If too many cooks spoil a broth, then how many fashion designers does it take to cause a meltdown? Just one, and her name is Sp*rkle.
This past Saturday, at the opulently spledorifically magnificentesimal Villa di Waterloo Station du Palais-Royal de Lincoln Center d'Oyster Bay Expressway, the who's who of the crème de la crème de la crème (de la crème) of the crème de menthe of the écureuil dans un chapeau particulièrement adorable of the fashion world gathered to bask in the certain radiant glow of magic and delight and whimsy that is Sp*rkle.
People not of the fashion world (kindergarteners, botanists, Jacobins) certainly might remember Sp*rkle from her tweenage heartthrob days, that former Mouseketeer turned singer-songwriter, turned songwriter-actress-director-producer, turned producer-stunt-coordinator-caterer-DJ-taxidermist-ping-pong-champion (non-sexual), turned several dozen other hyphenated things, too. For those living in a cave -- especially caves that don't receive Women's Wear Daily -- her name had been buzzing around the runways and editorial offices, and certainly not just because of the asterisk in the middle of it. No, this was because Sp*rkle had recently decided to take a stab at fashion.
"Fashion?" she said -- whimsically, magically, delightfully -- in the now famous interview with Entertainment People of Trimesterly Variety of the World, smiling her certain toothless smile, chawing a big old certain lump of chewing tobacco. "That's, like, the stuff with clothes and stuff, in' it?"
It certainly was! And so, Sp*rkle was placed at the helm of her own fashion brand, with as much money at her disposal as it took to start the Gemini space program. Her foreign business partners -- mysterious Bavarian agro-tech venture capitalists known for their work with the microchip-gluten-seahorse hybrid, its application being more theoretical than practical -- launched a cross-platform, multi-variate, multi-multi-co-axial, multi-multi-multi-million dollar marketing campaign, meant to instill in all audiences and all markets, dead or alive, subdivided by race, gender, and species, the Pavlovian response that at the heart of all things fashion and luxury was Sp*rkle. (Then, figuring clothes might be important, they hired some designers.)
There was, of course,some early controversy. As with most things le monde de la mode de la haute couture de la glace à la fraise, the money lasted a whopping seven and a half days, the venture capitalists can't be mentioned due to pending litigation at the IMF, and everybody's suing everybody suing everybody else. In creative terms, this pre-preview collection didn't quite achieve its marketed goals, and the designers are now being confined, somewhat permanently, to the rest and relaxation (and electroshock therapy) of a medium-security psychiatric ward in Montana.
Even so, there's certainly more than one way to skin a cat, and this chat écorche du vin de table et le steak frites came in the form of Sp*rkle taking the helm of her company and single-handedly designing her entire first collection. During the previews, reviewers certainly had strong reactions. A photographer was rumored to have muttered, "Oh, the humanity!" before she broke out in hives and had to be escorted from the building, several Japanese bloggers could be seen rending their hair, whereas a market editor snatched a broach from her colleague and said, "Ye light, let me see thee for one last time!" before gouging her eyes out.
These reactions certainly did not sit well for Sp*rkle. Sometime during the after-after-after-party (celebrating the Caligulian success of the after-after-party), bedazzled blackberry in hand, she went on a Twitter rant, spewing forth a veritable fountain of Anti-Inuit vitriol. Her army of publicists -- literally, a roving band of Hessian mercenaries -- rushed to her defense, explaining that she had never even been to Alaska, barely knew what an Inuit was, and had never learned to read. They placed the blame squarely where it belonged: Exhaustion. (Exhaustion, of course, being the street name for the strain of crystal meth that Sp*rkle and her band of roadie Sp*rkle-heads invented in the basement of her Hollywood Hills estate, which may or may not have caused the Los Angeles brushfires.)
But that was all so very la saison dernière de jardins suspendus de Babylone, in that it happened more than 72 hours ago. With equal parts magic, whimsy and delight, a sense of eager anticipation dominated the air, and not just because the air was thick with the smell of rendered whale fat, or because the assembled were preparing to watch the show on top of artisanal trampolines that had been built especially for the occasion by the Iñupiat tribe of North Alaska. Meant to support the weight of one full-grown Iñupiaq man or 14 market editors -- minus ceremonial headdresses/Louboutins, respectively -- the artisanal trampolines were certainly a nod to the out-of-court settlement with the Eskimo peoples in the wake of her anti-Inuit Twitter rant.
Unfortunately, there were some problems in the Iñupiaq-to-French translation of the artisanal trampoline assembly directions; after several glasses of Côtes du Rhône, the translator had great difficulty distinguishing between the Inupiaq words for "load-bearing wooden pegs" and "margarine." Two of the artisanal trampolines had already collapsed, and many of the assembled feared for their lives. But such was the magic and whimsy and sheerly delightful unpredictability of all things Sp*rkle.
