“The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk” features approximately 140 designs created between the early 1970s and 2010, in what amounts to the French couturier’s first international exhibition. While Gaultier’s “fusion couture” designs stand on their own, the designer has achieved an impressively high-profile status through collaborations with Madonna (inventing the infamous cone bra), Lady Gaga, Kylie Minogue, and various other figures of celebrity and political royalty. But he is still best remembered in certain circles for “Chic Rabbis,” his 1993 collection of urban wear, heavily inspired by Jewish Orthodox apparel.

In “Urban Jungle,” one of six themed rooms in this exhibition—others have titles like “Punk Cancan” and “Skin Deep”—Gaultier and curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot display three looks from the “Chic Rabbis” collection. When the line debuted in the fall of 1993, the designer aimed to highlight the beauty of urban Orthodox Jewish apparel, and the collection was criticized for looking like “dress-up,” causing particular offense by sending women down the runway in rabbis’ clothing, in a “charged” atmosphere. But Gaultier defended his collection. “The catalyst for the Chic Rabbis collection was a trip to New York in the early 1990s,” he writes of his inspiration on a placard at the exhibition. “I saw a group of rabbis leaving the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. I found them very beautiful, very elegant, with their hats and their huge coats flapping in the wind. It was a fantastic scene.”

Indeed, not only is this inclusion noteworthy for its function in the show—planted in the corner of a room devoted to the synthesis of city-wear and runway avant-garde—but also for its significant place in the career of Gaultier and the history of Judaism and fashion.

It can be argued that the arts have increasingly conditioned us to appreciate the quirks of Jewish culture, but not exactly the statutes of the religion; through comedic portrayals in various media, society is encouraged to openly embrace the stereotypical characteristics of a Jew but leave behind the observant practices associated with the religion. Clichéd Jewish traits can easily be conveyed and exaggerated through comedy and writing, whereas in the world of fashion, emphasis is placed on visual representation. Can we portray an anxious, nebbishy, food-loving, money-hoarding, stereotypical Jewish character through a line of fashion? Probably, but I doubt anyone would want to send it down a Bryant Park runway.

Instead, designers wishing to flaunt theological influences can most effectively turn to religious iconography. It’s is a risky move to make. Even before “Chic Rabbis,” Gaultier had been known to controversially experiment with iconic images of Christianity in his work. After recently publishing a lengthy New Yorker article on the designer, Susan Orlean commented in an online chat about Gaultier’s use of religion in his work: “It fits with his interest in tradition and iconic imagery, as well as the fact that he’s treating somewhat irreverently something that maybe people wouldn’t dare play with. It almost sums up his philosophy in one fell swoop.”

In “Chic Rabbis,” he did this with a tradition not his own. Gaultier was able to cultivate and harness inspiration from Jewish culture in a way that no Jewish designer had ever managed to do. Rather than taking offense to the aesthetic exploitation of Hasidic apparel, we should be flattered that Gaultier found Jewish images stimulating enough to inspire an entire line of couture designs. He set an unprecendented milestone for the integration of Judaism and fashion, and he’s not even a member of the tribe.

The rumor that New Jersey Jew Marc Jacobs might fill Galliano’s empty seat at Dior is a fun twist, but not quite a consolation. Even after Gaultier dusted the 1990s grime off of his “Chic Rabbi” pieces, the designs still retain their element of surprise to an increasingly secularized nation. One wonders if the up-and-coming Jewish fashionistas have an opinion in this matter. Perhaps the next generation of designers will develop an innovative method for incorporating Jewish culture into high fashion. For now, we have only Gaultier to reference until another couturier has the chutzpah to send a yarmulke down the runway.

But others got that it was a joke. (If the girl’s dachshund were really named “Miuccia,” wouldn’t she be able to pronounce it?) “Fashion Week High Holidays Bat Mitzvah Speech Practice By Hannah” is not a real Bat Mitzvah speech. It’s a comic piece by writer Bob Morris, a style writer, frequent contributor to The New York Times and author of Assisted Loving, a memoir about double-dating with his elderly father. Hannah is played by his tennis partner’s daughter. Miuccia is played by his dog, Zoloft.

“My intent was more about satirizing fashion culture than religion,” he tells me. What was the genesis of the piece? “Last year, the first day of Fashion Week was on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and I was doing a column at the New York Observer at the time. I had to dress carefully because I was going from a fashion show to services. And when you’re standing around with a bunch of Jews two minutes from the Garment District, you’re gonna check out each other’s outfits!”

Morris comes from a Conservative Jewish background. “My oldest memories of long days of High Holiday services on Long Island always were mixed with memories of women dressing for each other,” he says. “We had style, judgment, and atonement all under one roof.” Writing the script for the video took him several days and multiple rewrites. To prepare, he watched dozens of b’nai mitzvot speeches on YouTube.

“They all follow the same template,” he says. “Welcome the congregation, talk about becoming a man or a woman, discuss their portion, throw in a pitch for their community services, thank everyone.” Even though Morris’s primary intention was to parody fashion culture, the speeches were a target, too. “You have parents throwing their kids into religious training that has no fallout whatsoever when it’s over,” he points out. “It warrants social commentary.”

