Down and Delirious in Mexico City (8 page)

The casino's downstairs is a long hall with poor lighting and paint peeling off the walls like skin on a banana. The runway consists of metal folding chairs laid out on the faded tile floor, facing each other. Waiters walk around serving shots of tequila in teensy plastic cups. Camera flash punctuates the air. Friends greet each other, posing and floating air kisses. People lustily stare at one another. The show is already two hours late, and a palpable sense of expectation and drama fills the room, a feeling that we are there to witness something spectacular and important—not the fashion show, but one another.

The lights dim and a spotlight catches the rear of the runway. Red lighting from behind an opaque screen illuminates a logo in jagged punk-rock letters,
MARÍA PELIGRO,
and the show begins. The audience watches the models with determined severity. The line of clothing—subdued large-print flannels in large, angular cuts—is by a young designer named Paola Arriola, who is pretty, has orange hair, and is from Argentina. When she walks down the runway to take her bow, camera flashes sizzle at her from all sides. It isn't Fashion Week, and no major foreign headliner is sweeping into town. Not a single celebrity is in sight, in fact. But no bona fide celebrity is necessary at the María Peligro show because in this world, everyone is a celebrity or behaves like one. It is an independent fashion show in Mexico City, and that means it is—to a certain set, to the fashion-party bloggers—the most important thing happening tonight.

Earlier in the day I stop at Clinica, a small boutique showcasing young, independent fashion designers from Mexico, in the Colonia Condesa. The partners there, Enrique González Rangel and Denise Marchebout, designers from Guadalajara, tell me about the show. I tag along, taking pictures and taking notes. We stop for sushi in the Roma and meet up with more people heading out for the night.
I imagine us as the cast of a droll art-house movie: the gay disco promoter, the strikingly beautiful kabbalist, the German graphic designer, the film-studio executive from Los Angeles and his young Mexican boyfriend. More than enough sexy sceney energy is here to go around already, and the sashimi hasn't even arrived.

We pile into a row of cars waiting outside and head downtown. At the Casino Metropolitana, the clothes by Arriola are interesting, yes. But what really gets the crowd going is the majestic ascent up a glistening marble staircase to the after-party. The dazzling neo-baroque ballroom has lush plants and gilded surfaces and red velvet beckoning from every corner. The city's young and fashionable elite dance into the room, toward the pounding beats of an electro DJ, and to the bars, where men and women in crisp black-and-white uniforms eagerly dispense free cocktails. Every few seconds a new camera is thrust into a random face or group of people. Everywhere you look, instantaneous modeling.

I have never seen posing like this in Los Angeles, and people in Los Angeles carry posing in their DNA. Here, they pose in the gilded sitting rooms, they pose on velvet couches, they pose with their mouths agape and pose grabbing one another inappropriately. The energy keeps rising as the music does, as if there might be no other place in the world worth being at than this fashion party in the Centro Histórico of Mexico City with hundreds of familiar strangers—some Mexican, some British, some American, some a mixture of Mexican, and others of Latin American polyglot heritage. It feels as if a dam has broken, and it is only a Wednesday.

The artist Miguel Calderón, whom I befriended a year earlier, keeps a stash of canned beer near a speaker and scours the room to find me a date. Vicky Fox, a towering transwoman with yellow hair and brown skin, hurls herself dramatically onto the floor and begins contorting about on the weathered tile when I ask to take
her picture. For the entire night, a small pixielike character with a bowl haircut and an all-white elfin outfit trails behind me, posing nonchalantly for photographs at any moment and rarely saying a word.

A circle quickly forms and we decide it is time to go. I have lost Enrique and Denise in the drinking and dancing spree. A group of us glide down the stairs to the open street. We gallop over to the plaza in front of the Museo Nacional de Arte, brilliantly lit in the 3:00 a.m. chill. We—it is impossible to say whom with precision—pile into a cab and speed forward, destination uncertain. Crammed in the backseat with Vicky Fox, the pixie in white, Miguel Calderón, and a few others, I am so drunk and happy I become inexplicably furious at the driver. I demand he not drive us around in circles, running up the fare, as cabdrivers in Mexico City often do. In my delirium, I accuse him of cheating us even before we move a few blocks. I curse him and curse all cabdrivers everywhere in the world and on other planets. The driver wisely ignores me.

