The Asylum by Simon Doonan

Author:Simon Doonan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

anna’s wondering why we haven’t started yet

LAST NIGHT I DREAMED I went to Anna Wintour again.

This is not so unusual. Like every other sick, twisted, neurotic, highly strung fashion person on earth, I regularly have Anna dreams. The bobbed and dark-spectacled Vogue editrix in chief haunts our collective unconscious on a near-nightly basis. Even as I write, some slumbering style slave somewhere in the world is tossing and turning, and mumbling, “Yes, Anna! No, Anna. Three Birkin bags full, Anna.”

Why is Ms. Wintour so enmeshed in our collective psyche? Why is she inhabiting our nocturnal dramas and deliriums? The reason is fairly obvious, non?

La Wintour is all-pervasive and all-powerful. She represents many mythological archetypes, so many, in fact, that it’s hard to keep track of them all: She is mother, soothsayer, monarch, deity, avatar, savior, teacher, redeemer, judge, kingmaker and executioner all rolled into one. So complex and powerful is her image that it is nothing short of a miracle that we ever dream about anyone else. How on earth do we ever find the psychic space to squeeze in a Gaga or a Madonna dream, to mention nothing of a Maya Angelou or a Margaret Thatcher one?

My Anna dreams are nothing if not consistent. Though the narratives and context may vary, the essential emotion is always the same: good old-fashioned shame. In my Anna dream I am invariably overwhelmed by the feeling that I have done something unforgivably unsavory and horrid.

Once, I was flitting through a crowded shopping mall wearing only a cropped Ed Hardy T-shirt. Yes, I was sans panties. Just at the moment of maximum public humiliation, Anna walked out of the nearest Chanel boutique looking flawlessly intimidating in shades and bouclé.

I woke up cringing. This feeling subsided only after I realized that I was, at least, wearing panties.

Cringing? Yes, we cringe and bow down before Anna because this is what you do in front of your queen. You worship and you curtsey, but you also cringe.

I am the same age as Anna. As baby boomers, we have a significant dollop of life experience under our belts. No longer in the first flush of youth, we are enriched by the machinations and tribulations of more than half a century. We have seen all kinds of things, both jarring and fabulous. We remember Kenneth Tynan saying the first “fuck” ever on live TV. We remember Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. We remember the Manson Girls, and Betty Ford’s drinking problem. We remember when heiress Patty Hearst got kidnapped, became Tania the revolutionary and started calling everyone “fascist insects.” We remember when David Bowie had a boy child and named him Zowie. We remember the Hillside Strangler. We remember Golda Meir. We remember when Alan Carr produced the Academy Awards with a Disney theme and all the pompous Hollywood actors got up and walked out because they felt it was so cheesy. We roamed the earth when women wore go-go boots and panty girdles and nylons. And we remember when men wore Hai Karate and had thick, butch tufts of hair on their various private areas.

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