I think the video is hilarious, but I also think it could be a great opportunity for families and religious leaders to talk about what a bar or bat mitzvah speech is supposed to be. Isn’t Hannah’s speech, fake as it is, a better model than the typical “Myyyyy poooortion … ,” full of stale, shallow insights that came from the rabbi or mom rather than the kid? Shouldn’t the d’var Torah reflect a kid’s actual interests, attempting to relate the kid’s daily life to the coming-of-age ceremony?

Besides, Hannah isn’t way off base about the transformative power of beauty in our culture. (The Jewish one, not the one in the tents.) “Hiddur mitzvah” is the principle of enhancing a mitzvah through aesthetics, so Hannah is right about the beauty of the jewel-toned synagogue windows and the “white Victorian lace dollies” (to which her “father” barks “DOILIES!”) on lady’s heads. Her love of fashion could be an awfully good jumping-off point for a discussion of why we often judge people by the cut of their Carolina Herrera rather than the content of their character. One could even encourage a discussion of heavenly judgment.

There’s a notion … and not the kind you buy at M&J Trimming on Sixth Avenue.

“Fashion Week High Holidays Bat Mitzvah Speech Practice By Hannah”

The cancelled loan included works by Paul Poiret for an upcoming exhibit on the French fashion designer.

Laura Gilbert reports:

“The ‘loans won’t be going forward,’ Mr. Holzer said, ‘in response to’ Russia’s embargo on lending art to U.S. museums. ‘As long as the loan embargo is in place, the museum believes it can no longer lend’ to Russian museums. A ‘one sided’ relationship would, he said, be ‘unfair.’”

Breaking: Met Cancels Loans to Kremlin Museum [NY Observer]
Earlier: Art Wars

Other trends we anxiously await the return of: bloomers, sensible heels, skorts.

So make your granny proud and rock that pocketbook with pride. Just don’t forget to keep it snapped shut when you go out. And would it kill you to stand up straight?

Bubbe Chic: It’s All in the Pocketbook [Kveller]

Meanwhile, Barneys fashion director Simon Doonan, proud husband of a Jewish man (he doesn’t mention who, but it is Jonathan Adler; anyone who has spent time strolling the West Village knows they have an adorable dog), pens a paean to the Jews who have made his career in the fashion industry. On the one hand, it smacks of the sort of philo-Semitism that Adam Kirsch rightly viewed skeptically; also, Doonan’s line, “The difference between a pink triangle and a yellow star is, after all, only three more points,” is, um, not true. But Doonan is also perceptive in remarking, “I suspect that John Galliano could, were he thus inclined, tell a story very similar to mine,” and in observing that a fashion professional who hates on Jews is biting several different hands that feed him.

But follow the live-tweeting for the next few hours—should be fun. And remember that Galliano’s alleged crime—he faces charges of “public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity,” which could end up costing him up to $38,000 in fines and up to six months in jail—is not illegal in the United States.

@GQfashion
Designer Galliano Goes on Trial for Anti-Semitic Remarks [JTA]
Galliano’s Trial to Open in France [NYT]
What Was Galliano Thinking? [Slate]
Related: Frenemies [Tablet Magazine]

Lately, it seems like the whole fashion world has become Orthodox. Whether it’s hipsters wearing Borsalino hats as though they’re a unisex accessory or Urban Outfitters’ faux edgy headscarf marketing campaign or street-cleaning skirts, it’s clear that modesty is in for what is typically the most exhibitionist and immodest of seasons: summer. Warm weather tends to bring out plunging necklines, not hemlines, mini jean skirts, not the maxi type. But this trend, like all others, will surely pass. In a few months when this quarter’s fashions are discounted, the only ones who will be gleefully picking over the sales racks will be the ones for whom this type of dress is not simply a matter of taste but is actually mandatory—frum women.

While most people visualize religious Jewish women in wigs and long dark skirts, there is a significant segment of the Orthodox female population that almost slips under the mainstream radar with the help of a jean skirt. In a culture where jeans and T-shirts are de rigueur, the denim skirt allows observant women to fit in while still adhering to the laws of feminine modesty. And it speaks of aspiration—to be like everyone else, while still being Jewish and observant. The dual messages aren’t just for the outside world, but also operate for the wearers themselves. I should know. I spent the majority of the first 20 years of my life in them.

The early years

This photo was taken by my father during a summer visit to North Miami Beach, where he moved after my parent’s divorce. I was about to start the fifth grade, which meant I was a full-time skirt-wearer. Phasing me out of pants and shorts had been the work of several years, mainly because my mother has never been particularly committed to the cause. She had been raised Orthodox in the 1940s and ’50s in Williamsburg, and for her, Orthodoxy meant only two things: keeping kosher and observing Shabbos. She only stopped wearing pants when my centrist Orthodox yeshiva swung to the right, along with the rest of the Brooklyn Jewish community. She told us that she didn’t want to create any problems for me and my older sister with the school’s administration. My sister, eight years my senior, had already given up pants, and I would soon follow suit—at age 8.

