Fashion Forward II

Little Edie's revolutionary costume strikes again! Check out this fantastic and very thorough article from the National Post.....

This year's look: The Wrecked Socialite
Karen Burshtein, National Post
Published: Friday, January 11, 2008

Each year, the world of fashion seems to require a new It icon. Two years ago, it was pin-up girl Bettie Page. Last year, a doomed queen, Marie Antoinette. This season, it's Little Edie, the wrecked New York socialite and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy.

The subject of a cult 1975 documentary, Edith Bouvier Beale, led a bizarre Tennessee Williams-like existence at Grey Gardens, her family's crumbling, vermin-infested East Hampton mansion, where, after a brief stint as a model and aspiring actress, she spent decades taking care of her mother, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (Big Edie), with dozens of cats their only company.

An iconoclast in dress, as well as lifestyle, her "revolutionary costumes" have served as inspiration to the occasional eccentric designer, drag queen or Olsen twin. But today, Little Edie is all over the culture, like so many raccoons in the attic.

Her signature look would make Martin Margiela hyperventilate: old cashmere skirts worn upside down over torn stockings, cardigans worn back to front, ratty old fur coats worn with bathing caps and hot pants and turbans fashioned from sweaters or towels and fastened with an enormous brooch.

Designers Todd Oldham, Isaac Mizrahi and John Bartlett have all sampled Edie's style, and photographer Steven Meisel paid tribute to her a few years ago in an Italian Vogue spread.

But the recent Little Edie fever is due, in part, to a new HBO movie about the Bouvier Beales. Currently filming in Toronto, with a screenplay by Patricia Rozema, the movie will feature Drew Barrymore in the lead role. Barrymore bears a striking resemblance to the remarkably beautiful and well-connected young debutante (who claimed she'd once been engaged to Joe Kennedy Jr.), scurrying glamorously through the Royal York (posing as New York's Pierre Hotel, where Little Edie came out before she unravelled).

But the fever is also due to Paris designer John Galliano's Spring 2008 fashion show, which, to the soundtrack of the Tony Award-winning musical Grey Gardens, paid homage to Little Edie's style, with off-kilter sweaters and models' grey hair wrapped around their heads like a turban.

Marc Jacobs also pays tribute to Little Edie this season with lots of layered looks, as does Philip Lim, though the latter's "pedigree minus the prudence" theme was a looser interpretation, primarily dresses that looked like wrapped towels.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the Little Edie look, however. Toronto fashion writer David Livingstone, for one, would prefer to "get this God damn tiresome phenomenon into a scarf shaped like a sweater and be done with it."

But the Edies are hotter then ever. Pop culture can't seem to get enough of the ladies who ate ice cream out of containers they shared with their cats.

Someone out there in YouTube land has done a mash-up, featuring Edie's most famous fashion statement, uttered in the opening sequence of the documentary Grey Gardens: "This is the best thing to wear for the day." She was referring to a tablecloth she had pinned into a skirt and wore over mesh stockings that she'd pulled over shorts. "The best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt, I think," she says. "And you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape."

Any fashion employee worth his or her Tods will spout Edie's motto at least once a day in the office. He or she will also be expert in the gnomic asides and high-camp statements Edie delivers throughout the movie: "I can't get the thumbtack in the wall ... I've got the saddest life."

Which may explain why Rufus Wainwright devoted a song to Grey Gardens on his Poses album and why Sarah Jessica Parker has been photographed recently wearing a ratty fur coat, sequined skull cap and pyjama bottoms. Kylie Minogue is said to have watched Grey Gardens 100 consecutive times. Try renting the DVD - chances are, it's been checked out by a teenager who covers her head with a stained Hermès scarf she found at Goodwill.

The Grey Gardens documentary was directed by Albert and David Maysles, of Gimme Shelter fame. Jackie Kennedy's sister, Lee Radziwill, hired the brothers to make a film about the Bouvier family, including their eccentric aunt (the sister of their father, John Bouvier) and cousin. But the two Edies proved to be the film's most enthusiastic participants.

The Bouvier Beales had already known notoriety. In 1971 the National Enquirer broke the story that Jackie's cousins were living in squalor, camped out together in a single bedroom in the crumbling 28-room mansion where they also kept a fridge full of cat food. The house stunk of feline urine and had no running water.

Jackie and Lee intervened cheque-wise, before the Suffolk country Health authorities made good on their threat to have the beach-front dwelling condemned.

Five years later, by the time the Maysles started filming, the house had fallen back into a state of decay. The documentary that was meant to be about the Bouvier family ended up being a film about the two Edies, which Jacqueline and Lee, mortified, tried to have burned. Watching the film is like watching a train wreck - you can't take your eyes off the Edies' folie à deux.

Drinking cocktails from a jam jar in her twin bed, the 79-year-old mother, all sagging breasts and straggly hair, tosses jabs at her then 54-year-old daughter. They bicker and talk about the past, yet seem at times to sweeten to each other's flea-bitten company.

Amid the squalor are moments of trenchant wit. "Oh look, the cat's going to the bathroom on my portrait," Big Edie says. "I'm glad someone's doing what they want."

The film could also serve as a pre-feminist-era metaphor for missed opportunity. Like a Chekhovian sister, Little Edie still mourns the few years she lived in New York. ("I was going to have an audition with Max Gordon, the famous producer! He discovered Judy Holliday!").

By the film's end, though, you have one foot on their side, if only because they are so damn unapologetic about their life (quite Jackie O, come to think of it).

So what is it about this Little Edie style? It's not just the fleas that make us scratch our heads. We have to wonder: What exactly is so important and, for that matter, so "now" about it?

Well, Edie does, as Todd Oldham points out in an interview on the DVD, possess a hallmark of the truly stylish: Consistency. "She knew what suited her. Those turbans, for example, were perfect for her face," he says. (She was also, reportedly, bald, afflicted with alopecia.)

But the real importance of Edie's style, as another designer once explained, "is not so much the clothes as the spirit, the utter originality of them. Edie Beale's look goes beyond fashion. It's like the true meaning of the word style."

In fact, her utterly nutter style has had an impact on how we dress. Let us count the ways:

Edie helped introduce the notion of styling a look, rather then merely wearing clothes. And layering: Onion dressing has, so far, been the defining characteristic of this decade. Recycling: The third-life fur coat is a big trend - now that grandmother's ratty mink is environmentally green, the Fur Council of Canada tells us.

Edie was also a pioneer of high-lo chic and the dishevelled rich-girl look, best exemplified by the Olsen twins. Fashion bloggers, who say "That's so Little Edie" about a look, explain: "The point is that once upon a time, you had all the money in the world ... and look at you now."

There's something pretty existential about that. Not only does Edie's style challenge aristocratic notions of acceptable eccentricity, there's also a foreboding subtext about privilege - that it's not going to last any way.

Of course, what's troubling is that it's hard to tell how much of the ratty sweaters is pure provocation and how much is poverty. In which case co-opting Edie's look might be exploitative.

There's something inherently contradictory about aping the Little Edie look, since the whole point of her style was that it was truly original. She'd want you to create your own revolutionary costume. The question is: Do you dare?

Epilogue: Little Edie died five years ago, aged 84. Big Edie died one year after the Maysleses' film was released. Little Edie finally returned to New York, where she had a brief run in a cabaret show, then spent her final years comfortably in Florida, where she swam in the ocean every day and, instead of cats, had hordes of fan mail for company.