“One of the requisite skills for sitting at a fashion show is being able to roll your eyes, talk to the person behind you, chew mints and say, ‘Yves Saint Laurent did it better years ago,’ all at once.” —John Duka, “Notes on Fashion”
As a young gay man in New York in the early 1970s, despite my leftist, revolutionary political leanings, I was crazy about style and clothes. That is, genuine clothes, not the throw-away H&M dreck we have now. My whole generation was. Young gay boys landing in New York wanted to work in fashion and be the next Calvin Klein, the way that they now want to be the next Tim Cook. Clothes were total sex, sometimes even better than sex, which to me is saying eons. Clothes went with nightclubbing, disco, drugs, gorgeous women, and the men who buzzed around them, and, of course, buzzed around each another.