a single press or buyer person responded to the invites,” she wrote me in an e-mail the day after the show. “But it was fun.”

And she has spent a lot of energy and money on her 15-look, 25-piece collection. After a financial backer fell through, her parents loaned her the $700,000 she’d need to start her line from their retirement fund. The samples she made are now hanging in Showroom Seven, which will get the line in front of buyers. Obara must pay a monthly fee for the showrooms, and it’s not cheap. “The designing part is really nothing,” Obara says. “Ninety-five percent of it is business.”

Chadwick Bell showed in Lincoln Center for the first time this season, to a crowd that included the stylist Mary Alice Stevenson and Elle style director Kate Lanphear. “It’s a one-brick-at-a-time business,” he said a few days before his show. “You have to know your client and know what their needs are and meet them, meet their friends. You can do shows all you want but at the end of the day you have to sell clothes.”

His first shows were very small and were limited to clients he met working at Bergdorf Goodman as a sales manager for Ralph Rucci; he made his industry Fashion Week debut with a presentation in a West Village townhouse. Though showing off-site afforded him a cool location, he quickly learned it wouldn’t attract many industry people. “There is a community in the industry and you really have to participate,” he says.  

Tawfik Mounayer started his label Tribune Standard a few years ago after working in fashion for fifteen years for companies like Liz Claiborne, Isaac Mizrahi, the Gap, and Loft (formerly Ann Taylor). He started showing a year ago with very small private appointments, but has held presentations the past three seasons at Pier 59. “If you’re doing it because of the shows, that novelty wears off in season two,” Mounayer says. “It’s exhausting — it’s like getting married four times a year. There’s an invitation, planning, and on top of that you have to design what everyone’s wearing to your wedding. To me those ten or fifteen minutes are amazing, but that’s not enough to sustain you as a designer.”

W editor Stefano Tonchi says he always takes the time to “go and see somebody new” at Fashion Week. But many of the new designers he sees have been around for seasons (he cited Juan Carlos Obanda, who is hardly fresh out of the gates). And while editors laud New York for the many funding schemes and sponsorships available to emerging designers, most of those require designers to have sold clothing to stores already and been in business for at least a couple seasons. “The CFDA, they have their emerging designers,” Obara laments, “[but] how do you get to that point for the CFDA to even see you? There’s a massive problem in this business.”

Francis thinks the requirements to apply for such funding schemes are warranted. “If you’ve been putting the time and effort in and you’ve been reaping results, you deserve the award,” she says. “It’s a monetary award, and they want to make sure individuals can do something with it.”

T magazine editor Sally Singer urges designers to carefully consider if showing is the right move for their label. “I think it’s a mistake to put everything into a show and to believe that that will launch your business if you don’t have money for production and if you don’t have money to actually show to the buyers,” she says. “You can have an impact, but it’s hard … you have to almost be a parasite to a bigger show. And then you have to have money to make the clothes. So often people put all their money into their show samples and they don’t have any money to take the orders. You’ve got to be ready to spend money to hopefully, one day before you’re 80, make some money.”

Francis adds: “You never know when you’re one step away from your victory. You have to have heart.”

— With reporting by Jenni Avins

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new york fashion week
,umindi francis
,tribune standard
,maison murasaki
,maki obara
,chadwick bell
,designers
,fall 2012
,tawfik mounayer

Jessica Alba enjoyed a front-row view of the Michael Kors show this morning wearing a sexy dress with a window into her … heart.

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jessica alba
,michael kors
,new york fashion week
,fall 2012
,fashion shows
,hot shots

Jessica Alba enjoyed a front-row view of the Michael Kors show this morning wearing a sexy dress with a window into her … heart.

Read more posts by Amy Odell

Filed Under:
jessica alba
,michael kors
,new york fashion week
,fall 2012
,fashion shows
,hot shots