The devil wears great
In the fashion world, there are clear bids. Anyone who wants to be in (and "in") is wise to follow them. The first commandment is: You should look fantastic. Always and everywhere. And if you go to a fashion show, a little better.
breaks this commandment consistently. Even her hairstyle is an aesthetic imposition: On her more than round head piles up a reincarnation of the Elvis Tolle in a monstrous extent. Some remind her of a Klorolle, others of a baguette roll. Nevertheless, Suzy Menkes wears it with pride and likes to combine it with stale-looking brocade coats, shapeless jackets, floral silk scarves and large gold earrings. In short, she looks impossible. And she does not care.
As sharp as a tailor's scissors: the judgments of Suzy Menkes
"The interesting thing about fashion journalists is not what they think or what they wear, but what they write, that alone is important," she once said in an interview. And so, when she sits down in the front row at Armani, Gucci or Yves Saint Laurent, she opens up her little laptop and starts typing as soon as the first model enters the catwalk. And type and type. While others are busy looking away with their big sunglasses as uninterested and arrogant as possible, she looks very carefully, makes her judgment - and dresses it in sentences, sharp as a freshly cut tailor scissors.
Sometimes such sentences destroy a whole collection. And her creator equal to it. Because Suzy Menkes is the most influential fashion journalist in the world - alongside Anna Wintour, the notorious editor-in-chief of US Vogue. In contrast to her, Suzy Menkes has not made it into a revelation novel and a movie script, but for intrigues and power games à la "The Devil Wears Prada" she still lacks the time.
She visits up to 600 fashion shows a year. An enormous amount of work for the 65-year-old, who is therefore also called "Samurai-Suzy" or "raging grandmother". Whether early morning or midnight, at zero or 30 degrees, Suzy is here. Even in a wheelchair she has already driven up to fashion shows. Only the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur is sacred to her since she converted to her now deceased husband for the sake of Judaism.
For more than two decades, Suzy Menkes has been writing as a columnist for the International Herald Tribune newspaper, and she's also breaking the second bid for fashion journalists: honor the designers. Praise her new collection, whether she likes it or not. Suzy Menkes is a stranger to praise and she knows no mercy: "Karl Lagerfeld lacks a mother who tells him when he goes too far," she once wrote. Lagerfeld is a close friend. For a long time no reason to spare him.
Because of her hard judgments, she has been banned from many. "What a pity!" Says Suzy Menkes. "They are so sensitive, people ... but maybe they need me more than me." That can be good. Star designer Alber Elbaz, who designs for Lanvin, gets up season after season after his fashion show at six in the morning to grab the freshly printed morning edition of The Tribune. And to read Suzy. Only then will he know if he has worked well or badly, he says. He is one of many who rely solely on Suzy Menkes' judgment. Because it is independent. And not based on personal taste, but based on experience and expertise.
Actually, Suzy Menkes wanted to be a designer herself. After leaving school, the native Briton went to Paris for a year, attending a tailoring course, but quickly realized that her talent would not be enough to ever be one of the great couturiers. "If you can not become a millionaire like Ralph Lauren, then prefer to write and criticize others," she explains in retrospect, her decision to go back to her homeland and study history and English literature in Cambridge.
In the sixties she started a traineeship at The Times. London swingte, Suzy started in mini skirt and white Courrège boots - and wrote down what she saw on the street and in the booming art and culture scene. Here she was able to live out her fashion enthusiasm, which had brought her as a student to sneak into fashion shows at five in the morning and to hide under the stage until the beginning of the defile.
A passion that few people shared: Suzy Menkes wrote too much over-the-top clothes to her male colleagues at the Times, and her girlfriends, who were a girl's girlfriend, did not even understand why she even talked about fashion. Suzy continued to write unswervingly, for the Evening Standard, the Daily Express, then again for The Times.In 1987, when Hebe Dorsey, the long-time fashion critic of the International Herald Tribune, died, the editor-in-chief Suzy Menkes offered the successor. She was in such a hurry to start her new job that she did not even clear her desk in the Times editorial. In keeping with the new job, she put on the weird hairstyle, which is still her trademark today.