We arrive at a cramped cantina in the lower Condesa, and I feel transported to, of all places, Paris, circa 2003. Echoes of a visit there. A dance floor, dim lighting, nothing to drink but beer, cigarette smoke, magically liberated young women who appear to inhabit other time zones and cultural genres—1990s rock, 1990s hip-hop, 1990s electro. The pixie trails along with us the entire time, saying barely a word. I do not learn his name until the morning after, Quetzalcóatl Rangel Sánchez, a fashion designer and half of the creative force behind the up-and-coming label Marvin y Quetzal. As the sun begins rising, Quetzal and I wind up navigating Avenida Revolución in Tacubaya, inviting ourselves into a new friend's apartment at the iconic Ermita building, an art deco landmark. We watch daybreak from the high windows and marvel at the morning traffic roaring below us. The following day, we manage to make
it back to our respective houses. I had somehow lost a couple of prized homemade necklaces. Quetzal says we'd find ourselves online and be in touch.

We talk that very night. We come to a solid conclusion: “We should go out again.”

For a period in the mid to late 2000s, fashion is
in,
in Mexico City, and I feel compelled to cover every aspect and every minute of it. Mostly, this involves socializing and drinking every night of the week at sponsored parties. The Paola Arriola show is reportedly sponsored by a young party impresario named Rodrigo Peñafiel, a surname seen on millions of bottles and cans of mineral water across Mexico. I quickly learn how the parties work. A good amount of money is always behind the best parties in D.F., the ones where there's no hassle to get in and no hassle for drinks. You just . . .
arrive.
The tricky part is knowing where and when, and with whom. For the next six months or so, as if it is my holy duty, I attend every fashion-scenester-hipster event in Mexico City that I can get into. I network with promoters, DJs, organizers, and producers. I get myself on e-mail lists and then at-the-door lists. I kiss lots of cheeks and shake lots of hands. I watch all the relevant event updates on Facebook feeds. Little by little, doors open, lists expand, access becomes an assumption. If I am not guaranteed access, I learn that with the right attitude and approach, a true Mexico City fashionista can talk his way into virtually anywhere.

I had learned how to network in Los Angeles after living in neighborhoods such as Echo Park and Silver Lake. I was already a dedicated scenester. In Mexico City, I begin gaining access not only to hipster parties and fashion shows, but to the burgeoning stream of film festivals, high-society art openings, mega-concerts,
and brand-sponsored cocktail hours. To the movers of the scene in Mexico City, I was “from Los Angeles,” and in this moment both cities gave the other equal levels of cool cachet. But I didn't confuse one for the other. The Mexico City scene felt like one sustained climactic moment, night after night, week after week, driven by the sense that in this town more than anywhere else, the party is
it.
In Mexico for as long as anyone can remember, nothing has been more important than to deliver oneself to the rite of the fiesta whenever the opportunity presents itself. And no one in Mexico City at the moment is partying harder and more exuberantly than its fashionable hipsters.

By its very nature the formula is tricky. Devotion to such partying can do wonders for the vitality of someone's professional profile, but without the proper precautions, it can also cause a professional downfall, or worse. This is the world that I fell into right away in Mexico City, a world that is exceedingly welcoming to foreigners. These are the people for whom partying is synonymous with work—and with risk. For me, like them, it becomes an obsession.

“I was supershy at the beginning,” the fashion blogger César Arellano tells me over lunch one day in the Condesa. It is January 2008, a year after he launched his blog, Diario de Fiestas. Our conversation takes place in English, characteristic of the first-world leanings within the Mexico City scenester community. César has a lean face, darty eyes—good for quickly scanning a room—and a sneaky grin. He wears neckties and bow ties and shiny wing tips, stuff like that.

