Unadorned Chic

Where style meets substance

Socialites—they stare at us from the captive pages of fashion magazines with ghostly grimaces, as if their crypts had been unsealed with a crash of sunlight. Why this strained, startled, stalked look? Because by the end of the eighties it was no longer fashionable to flaunt. Almost overnight the rules were rewritten. Now a traipse of fur makes animal activists furious. A collage of jewelry earns wipeout in the pages of Women's Wear Daily. Ostentation is out, Dynasty is dead. What to do, what to do?

Gisele (that's her—stop staring) has the solution. Gisele (that's her—ain't she something?) is the solution. Tall and tan and young and lovely, this Brazilian model belongs on the deluxe dashboard of the new decade. When she appears at a major do, talk stops, chins drop, and martini olives eyeball her from their goblets. What's her secret? Is it her helmet of hair, her strategic handbag, her stand-up posture (bringing to mind Igor Stravinsky's comment that he once saw a woman in Rio who looked as if she could dial a telephone with her nipples)? Yes, yes, YES. But it is more. Adorned with a few darling items courtesy of Chanel, Gisele has found a way to accessorize in an era of Higher Austerity. Dancing cheek to chic, her uncamouflaged curves connote the sloping essence of the scaled-down nineties. One must chew on one's pearls at home. To cut a swath today, one must be unswathed. So, ladies who lunch—lose those mummy wraps! Yo, arbitrageurs—loosen those cummerbunds! Who needs all that froufrou? Gisele has cracked the code of the nineties. Less is moi.

JAMES WOLCOTT