For years before, though, I chafed at wearing skirts all of the time. They reminded me that I was a girl and couldn’t do everything I wanted to do, which at that age was primarily handstands and back handsprings. At recess, I was chastised by a teacher for leading my friends in cartwheels at the back of the classroom. The objection wasn’t that the move was dangerous but that when we turned upside down, we exposed our underwear. It didn’t matter that there were few men in our all-girls school and we were only 7 years old. The purpose of our skirts was to show us that even in a single-gender environment, certain types of activity were improper.

Outside of school, I wore jean skirts, which created the same problems when it came to acrobatics. There, though, no one stopped me—least of all my father, who only saw me once a year and wasted no time on discipline. Also, my father’s relationship with Orthodoxy at this point was tenuous at best. I had seen him flipping light switches on Shabbos in his Florida apartment. He was not going to be the one to keep me from doing cartwheels.

Nor was he going to enforce the Brooklyn dress codes in Miami. Pictures from the same trip revealed a gap-toothed girl with unruly bangs in culottes. While they weren’t exactly Daisy Dukes, they were most certainly on the forbidden attire list. I was hardly alone in this transgression. Though my classmates and I were warned by school administrators to uphold the same modesty standards at the beach as we would on Avenue M in Brooklyn—and yeshiva urban legends about girls who were sanctioned or even suspended for being caught in shorts or a swimsuit abounded—most of us took the view that what happened in South Florida stayed there.

This seems like a nice thing, as long as fashion-world balkanization isn’t totally abolished: As you can see from our custom-built image, the rise of the foot-length maxi skirt as this summer’s defining silhouette has some potentially dangerous implications if you are fearful of a hipster-hasidic supernova-esque clash.

Culture Hopping in a Fedora [NYT]
The Floor’s the Limit [NYMag]

But there’s not much textual guidance. The Book of Esther opens with a description of a feast. It tells of white cotton and royal-blue wool wall hangings embroidered with cords of fine linen and purple wool, suspended over silver rods and marble pillars. There are gold and silver couches on platforms of green, white, shell, and onyx marble. When Queen Vashti, King Ahasuerus’ first wife, refuses to come to the banquet when summoned, Ahasuerus banishes her. After that, the Purim story is all plot, no scenery. With the exception of the royal finery that Mordecai, Esther’s uncle, will don for his parade—a line about blue and purple robes and a large gold crown—there is no visual information to go on.

Looking for inspiration, I rang Susan Handler, co-owner of Manhattan’s Creative Costume, which rents costumes for theater and film and to the general public. “No, we don’t really have Purim,” Handler said. “Nobody asks for Purim. People come in for Purim and want in general what everybody wants.” What in general do people want? “Today I just did a Purim couple: a mermaid and king Neptune.” Frankie Steinz, the owner of the eponymous costume shop in Manhattan, concurred: “Nobody wants Purim—we do things like fruit bowls and refrigerators and movie stars,” she said, adding that typically Purim is a time for theme parties, just not 6th-century-BCE Shushan-theme parties.

I thought I’d turn to movies, but it turns out unless you want be a Raoul Walsh-ian Middle-Eastern siren (such as Joan Collins in Esther and the King or Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra), there’s not much to go with.

Finally, I looked to fine art and hit the jackpot. Painters have depicted nearly every scene of the Purim tale. Not only does Western art offer interpretations of Shushan garb from 1650s through the 1890s, but many of the looks are easy to approximate from stuff you could grab from your or your grandmother’s closet. Ernest Normand’s portrait Vashti Deposed, from the late 19th century, reveals the banished queen wrapped in an indigo robe, her black hair falling over her face, lying in a commodious bed. It’s an affecting look—and easy to replicate. For the more risqué, there’s a blonde Esther in Theodore Chasseriau’s La Toilette d’Esther, from 1841, in which our heroine is naked but for a piece of white fabric draped across her waist, a gold necklace, and bangles.

The Purim scene that garnered the most painterly attention is Esther appearing before king Ahasuerus. Poussin’s Esther Before Assuerus (1640), Batoni’s Esther Before Ahasuerus (1740), and Lefevre’s Esther Before Ahasuerus (1675) each contain solid blocks of colorful cloaks, which my eye gravitated toward. Sir John Everett Millais’ 19th-century Esther is a magnificent portrait of a red-haired queen in contemplation, wearing a loose canary-yellow robe with splotches of color. (Millais used an authentic Chinese Qing-dynasty robe turned inside-out for Esther’s gown, I discovered: There’s a great idea.) I made my decision: I would try my hand at just such a Purim cloak, a simple no-sew affair.

I called Mood Fabrics, of Project Runway fame, located in New York’s Garment District. The clerk assured me that making a cloak and dyeing it to my specifications would be easy. “Dyes work best on natural fibers like cotton or silk or wool,” she explained. “Your best bet would be cotton, but for more weight go for wool.” An adult-sized cloak requires 4 to 5 yards of fabric, one for a small child, 2 to 3.

On the Rit dye website I found a neat color chart that indicates precise color recipes. Esther’s robe by Millais? That would be Yellow 2 #61: “1/4 Tsp Rose Pink, 1 Tbs Lemon Yellow and 1 Cup water.” Batoni’s pink and pea-green Ahasuerus is a cinch to match, as are Poussin’s courtiers in blazing orange and cobalt blue.

