| On Monday, the world’s élite models and designers will converge in Paris for Fashion Week, showcasing new collections and revealing one another’s cachet via invitations to runway shows, dinners, and after-parties. In 2002, the top of the food chain was occupied, somewhat unexpectedly, by Puff Daddy, the rapper born Sean John Combs. Combs’s three-year-old fashion label, Sean John, was then among the best-selling and most critically respected in the industry, and its namesake arrived in Paris, on a Concorde jet, as one of Fashion Week’s most sought-after tastemakers and guests. The New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter accompanied Combs on his frenetic, largely nocturnal journey that year, joining him for parties with Naomi Campbell and Paris Hilton and recording Combs’s dismay when he realized, too late, that he had forgotten about a gathering hosted by one of his biggest supporters, Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. Specter’s piece weaves in strands of Combs’s turbulent past and rapid rise: a mother who concealed the true nature of his father’s death; an exceptional ambition and work ethic; a relationship with Jennifer Lopez that she ended when Combs went on trial for a nightclub shooting. The result is a layered portrait of both Combs and his adopted industry, and an entertaining character study filled with the sort of catty behind-the-scenes comments that one would expect among fashionistas in Paris. At the same time, the article observes an African American artist navigating power and celebrity in two fields, both known for appropriating Black inventiveness for white profit. “As a fashion figure,” Specter writes, “Combs has transcended hip-hop completely. He has done more: black fashion has been ripped off and reinterpreted for many years, and Combs has helped take it back from the Tommy Hilfigers of the world.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment