With the recent passing of American Fashion's top cop, Joan Rivers, this month the New York City Police Department has been directed by Mayor De Blasio to assume the enforcement of good taste and masterful style on red carpets throughout the city.
While the city mourned the loss of the trailblazing comedienne, attention crazed ingenues and drag queens exploited the un-policed Fashion Week at Lincoln Center and the various movie premiers and theatre opening nights. Betty Page heels, butt cleavage, clam shell necklines, big silk flowers, unflattering tailoring, nauseous colors and worse combinations competed with unimaginable distortions of retro and future looks.
Police Commissioner Bratton said that he called in the Fire Department more than once to put out some of the flaming disasters passing through the velvet ropes. Champions of bad taste like Michael Musto formerly of the Village Voice and Hairspray Director John Waters claimed the NYPD and FDNY were trying to drown out fresh new voices in fashion and gender mania.
"If they don't like where these boys are wearing purple they just soak them down," said Waters. "This could never have happened when Joan was on the beat. If the clothes were terrible she'd be really cruel and ignore them and if they were too good she'd spark them up."
Joan Molinksy aka Joan Rivers came up from Brooklyn through Greenwich Village playing a lesbian fixated on a young woman played by then unknown Barbra Streisand in an Off Broadway play and then as one of the "New Wave" comics, the first generation after the demise of Vaudeville. Trailing stand up comics Jean Carroll and Phyllis Diller by almost a decade, Joan was the first woman to write, direct and star in comedies in both television and film and hosted her own late night talk show on Fox. Author of a dozen best sellers, infamous for her self depreciation and satirization of celebrities and politicians, Joan treated political correctness as censorship and criticism as praise. "If you want to do satire, you'll never be part of the party."
She was a courageous and outrageous comic, comedienne, humorist and satirist. I always loved her and I always will.
Don Arrup
Satire1
