Sat 6th April
In an ideal world, for the committed globetrotting fashionista, one’s year should always begin in the marvellously warm, welcomingly erratic, tumbledown beauty that is Rio de Janeiro, and its uber “babe, beach and body” moment that is its fashion week.
For, if any runway season best expresses what’s best about its own city, it is surely Fashion Rio, with its rolling shows, hyped-up audiences, caipirinha-fuelled after parties, glistening dawns and samba bars, where folks dance better than anywhere else in the world, that capture this unique city at its best.
I’ve jetted down to Rio most Januaries this century for the fashion season, and have grown to love the Cidade Maravilhosa, or Marvellous City, where every single day provides new adventures, every night fresh locales. Like many cariocas, I start each morning with a long swim. So many people take to the immense strands that make up the majority of Brazil’s 7,500km of coastline that the beach seems more like a living room or cocktail bar. Central Rio is divided into two great beaches – Ipanema and Copacabana – and while the former is immeasurably more chic, I prefer the wider Copacabana, where huge breakers crash down, and where, if you are not careful, the petite Japanese stylist you’re seeing at the time can be washed out into the rough Atlantic.
I usually swim a good part of the 4km beach, from north to south, and then trot all the way back to one of the beach kiosks perched on the edge of the incredibly beautiful black and white wave-patterned mosaic promenade created in 1970 by the great Roberto Burle Marx – for my money the greatest landscape “urbanist” of our time. Observed from a high hotel terrace, the promenade is a great work of modern art. Breakfast is always a fresh agua de coco, or fresh coconut, which the barman slices open dramatically with a swipe of his huge machete: it’s the most restorative drink known to man, and by Christ, one needs that after a triple club night out in Rio.
No day is complete without checking out a little architecture, and again my favourite architect is Brazilian – Oscar Niemeyer, who is still alive at 104. His curvaceous buildings echo the voluptuous fauna and bulbous basalt boulders of this country’s coastline.
Niemeyer’s buildings – from cathedral to war memorial – dot Rio, though his most-visited structure is MAC, the flying saucer-style art gallery reached by a ferry to Niteroi. The same craft from which the dancers descended in Orfeu Negro, the 1957 reworking of the Greek classical myth in Rio’s Carnival – and my favourite musical.
I am such an Niemeyer fan that if you Google my name, two of the first images are of me standing before his homes: an apartment building on Copacabana, and a villa in the hills above Rio’s elegant Lagoa neighbourhood. In the latter, it’s me taking photos with two striking ladies – Natalia Vodianova and Astrid Munoz, neither of them Brazilian, but both super at home in a city and fashion week that values physical beauty more than any I know.
The runways are packed with lithe lovelies. But late-night carousing in bossa nova bars and samba clubs in the funky city-centre ’hood of Lapa also unveils an amazing array of taut bodies and muscular grace. I’m a dance nut and go clubbing every week as I follow the fashion seasons around the continents. But my preferred dance bar is Clube dos Democraticos, a seriously funky joint at rua Riachuelo 91, in the old merchant’s quarter of Rio de Janeiro. Democraticos’ live, rockin’ 10-piece samba bands attract sensational local dancers, the best I’ve seen anywhere, and the local carioca gals don’t mind stepping out with foreigners. “You know, gringo,” a café crème stunner in a clinging purple satin cocktail dress told me one night, “you really don’t know samba, but you know how to move your hips, which is fine with me.”
For less bohemian fare, I head to the ever-amusing Londra, the impossible-to-get-into dance bar of Fasano, the Philippe Starck-designed hotel, beautiful with its raw tropical wood, white linen and perfect Ipanema-sunset, rooftop pool – a beachside pleasure palace that has the world’s most glamorous clientele.
Despite the very late nights, my days begin early in Rio. The place is too crazily gorgeous not to arise with dawn. From the roof of my last hotel I could admire the romantic Sugarloaf to the north; the canyons of tropically drenched apartment buildings rising in battered splendour to the south; aloof, bronzed-god surfers patiently waiting for the perfect Atlantic roller due east. Below, I join a pick-up game of futebol on the golden strand, the locals’ technical skills mocking me, even as their camaraderie included me in. When I tell them I support Liverpool, they stop calling me Godfrey and rechristen me Gerrard.
Fashion and football unite in Brazil, where Fashion Rio is spearheading the city’s renovation in time for the double whammy of the World Cup and Olympics. The clean-up job has not been without tension – whole favelas have been fairly brutally cleared – yet it’s still remarkable how this beach-blessed paradise has managed to clean up its act while keeping the funky glory of which it is legitimately proud.
Each season, a new crew of editors makes their first appearance at Fashion Rio and its larger rival, São Paulo. But having witnessed the BRIC nations’ seasons, when it comes to comparing runway shows, models, fabrics, personal style and range of designers, Brazil is a far more significant player than Russia, India or China. Fashion designers, and certainly models, are fêted and fantasised about that much more in Rio than in Moscow, Beijing or Mumbai. Here in Brazil, runway seasons are such a big deal that even the taxi drivers in Flamengo or the sarong salesmen on Copacabana know the names of the designers and models.
Launched over 15 years ago by the impresario Paulo Borges, Fashion Rio’s budget is now R$15m (about £4.6m), which is beginning to dwarf even London. Alone among the BRIC quartet, Brazil has talent that has begun to make a real impact.
Plus, there were lots of brands one has to love. Such as New Order and Osklen, both by Oskar Metsavaht – a dashing Estonian -Brazilian and the local Richard Branson – the latter a global brand in the making that is famed for its melange of recyclable materials and Niemeyer-influenced curves. Something of Niemeyer’s reinforced-concrete tropical architecture is always apparent in Osklen’s voluminous fashion. I should know: I own three pairs of Osklen pants, from buttoned-at-the-ankle jodhpurs to linen trousers that look like a long plant stem, and hang as smoothly.
Though on the beach, I am happy to see leggy gals wear Lenny, by Latin America’s most flamboyant grande dame and the continent’s finest beachwear designer, Lenny Niemeyer. Lenny – as she’s universally known – staged her 20th-anniversary runway show at Lagoa last time I was in town, with models slinking out onto a grey, wooden catwalk, and afterwards the whole place turned into a hyper-sexy party that lasted until dawn… I stayed to the end, before wandering home, my green-eyed companion insisting we stop at a beach dive bar, kissing me just as a rosy-fingered dawn laid her hand upon the Atlantic sky.
I’m also into wearing British Colony, with their expressionist fauna shorts and sleek calico jackets; and dating girls who wear Juliana Jabour, an It-gal look of hibiscus tops and ruffled skirts; or hanging with gals in Printing, known for its colonial embroidered linen chic and phantasmagorical wit.
Cool girls also wear Cantao, a brand famous for its abstract-expressionist-meets-haute-bohème style, which stages shows in the marvellous subtropical garden of Parque Lage, tucked underneath Corcovado, near to an area known charmingly as Christ’s Armpit. Built by the industrialist Enrique Lage, and remodelled in the 1920s by the Italian architect Mario Vodrel, the garden and villa have been featured in music videos for Pharrell Williams, Snoop Dogg and the Black Eyed Peas.
However, most shows are held in Pier Maua, an elongated waterfront warehouse complex being made over into giant contemporary-art centre and spanking new multi-stadia Metro line to Maracana, the planet’s biggest football ground. I’ve paid my football pilgrimage to that soccer shrine, sitting as guests in the president of Botafogo’s box with Natalia and buddies. Yes, yes, a dirty job, but some fashion-victim, party-animal heterosexual has to do it. So why not me?
Text Godfrey Deeny