It seemed so easy, I wanted to do more. And what about crowns and accessories? I called Ellen Christine Colon-Lugo, a New York milliner whose confections are sold at Bendel’s and the shop of Metropolitan Opera and have appeared in publications like Elle and Vogue. She suggested investing in a turban. “They are in right now, and it’s a good excuse to buy one,” she said. “You can stick feathers in a turban, or pin on broaches.” She suggested visiting a South Asian emporium for a costume. “Indian shirts, the embroidered or mirrored ones, the cotton ones with shiny dots are a good choice, and Sari fabric is also great.”

Jessica Harris, a buyer at the Wasteland, a popular vintage shop on Los Angeles’ Melrose Avenue, suggested keeping it simple. “You can buy some fabric and add jewels,” she said. “Tie a bunch of different scarves together to make a cape or stoles and visit a crafts store—there are tons of ideas there for fabric decorations.”

Sandy Schreier, a private collector of haute couture and Hollywood costumes (she owns Rita Hayworth’s gown from Gilda), hesitated to offer Purim costume advice—at first. “I am not a Purim dresser,” she said. “It’s hard for me to dress up because of what I do and what I’m known for—it has to be all or nothing.”

She recalled that the last time she attended a Purim party, she and her husband dressed as Esther and Haman, and they “made the costumes as if they were at Sunday Hebrew school.” She glued feathers on her nightgown and made tin-foil crowns. She encouraged aggressively homemade-looking confections—Sunday School chic. “Everyone’s got cardboard and tin foil, so start with that,” Schreier said. “Make a crown and glue glitter on it. Take various dollar-store beads like for Mardi Gras, or better, your mother’s or grandmother’s costume jewelry, and pile it on.”

Once she got going she couldn’t be stopped: “Take that old bridesmaid’s dress or prom dress and put that on as a base—or the nightgown, a great fallback. Go to a sewing store or fabric shop and buy some of that silver or gold crinkled fabric and make a train from your shoulders, fastening the fabric with a broach around your neck. I would also wear a wig—actually two or three piled on top like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.” For footwear, don sandals. “This is the season for gladiators,” she said.

As for men, Schreier thought that evil Haman would be the most fun to dress. She suggested using a bathrobe and making a three-cornered hat out of cardboard and brown felt and then adding small hamantashen. “You can shellac them,” she said, “or better yet, don’t. Let people pick and eat from the hat, an edible hat, and put a sign on his back ‘Haman likes to share’.”

I liked this idea of incorporating edible elements. I might try lining my Millais-inspired robe with hamantashen.

Erika Kawalek is a New York-based writer. Her first book, Ragpicker, will be published in 2012 by Riverhead Books.

The question is more complicated than it might seem. For me, fashion used to be inextricably linked to my Jewishness. Mainly this is because the catwalk of my past was the synagogue aisle: As I’ve written, for me, good clothes and shiny hair were the particular trappings of Shabbat and holidays; prettying oneself was a unique form of hidur mitzvah, or glorifying the commandment. (The same principle is responsible for your sterling silver candlesticks, or that nice carved mezuzah from the Old City.) When I got older and started circulating in a wider community, I found that these values were calcified in the term “JAP,” which, despite its arguable historic connotations of misogyny and even anti-Semitism, I reluctantly embraced, because there was no other readily available term that meant something both to me and to the culture at large.

Then, a couple of years ago, a colleague asked me who I consider to be a truly Jewish designer—not as in Ralph Lifshitz, the Jewish boy from the Bronx who created the ultimate sartorial phantasmagoria of the WASP lifestyle, but as in designers who created the fashions that most spoke to the Jewish story of upward mobility, conspicuous consumption, desire for assimilation, and, at some far point, acceptance and even leadership. I offered up Emanuel Ungaro, whose garish prints seemed to me reflective of aspiration, that most feverish of American Jewish traits; at the other end of the spectrum, I said, was Prada, whose aggressive minimalism revealed nothing if not confident insiderdom.

But I’m no longer sure. So I put the question to you: Who’s a Jewish designer? And—perhaps more importantly—does it even matter anymore?

Related: Fashion’s Fascists [Tablet Magazine]
The Jap [Lilith]
Earlier: Golly, Galliano!
Resignation over John Galliano
A Plea on Behalf of John Galliano

The condemnation has been swift and for the most part unequivocal, with a few notable exceptions. (I’m sure Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani had only the most noble of Enlightenment principles in mind when she accused the maker of the video of cashing in for their “30 pieces of silver.”) Christian Dior swiftly suspended and ultimately fired Galliano from his position as head designer; CEO Sidney Toledano called Galliano’s remarks “odious” and proclaimed the company’s “zero-tolerance towards any anti-Semitic or racist words or behavior.” And Natalie Portman, the face of Dior Cherie perfume, denounced Galliano, saying she was “deeply shocked and disgusted.”

Much as it pains me, I must beg to differ with my divinely anointed sovereign, the Holy Empress of All Jewesses. I’m disgusted, sure, but I’m not deeply shocked. I’m not even a little shocked. In fact, I’ve realized that I’ve been subconsciously expecting something like this to come out of the fashion world for some time.