The first post on the blog is titled “En el Cultural Roots,” referring to an underground downtown club that caters to the Mexico City reggae scene. César had gone to a “weird” art-rock show there. He posted just two images of the night: a shot of the backside of
a girl in a pink vintage-looking dress dancing wildly, holding a microphone, and a shot of a person holding a microphone, wearing an absurd sumo-wrestler costume, a silver eye mask, and a silver metallic wig.

“I took these photos in November,” Arellano writes on his first post. “They introduce perfectly the tone that I'd like to frequent on this blog. . . . I don't remember the band, but to me they were brilliant.”

Photos follow of parties at an underground club called El Patio de Mi Casa, then shots at an opening party for the Kurimanzutto gallery, then one of César's outfits hanging on a door waiting for the night to begin (“Vintage Yale University sports coat, T-shirt by María Peligro, JBrand skinny jeans, and plaid SB Jordan sneakers,” he writes). More posts followed, like candids from debauched living-room birthday parties. March came around, and with it, a barrage of posts from Fashion Week. In a short time, Arellano added links, mixing little blogs and big houses: I'll Be Your Mirror, Givenchy, Diary of a Third World Fashionista, Balenciaga, Love Naomi, Mexican Flamboyant, Prada. People started looking.

“I used to go to a party and take ten pictures and that was it,” César says at lunch. “But they were my friends, and it was easy to take pictures of them. It was me and it was my close friends and that was it. Then three months later, everyone was looking at it. I don't know, one hundred people were looking at it. The same people who were going out every weekend.”

The need to document was apparent. After spending some time apprenticing with a photographer in San Miguel de Allende,
and freelancing for an established Mexico City fashion designer, Arellano began meeting young fashionistas who were resettling in the capital and putting on parties. So many had spent time abroad, while many were foreigners themselves: Argentines, Venezuelans,
and the Mexican-born but U.S.-raised. In a loose phenomenon, many young Mexicans had soaked up Paris, London, Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, Barcelona, and other world capitals in the early part of the 2000s. They returned to Mexico City around 2005 and 2006 with a refined global sensibility. All were hungry to party—and to prove themselves.

“I felt there was a scene, you know, there was something happening,” Arellano explains. “I felt it at Patio. I remember I was at a Zombies party, more than a year ago, and there were at least twenty people dressed amazingly, and the music was great, and the outfits were great.” He pauses, as though it sounds so self-evident. “And the night was amazing.”

Arellano kept posting. Viewers of Diario de Fiestas rapidly doubled many times over. By late 2007, it seemed every scenester in the city was logging on to the site, looking for shots of themselves from the night before, ogling strangers, critiquing looks, looking for hints for the next spate of parties. From afar, fashion-conscious bloggers in other world capitals started taking notice, adding Diario de Fiestas to their link bars, to peek in and see what the cool kids of Mexico City were wearing on any given night.

Partying, it turned out, is
work.
For his entry documenting the María Peligro runway show and after-party, César expresses some exhaustion with the world he is so faithfully recording. He writes, “At one moment in the night I got tired of the scene and the alcohol and eternally carrying around my camera. After a week, I'm recuperating from it. It must have been the overdose of runway shows and after-parties in October.”

“God,” he adds in English. “I'm so glad it is over.”

It is late spring now, and there is another party at the club called Pasagüero.

“Another party” is how it is described to me and how I describe it to others. Another party, after some other parties, and before a few others to come. I don't know why I am here again. Maybe it is Fashion Week. Maybe it is some other foreign brand in town to penetrate the market: Bacardi, Absolut, Nike, Adidas. Maybe it is someone's magazine-issue release party. I had been to Pasagüero before for one of those. It is in Centro, on a pedestrian street, and the music always bounces loudly up the ditches made by the old buildings facing one another. Back in the early 2000s, which is to say, a million years ago, Pasagüero was
the place
to be in Centro for Mexico City's scenesters. There and at El Patio de Mi Casa, which was more “underground,” but anyway that was well before Pasaje America came around, also in Centro, when that club turned into
the place
to be for—oh—about two months.