Fashion is a mirror of society for Suzy Menkes
Since then, she has been commuting restlessly between the fashion capitals of Paris and London - and constantly strives to ignore the third commandment for fashion journalists: Always have an answer to the most important of all fashion questions ready: What's coming, what's left? Suzy Menke's answer: "The skirts are getting shorter or longer, but that's the world's most boring subject."
Much more exciting than current trends, she finds that fashion is a mirror of what's happening in the world and in our time, and last but not least an industry whose sales are in the billions. A fashion journalist should therefore be familiar with numbers, she says - and still enjoy chatting with model Kate Moss about shoes.
More than 1.7 million words by Suzy Menkes have been published by the International Herald Tribune so far. Last year she celebrated her 20th anniversary - at the Paris Fashion Museum of course. And at this party, too, I could not stop questioning the invited designers about ongoing projects.
In 2005, she was beaten in France for her services to fashion Knight of the Legion of Honor, the Queen she was later awarded the British Order's counterpart. Probably also because she has never included the fourth commandment for fashion journalists in her code of conduct: let yourself be gifted generously by fashion companies. For small attentions like Louis Vuitton handbags thank you politely.
Except for flowers and chocolate, Suzy Menkes does not give anything away
Suzy Menkes can not be bribed. She donates presents to a hospital in Paris, and returns a short but clear letter to her patrons: "I was raised in the belief that a girl should never accept presents except flowers and chocolates."
So modesty is rare in the fashion world, and some even feel so provoked by it that they call Suzy Menkes a frustrated old woman who has acquired her housewife taste at Grabbeltisch. Or, a little finer, hypocritical ask how long she intended to practice her profession. "Why should fashion be reserved for the youth?", She then parries, but added diplomatically: "Undoubtedly, fashion should not be exclusively the task of older people."
Hard to imagine that Suzy Menkes should actually hand over the laptop to a younger one. It is unlikely that she would then devote herself exclusively to her family, her three sons from her marriage to the journalist David Spanier and her granddaughters. More likely that she would at least continue to care for her other passions, for example writing books about the English crown jewels, the style of the Windsors or about knitting.
Most likely, however, they will still be seen with toboggans at the fashion shows. Because she needs them after all, these fashion people, even if she likes to claim: "Just because I stay away from these people as much as possible, I have ever endured so long with them."
And why did the otherwise fast-paced and relentless fashion world last so long with her? Because Suzy Menkes knows her commandments better than anyone else, but does not depend on them, but rather dignifies her. And despite all the sharpness always British understatement - or French Contenance, when just the Paris Fashion Week is pending. Only once did Suzy Menkes get carried away to a temper tantrum. After a Marc Jacobs show that started two hours late, she wrote: "I would like to kill him with my bare hands and never see one of his shows again." Jacobs' unforgivable mistake - he had broken the supreme of all fashion commandments: you should let the show begin only when Suzy is there. But then it has to start. Immediately. <
Judgments by Suzy Menkes: - "The stuff looks like a comic strip, and it's really as bad as it sounds." - "A grisly parade of horrible clothes!" - "One of those moments when Lagerfeld is too smart to be good - he uses everything his fashion radar has found - and makes the mistake of choosing nothing." - "A costume party for freaks!" - "Everyone loved, loved, loved the colors on the catwalk, but who will wear them?" - "No, I never doubt my judgment, is not that terrible?"
Suzy Menkes on fashion: - "This is fashion - people like to make things out of things." - "Do models have to run at each other with a snarling tooth? Are not there enough aggression in the world?" - "There are simply no new ideas." - "A praise is only worth something if it comes from someone who does not praise everyone, right?" - "Anyone who invests millions in a collection and then his luck depends on the judgment of a critic who missed his job anyway"