I love fashion. I’ve always loved fashion. I was reading Vogue and W before I finished grade school. My happiest childhood memories involve standing in front of three-way mirrors in dressing rooms with my grandmother, analyzing the line, fit, and fabrication of whatever egregiously overpriced ribbon-festooned ’80s monstrosity I had set my heart on. Even today, if it wasn’t for the Barneys website I would have—well, let’s just say I would have finished this piece before I’d already spent all the money I earned writing it.

This is all harmless enough (except to my bank account, which isn’t your problem), but the fashion world has its dark side. I’m not talking about its well-documented failings—the rampant drug use and eating disorders, the abuse (or at least neglect) of bewildered underage models—but the fact that its integral philosophy is based on a principle of exclusivity. Fashionistas may indeed have a keen eye for beauty, but for many (and I shamefully include myself in this number) the true frisson comes less from an appreciation for innovative design or admiration for glorious craftsmanship than from the mean, malignant, but deeply satisfying sense of superiority in having a handbag that costs as much as an emergency appendectomy or being able to wriggle neatly into a sleek size 2 (or, more elusively, an Italian 38, since everyone knows how American designers are bullied into cutting generously for their vain customers). You are rich (or look like you are, which is almost as good); you are thin, and those are the two things that legendary fashion icon and notorious Nazi-sympathizer Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, said you can never be too much of, and therefore you are better, fancier, more deserving than the lumpen undesirables relegated to the downstairs cosmetics counter in the metaphorical department store of life.

Walk into a Chanel boutique and ask to try something on. Unless you look like a billionaire or Blake Lively or a member of the harem of the Sultan of Brunei, you’ll feel like a character from Schindler’s List desperately trying to convince an impassive Gestapo clerk of your worth as an essential worker. “Please, I beg you! I’m not a violinist, I’m a steel welder! And a French size 36! I swear!”

Obviously, a sane, rational human being with a secure sense of self wouldn’t buy into any of this nonsense, but if millennia of religious war, oppression, totalitarianism, and genocide have taught us anything, it’s that sane, rational human beings have historically been pretty thin on the ground.

I’m not saying that fashion people are all fascists-in-waiting. Fashion, like many other creative professions, has long been a haven for all varietals of misfits and non-conformists in need of a place to turn their eccentricities into strengths, and how can I ignore the enormous contribution of my co-religionists Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Zac Posen, Isaac Mizrahi, and Sonia Rykiel to the schmatte business (although it’s interesting that their clothes are often lauded with adjectives like “wearable,” “form-flattering,” and “democratic”—go figure)?

But plenty of iconic European fashion figures don’t hold up so well under scrutiny. Louis Vuitton collaborated enthusiastically with the Vichy government. Christian Dior himself was able to bounce back so quickly with his postwar “New Look” in large part because of the nice little nest egg he’d amassed enthusiastically dressing the wives of Nazi officers. Coco Chanel passed diplomatic secrets to the Germans, attempted to use the Aryan laws to unfairly wrest control of her perfume business from the Jewish Wertheimer family, and narrowly escaped having her head publicly shaved as une collaboratrice horizontale after living openly with her Nazi lover at the Ritz in Occupied Paris.

The ignominious wartime history of such members of the fashion world might be less a question of immorality than amorality. When questioned about sleeping with the enemy, Chanel responded reasonably: “Really, sir, a woman at my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance for a lover.” (Aesthetics, or rather vanity, above all.) And even if Galliano’s expressed love for Hitler (in what I’m still not sure isn’t an outtake from Bruno) is less a function of a shared murderous ideology than admiration for a fellow uncompromising stylist who would never allow so much as a sprig of freesia in his hotel room, it’s easy to understand how they, or he, got there.

Exclusionary prejudice begets exclusionary prejudice. It’s not hard to see how someone like John Galliano, who has staked his entire career, his entire empire, if you will, on the deep-seated belief that some people (rich, thin, fabulous) are inherently superior could spill over into murkier, scarier, more atavistic realms. Taken to its logical extreme, there’s no telling to what kind of depths that psychological darkness can wander. Once you start dehumanizing others for being poor, fat, ugly, tacky, whatever, all bets are off.

Or maybe he just hates us because we won’t buy retail.

She found her way to the Pratt Institute, where she studied costume design and fell in love with Charles Julianelli, a gorgeous-looking but equally poor Italian-born art model who dreamed of becoming an artist. She and Charles worked at a Brooklyn shoe factory where Mabel sketched and Charles cut shoe models. In 1929, the petite powerhouse of a girl, set on starting her own business, invited Charles to become her creative partner. Business was terrific, but romance was more problematic. Mabel was besotted with Charles from day one, but her parents were aghast at the idea of her marrying a Catholic. Charles was popular with the ladies. (He’d had a fiancée, who committed suicide.) They finally married after 10 years, at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach on New Year’s Eve 1939. But, never mind that. The shoes, oh, the shoes they created! They were gorgeous.

Mabel, the granddaughter of a Russian-born push-cart peddler, did not know much about Judaism. When she asked her parents what it meant to be Jewish, they told her you were born one, and she didn’t seek to find out more. What truly mattered to her was her great love for Charles and her burning ambition to achieve success. But her story is still a Jewish one; she’s a classic example of a second- or third-generation American Jewish girl whose talent and drive propelled her to prosperity and success.

