Icons

ArtForum, Nov, 1995 by Guy Trebay

Among the many things I will read are cereal boxes, sugar packets, subway ads for "your dermatologist" Dr. Zizmor, advertising blow - ins, art magazines, fashion magazines (foreign too), pop-culture magazines, shelter magazines, literary magazines, magazines with staples that spear your fingers, Quest, Avenue, and an English rag devoted to the lives of social parasites called Hello! I mention this autobiographical tidbit to indicate, in a general way, that I equip myself to review a book by Dodie Kazanjian by being a person who will read anything.

It's true that I'll also try books by writers with large heads that contain big thoughts, and books by famous prose stylists who do not in any way resemble Dodie Kazanjian. They are a weakness of mine. Dodie Kazanjian is not a prose stylist; she is closer to what fashion people might call a prose moment. Her approximate moment is Vogue late '80, a time of some general confusion and also a time when editorial requirements at magazines were fairly undemanding. It was not as Dodie Kazanjian paraphrases Dickens, the best of times. Neither was it the worst. It was a middle time, when that aspect of culture represented by fashion skidded crazily around the road until it finally settled for driving up the center line. It was when most of the pieces collected in icons appeared.

What is an icon? In the view of Dodie Kazanjian, an icon is an absolute of style." It is something that makes us feel "wonderful, glamorous and beloved.' As such it is something we wish to possess. Using this standard, I can report that Crunch Fitness (Lafayette Street), the IRT #6 train, and various other locales around Manhattan are rich in potential iconic resources. But Dodie Kazanjian means something else by "icon," or at any rate her appetites run along more sublimated lines. Specifically, they run to a shopping list that serves as this book's backbone and organizing conceit. one Chanel suit, one Armani jacket, one winter coat in spotted-cat pattern, one authentic Kelly bag (and one copy), a selection of chaste under-things from Victoria's Secret, and one pair of Manolo Blahnik mules. There are also several other things that I forget.

Among the many things I have learned about Dodie Kazanjian from reading this book, I now know that she is a size 34 in Chanel, a size 36 in Giorgio Armani, a size four-and-a-half in Manolo Blahnik. I know that she is just over five feet tall and dislikes (no, hates!) to be called petite. I know that she has luxuriant black hair. I know that she shares Armenian extraction with another fashion devotee (and icon) named Cher. Unlike Cher, Dodie Kazanjian suffers from cellulite around her inner thighs.

Dodie Kazanjian is, in her own charmingly maladroit formulation, the original princess on the pea." As befits her imaginary station, she has a fondness for French phrases. Though not incapable of nice writing (her descriptions of a pearl's genesis is lovely), she as often employs a boarding school girlspeak peppered with such foreign "refinements" as coup de telepbone, unique au monde, and bien entendu! Her general approach is practical, though, and whatever the fantastical nature of the objects she desires, whatever the absurdity of their setting, however artificial their market or unwarrantable the price, she is a game shopper. In 1989, I became a writer for Vogue magazine. Not a fashion writer - my main beat was contemporary art and arrists - but now and then I was told to go out and report on some aspect of fashion that interested me. I felt a little like an anthropologist taking notes on some exotic tribe. But what fun it turned out to being

It developed that Dodie, the urban anthropologist, got acculturated quickly. Happiest in the field, she is particularly engaging when she suffers the anxiety induced when denied an object of desire. Her account of being wait-listed for a Chanel suit is instructive along these lines. Shopping gestalt meets journalism's random datum in Icons to produce both infobits (At Tiffany's, diamond engagement ring sales rose 40 percent in 1992 on top of the previous year's 30 percent increase") a lid the sort of quote for which fashion folk are insufficiently prized. On a jaunt with shoemaker Manolo Blahnik, Dodie Kazanjian learns that he's "been doing mules for donkey years." While visiting jeweler Barry Kieselstein-Cord, she's informed that diamonds are a fabulous middle-class statement for someone who's saved the money." Fashion-besotted designer Isaac Mizrahi one afternoon asks Kazanjian "Who needs fashion? Fashion is totally out." That's true. But as Dodie herself reminds us, the "lure of it just won't go away."

Guy Trebay is a columnist and senior editor at The Village Voice. A collection of his essays, In the Place to Be: Guy Trebay's New York,, appeared in 1994.