Nonetheless, the front trampoline was a déjeuner sur l'herbe du placard de la coutellerie de l'beaucoup beau monde, and of fashion bloggers Bryan Boy, Tavi Gevinson, Rumi Neely, and Kristin Prim, mentioned here so that they'll tweet this article, and of the Iñupiat elders. As mandated by the court, the show would be doubling as a spring whaling festival, or Nalukataq. The quaq and muktuk of a bowhead whale had already been distributed among the awaiting Iñupiaq villagers, seated in rows one through three of Trampoline Section B (as part of the court settlement), and was now being cooked up, hence the general whaley smell now wafting through much of the first arrondissement.
Amidst the malodeur baleine and collapsed trampolines, there were the clothes -- such magical, whimsical, delightful clothes! For Fall/Winter, the House of Sp*rkle showed a 714 pieces collection of haute couture, bridal couture, divorce couture, ready-to-wear, menswear, sportswear, Tupperware, scubawear, muskoxenwear (out-of-court settlement), jeans, accessories, wear-not-otherwise-specified (Garden Gnome collection), beauty, hotel, profiteroles and a collection collection, to keep track of all other collections.
The show opened to the strains of a post-post-punk hypno-gyro-electro-clash version of Sp*rkle's hit singles, "Ridi(k)ulousityiousness," and "U R 2 B the 1 4 Me," blasted at volumes so loud that a Los Angeles class submarine running exercises off the coast of Newfoundland thought it was under attack, sending much of the North Atlantic fleet into high alert, thus making this one of the first runway shows to draw protests from both Greenpeace and NATO.
The first model rode out en caribou -- literally, on a caribou (out-of-court settlement) -- wearing nothing except a futuristic gold lamellar cuirass, an image perhaps meant to evoke that of Queen Elizabeth I riding to her troops at Tilbury, though, of course, en caribou. A study in powerful yet graceful femininity (and magic, whimsy, delight, etc.), the dress certainly reminded many of the 1960s Space Age collection of French designer André Courrèges, of the architecture in Fritz Lang's 1927 German expressionist film Metropolis, of ancient roman lorica squamata chain-mail armor -- and of Versace's Spring/Summer 2007 Collection, because that's where the dress had come from.
Traditionally, designers like to present one season at a time, but Sp*rkle certainly does like to cut against the grain of the various other clothing metaphors we could so deftly include, interspersed with French phrases, here. After the last model left the runway, the music started right back up again, and fall/winter led into spring/summer, which led into resort, post-resort, pre-fall, and then into post-post-resort-pre-pre-fall-definitely-pre-winter, explained in the press release as being a Thursday afternoon approximately 18 weeks from three Fridays ago (slightly cloudy, 30 percent humidity, a chance of scattered thunderstorms later in the evening).
All of this was the lead up to FWSS∞, a Sp*rkle-specific season meant to transcend all possible permutations of the space-time-fashion continuum, though totally separate from any market collection the editors may have previewed not 36 hours ago.
With its velvet, lace, tulle, neoprene, Kevlar, spandex, seal fur (out-of-court settlement), more lace, more tulle, one big giant ball of silly putty, elk meat (out-of-court settlement), not to mention the ominous, phosphorescent glow of its trademark Sp*rklefabric, the House of Sp*rkle's FWSS∞ line was perhaps the most interesting, though one generally couldn't tell whether the models were coming or going, which may have been caused by a refraction of the visual plane, stemming from an actual rift in the space-time continuum. When reached for comment, editors declined to speak on-record, largely because they had disappeared into this increasingly noticeable rift in the space-time continuum.
This now certainly very alarmingly visible rift in the space-time continuum appears to have been caused by instabilities in Sp*rklefabric's signature blend of rayon, cashmere and unbihexium. For those not in the fashion world, Unbihexium is a theoretical superactinide g-block element, atomic number 126, with an azimuthal quantum number of four, which has long thought to be doubly-magic -- and whimsical and delightful! -- in that it has both a closed neutron and a closed proton shell, giving it a radioactive half-life measured in millions of years.
Or, should we say previously theoretical, because Sp*rkle, using her knowledge of experimental quantum chemistry gleaned from years of cooking up her own Exhaustion (to remind: crystal meth) with her Sp*rkleheads, had synthesized unbihexium to fashion her latest whimsical and delightful and highly atomically unstable collection.
The clothes of the FWSS∞ collection certainly did ring alarm bells, these alarm bells being at the Society for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, where nuclear physicists (non-fashion) had just detected the mass of radioactive instability. Had they been among the fashion set, they certainly would have gotten the hint a lot earlier, because the gift bags contained House of Sp*rkle branded gamma-ray spectroscopes, along with some nice scented candles and hair product, to detect any nuclear imbalances in the Sp*rklefabric, or this now certainly staggeringly very, very large rift in the space-time continuum.
Alors, even those who aren't of the fashion world certainly can bask in the radiant, resplendent, redolent, and, as it turns out, radioactive glow of the magic and whimsy and delight that is The House of Sp*rkle -- except for any government officials being housed several miles beneath the Yucca Mountains. Our atmosphere is clouded in pitch and ash, our planet is now devoid of most plant-life, our universe is an infinite purgatory of antimatter and timelessness, meaning that no man, woman or child ever has to worry about being late for the Marc Jacobs show.
When it comes to fashion, après Sp*rkle, le deluge!