Mabel and Charles’ beautiful couture creations were sold in stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, first under the stores’ labels and then under the Julianelli brand name. The Julianellis were inventive and versatile. They developed new styles and techniques, creating a sensation with their Chopine sandal, a combination shoe/sock, the parts of which could also be worn separately. It was the most talked-about shoe of 1941. The Julianellis’ artistic achievement was confirmed a year later when Saks donated two pairs of Julianelli shoes to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mabel and Charles kept expanding their horizons, designing footwear that ranged from simply walking shoes to elegant ballroom slippers, and they even branched into men’s and children’s footgear. Worn by such fashion goddesses as Sophia Loren and Diana Vreeland, their designs were also included in the 1945 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “Is Fashion Modern?”

Mabel died in December 1994, survived by her daughter, Jane, a former Women’s Wear Daily editor and the author of The Naked Shoe. But the shoes she and Charles created—beautifully made, delicate, smart, the epitome of good taste—are her legacy. I would love to have them in my closet.

Edna Nahshon, a professor of Hebrew at the Jewish Theological Seminary, is the author of Jews and Shoes.

It is easy to spot an Orthodox man, modern or otherwise, by his yarmulke. But unmarried women don’t have one thing that clearly conveys themselves to others as religious. Instead, they must think holistically about their outfits: Long sleeves won’t do the trick if they’re paired with shorts or jeans; a long skirt with spaghetti straps means you could be just another hippie chick.

So for a couple of years after I stopped believing that I had to wear long skirts, I continued to do so. As a result, I enjoyed the knowing looks from other similarly clad women on the subway; being approached on the street to be asked where the nearest kosher restaurant was; and being greeted with a hearty “chag sameach.” These little nods, gestures, and words make you feel a little less anonymous in the largeness of New York.

Eventually, though, being easily identified as frum was no longer enough of an inducement to continue doing something I didn’t believe in. These days, I take full liberty with my wardrobe: Tank tops, booty shorts, and, for my shyer days, jeans and t-shirts. And though I can still easily spot Orthodox girls in their long skirts and three-quarter-length sleeve shirts, they pass me without giving me a second look.

However, if Leandra Medine is correct, this fall’s fashion might confuse those possessed of even the best Jewdar. Her site is dedicated to clothing that is fashion forward yet so unappealing and unflattering that it will cause men to start calculating minimum safe distance. Medine, a former day-school student and writer for several fashion sites, observes that the design community has seemingly drawn inspiration for its autumn styles from the Orthodox community.

While I don’t understand why anyone would wear these skirts if they didn’t have to, I do hope that a memo is being circulated at the yeshivas regarding this development. At least for the next few months, approach women in long skirts and sleeves with extreme caution. They may not be Jewish.

This Fall, Fashion Channels Yeshiva School Girls [The Man Repellent]

Last night, Rebecca Thomson, a 22-year-old graduate of the Manchester School of Art, took home top prize in London’s 2010 Graduate Fashion Week Gala for a collection that, she said, was inspired by Vishniac’s iconic pictures of Jews in prewar Eastern Europe.

Oy.

Thomson is not the first designer to plumb Jewish life for sartorial inspiration. But, with only a few exceptions—including Alexandre Herchcovitch, whose work I profiled a few years ago—most fashion minds have used Jewish culture as a crutch, passing off a fetishization of insularity and faux-quaintness as a replacement for genuine art. (A moment of silence, please, for Monsieur Gaultier’s fantastic 1993 mishap.)

Given this history, it is almost strange that no designer had been inspired by Vishniac before. He was, after all, one of the main people responsible for the two-dimensional caricature of pre-Holocaust Jewish life, a shtetl nostalgia that has nearly colonized pop culture’s ideas about that time and place. His images—or rather, the ones we knew of until recently—seem almost, well, tailor-made for Gaultier-ian exploitation. I can see the runway set already: “Shtetl Chic: Resort 2012.”

I am pleased to report this isn’t the case: Thomson’s collection is beautiful and sumptuous, and telegraphs none of the threadbare desolation I feared. The clothing is indeed driven by nostalgia, but not the nostalgia for some dangerously insipid idea of the Jewish “shtetl.” Rather, it is the nostalgia for the artisanal, the hand-tailored, the romantically local—qualities that are, in fact, remarkably modern. That she found that freshness and modernity in Vishniac’s pictures—and not even the newly discovered ones!—is a wonder, and a delight.

Also, check out that bow. Who doesn’t love bows?

Britain’s Got New Talent [British Vogue]
Related: Out of Focus [Tablet Magazine]
A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac [NYT Magazine]
Schmatte Chic [Slate]

Exclusive: easyJet Grounds In-flight Magazine After Holocaust Gaffe [New Statesman via The Awl]

*For inspiration check out this not-quite-haiku from Tablet’s resident rhymester, written circa age 10:

Haiku About Freedom

I like to be free
You can do what you want
You can study Torah

David Sassoon has become a legend for dressing the rich, the aristocratic, the glamorous, and, especially, the royals. He’s just celebrated 50 years in the fashion business, and he’s now published a lavish book called The Glamour of Bellville Sassoon. It’s part autobiography and part gorgeous coffee-table spread, with pictures of the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Princess Diana modeling his exotic outfits.

