PARIS — There was a beach inside the Tennis Club de Paris.
There was sand, a red-, white- and blue-striped boardwalk, a pastel seersucker palm tree and a few tall white lifeguard chairs. But this wasn’t the Côte d’Azur, or even Miami. We were in Nantucket! Or Hyannis Port or Martha’s Vineyard or some other New England seaside idyll.
We were there with a quartet of male garden gnomes in gray seersucker skirts, a golden-gowned mermaid, an iridescent jelly fish and a sea gull in a feather-bedecked knickerbocker suit.
We were there with lobsters and whales and the totems of the preppy experience. With picnic plaids and picnic foods (watermelon, bananas, cherries). With women in towering shoes so vertiginous their legs shook as they minced, ever so slowly, around the room.
Wait … what?
With women laced so tightly into their incredibly elaborate jackets and gowns that their arms were bound to their sides, immobile. With women in hybrid garments woven and embroidered and pieced in the most painstaking, intricate ways, their various constituent parts (such as arms and legs and backs) laced together so they could be undone and mixed and matched at will.
Huh?
With women in sickening sweet pastels, whose faces were hidden by Freddy Krueger fruit-colored masks. Welcome to Thom Browne’s coast. It’s an unsettling place. This season more than any other. So’s the world around it, of course.