Nextbook visited the designer in his London showroom and spoke with him about his Sephardic roots, his first visit to Buckingham Palace, and how Jewish weddings were ahead of the trends.

A few weeks ago, finalists were announced for this year’s Man Booker Prize, which honors the best novel by a British Commonwealth or Irish writer. The thirteen authors on the longlist include Salman Rushdie, art critic John Berger, and Joseph O’Neil, whose novel Netherland has received a lot of attention in the United States. Also on the list is an author who is not as well known here, but who should be: Linda Grant.

Grant’s new novel, The Clothes on Their Backs, tells the story of Vivien, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants who hide their Jewishness—and other details of their past—from her and the rest of the world. As an adult, Vivien forges a friendship with an estranged, criminal uncle in order to gain access to the secrets her parents have kept from her.

The Guardian calls the book “fluid and addictive.” Our London-based reporter Hugh Levinson was equally enthralled. In an interview with Levinson from her home in north London, Grant talks about why suffering does not make one noble, keeping family secrets rarely works, and shopping is a worthy pastime.

Photos: Judah Passow.

The apartment, rented by a wealthy uptown patron of Okunov’s who lets him use it as a studio, was stocked with spools of thread, heaps of fabric, sheaves of pattern-making paper and a hulking Singer foot pedal sewing machine. Garments that Okunov had designed hung on the walls, among them a jester-like turquoise coat, a futuristic silver dress, and a tennis skirt made from a tallis. Work on his current project would continue late into the night: Okunov had been invited to participate in a show this month at the Jewish Museum called Off the Wall: Artists at Work, a two-week slate of events featuring over a dozen young artists, musicians, poets, and one fashion designer—Okunov—all considered evidence of the wacky, polyglot new Jewish identity that sociologists and trend-sniffing reporters are fond of writing about. For his studio residency and March 27th runway show at the museum, Okunov had gone to the Satmar Hasidic center of south Williamsburg to retrieve scraps of parchment, the dried calfskin that mezuzahs, ketubahs and other holy texts are written on, intending to mold the material into sexy fitted bodices. “Once it’s wet, it becomes a rubbery leather and you can sew it, stretch it, play with it,” he explained, soaking pieces of parchment in a bowl of water. “It stays wet half an hour to forty-five minutes. In those forty-five minutes, I pin it to the dress form. Then it dries. We’re going to write beautiful love poems on it. We’re going to recreate a woman like a Torah, wearing parchment and a crown and adorned in velvet.” Okunov gazed at the parchment as if there were nothing strange about his use of it. Pulling and kneading it in the water, he started singing a wordless, hypnotic Hasidic tune. “Ya dee dah, ya dee dah, ya dee dah dee dah dee dah.” His brother joined in, as did the two others. Soon, they were belting it at the top of their lungs. They linked hands in the middle of the room and danced in a circle, stomping and jumping in ecstasy.

Okunov is small, lithe, and muscular, with a sharp angular jaw and squinty eyes. He wears his curly hair in a kind of modified mullet, short and mussed on top and long in the back. He has the manner of a graceful jackal and is prone to gushing speech and effusive air kisses. A friend once compared him to a Martian who, upon landing on Earth, had met a stereotypically flamboyant fashion designer and began to mimic him, having no other reference for how a human should behave. The truth is not so far from that, inasmuch as Hasidic Crown Heights is another planet. Okunov doesn’t come from the side of Lubavitch well known today, the glossy international outreach network that operates systematically to bring irreligious Jews back into the fold. Okunov’s Lubavitch lineage extends, rather, to the Hasidic sect’s late-eighteenth-century roots in a small Russian town. His father was born into a Lubavitch family in Russia and managed, despite harsh oppression, to remain devout throughout the war. In the late 1960s, he immigrated to Brooklyn where he married and ran a yeshiva for Russian boys. Okunov was raised primarily speaking Yiddish, studying Torah and Talmud, and regularly seeing the Lubavitcher rebbe, who—though he died in 1994—is still believed by some of his followers to be the messiah. “My father is an old-school, heavy-duty Hasid,” Okunov told me. “My mother is the most extreme of Lubavitch. She believes the rebbe is still alive.” Never an especially gifted scholar, Okunov started running with an eccentric Crown Heights crowd as a teenager. In 2001, another young Lubavitcher friend who was defecting toward the fashion world dressed Okunov, then sixteen, in a burgundy fedora and plaid velvet pants for Purim. Having lived his life until then in a black hat and plain white shirt, his experience parading around in the wild costume was profound. He felt drawn to fashion and costume by its transformative power, its creative richness, and, he readily admits, his lust for girls. “I entered this thinking I would be around beautiful models,” he said. “I was breaking out of this world where sitting in a room with a woman is forbidden, to say nothing of draping fabric over her.” Things unfolded quickly in Okunov’s late adolescence. Aware that he was smoking marijuana, his alarmed, cloistered parents sent him to drug rehabilitation. “They didn’t know the difference between marijuana and heroin,” Okunov shrugged. While there, someone gave him a sewing machine to play around with and he got an internship at a garment manufacturing company in Long Island City, Queens, where he learned about bias, cutting fabric, and operating an industrial sewing machine. For awhile, he moved back to his parents’ house, but soon found his own apartment in Crown Heights. Drifting away from religious life, he burrowed his way into the downtown culture scene. He landed a job as a stocker in the Marc Jacobs SoHo store and worked on developing his own fashion line. He also became a fixture on the fashionable nightclub circuit, partying at Bungalow 8 with celebrities he had never even heard of, having grown up in a media vacuum. He recalls once chatting with David Bowie and Iman, his supermodel wife. “So what to do you do?” Okunov cheerily asked Bowie. Iman looked at him incredulously and responded, “He’s a rock star.”

Oksana Baiul and Lev Okunov during Fashion Week in New York City, February 2, 2007

He amassed a motley assortment of new friends, among them Bert Padell, an accountant who has represented scores of celebrities including Irv Gotti and Foxy Brown, and Dov Charney, the American Apparel founder known for marketing simple cotton clothing with soft-core porn. For a spell, Okunov dated Oksana Baiul, the Ukrainian figure skater who beat Nancy Kerrigan in the 1994 Winter Olympics; last year, she helped Okunov stage a fashion show on ice. All of his networking and air kissing has not amounted to much in terms of measurable fashion world success. His limited mentions in the press have included his a mention on Women’s Wear Daily’s list of the “New Wave of Designers” in 2005 and praise in Variety for his “to-die-for” costumes in a production of A Night in the Old Marketplace in Philadelphia last fall; a smattering of other publications regard him as a curiosity rather than a serious fashion contender. Most of his press attention has come from Jewish publications, which focus more on his personal background than his work. His design talent was held up to wide scrutiny last year when the actress Sally Kirkland commissioned him to dress her for the Academy Awards, but the dress he designed was panned by red carpet bloggers as “disturbing,” “offensive,” and “a multi-colored winged disaster.” Still, other fringe and former Hasids who float between Orthodox and secular lives regard him as a role model, however modest his success has been in real-world terms. “The great hope of former Hasids is to go beyond their stories,” he explained. “Some are brilliant writers, some are brilliant musicians, some are just brilliant. They’re so used to rushing to be on time for shacharis and mincha and maariv. It’s hard to break that pattern.” Okunov is seen as a model not just for having transcended his story, but for having incorporated it into a larger story without abandoning it completely. The standard narrative of lapsed religious Jews (or any Jews, for that matter) is that they are forever suspended in inner turmoil and guilt. This is the narrative popularized by the Nathan Englanders and Shalom Auslanders of the world, and especially beloved by secular Jews for confirming a smug fantasy that religion is oppressive and unhealthy. But Okunov does not seem fraught with existential angst, perhaps because he has a loving relationship with his family. Although his parents were distressed when he first left the fold, they now have a close relationship with him, speaking with Okunov on the phone regularly and always welcoming him home. His mother believes that he is somehow saving souls through his work and has said she would eagerly attend one of his fashion shows if there were a divider separating men and women. Okunov seems to find nothing contradictory about being a fashion designer and bon vivant who spontaneously breaks into Yiddish song and still considers himself a Hasid, if not in practice then certainly in spirit. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about him is that in his mind, everything is OK. It might seem incongruous from the outside, but to Okunov, juggling the pieces of his seemingly disparate identities feels perfectly fine.

Last September, timing it to coincide with Fashion Week, Okunov unveiled his spring 2008 collection in a runway show before a packed audience at Cafe DeVille, a French bistro in the East Village. Skinny, surly models loped down the catwalk toward popping camera flashes. The crowd was filled with dewy-skinned young people in ethereal outfits, unusual shoes, and aggressively angular haircuts. Alongside them were Orthodox Jews in yarmulkes and dark coats, looking on with interest. In the past, some of Okunov’s shows have included elements of Jewish culture, including female models sporting curly, shellacked payes. In this show, the models wore small hats meant to evoke the furry round shtreimels of some Hasidic men. It seemed a little shticky. But Isaac Schonfeld, a Hasid and a friend, explained that to whatever small degree the Jewish strain was seen in his work, it resonates louder and clearer in his life. “I think that whereby he has to some degree jettisoned observance, he has not jettisoned the worth of Hasidism,” said Schonfeld. “Not only that, but it’s a part of him more than most Hasidic people.” At the end of the show, Okunov was escorted to the stage amid whooping applause. Afterwards, the Hasids and fashionistas mingled. It would not be long until they would migrate to an after-party at a bar on the Lower East Side, where Okunov would have everyone leaping on tables and belting Hasidic tunes until the wee hours of the night. One friend, a former Satmar Hasid from Williamsburg, jokingly referred to the group as adherents not of Orthodox Judaism but of Paradox Judaism. Okunov added that despite all the seeming contradictions, he thought they were the spiritual progeny of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism who taught that everyone, even the least pious, has a direct link to the divine. “The Baal Shem Tov fell in love with people like us, people who were a little crazy,” he said. “The tailors, water carriers, woodchoppers, shepherds. Their little niggunim, their little psalms were the holiest. I’m a simple tailor. Singing a niggun at the tops of my lungs is a miracle. It’s the Garden of Eden. If the Baal Shem Tov was around now, we would be the highest of the high.”