The After-Show Table: Oysters and the Grammar of Fashion

The show ends. The lights come up, or in today's staging shift from dramatic to warm. The last model turns, and the applause rolls back from the front row through the press, the buyers and the guests nobody can quite place. The designer appears, bows, disappears. Then a partition opens, or the crowd drifts into the next room, and there is the table. Champagne is being uncorked beside an ice station, where a tight selection of oysters sits on silver, slate or zinc-lined wood.

The move from runway to reception is carefully staged, and the oysters are part of the staging: a food that asks for a moment's attention, served in a room built for being seen.

Why Not Canapés

A raw bar does a different job from passed canapés. Canapés are food you eat while doing something else. They are built to be eaten on the move without interrupting the conversation or the circulation a reception depends on, and at their best nobody notices them.

A raw bar works the other way. It is a place in the room you walk to, and it asks for a short pause and a little attention. Those pauses are where people meet. Two guests reach for the same oyster at the same moment, each with an opinion about it, and a conversation starts. The fashion world runs on introductions, so an oyster station is doing social work, and good hosts design it for that.

The Paris Inheritance

The grammar of the fashion-event raw bar is, in its original form, Parisian: the grand brasserie, with its écailler opening shellfish at a stall on the sidewalk and the plateau de fruits de mer as the natural opening of a serious meal. Paris set much of the fashion calendar's template, and its dining culture came with it.

The Oyster on the Runway

The oyster has also crossed from the table into fashion itself, in at least three documented ways.

The most literal is Alexander McQueen's "Oyster" dress, from his spring/summer 2003 collection Irere. It is a one-shouldered gown of bias-cut silk chiffon. The skirt is built from hundreds of individually cut organza circles, layered so densely that they look like the rough, frilled outside of an oyster shell. One is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it was shown in the Met's 2011 retrospective Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.¹

The most commercial is the Rolex Oyster. In 1926 Hans Wilsdorf gave the name to the first waterproof and dustproof wristwatch case, explaining that like an oyster it could stay underwater indefinitely without harm to what was inside. The following year Mercedes Gleitze, a London typist born in Brighton, wore one on her second Channel swim of 1927. She did not finish that swim, but the watch came out of more than ten hours in cold water still running, and Rolex took out the full front page of the Daily Mail to say so. Rolex counts her as its first ambassador.²

The most consequential is the pearl. Kokichi Mikimoto produced his first cultured pearls in Japan's Ago Bay in 1893 and round ones by 1905. By the 1920s cultured pearls were on sale, and a pearl necklace was no longer only for the very rich.³ The irony for anyone at an oyster bar is that pearl "oysters" such as the akoya, Pinctada fucata, belong to a separate family of bivalves. The oysters on the ice almost never produce gem pearls.

The Visual Logic

Fashion thinks in images, and a raw bar photographs beautifully. Gray-white shell sits against crushed ice, cold vapor rises in a warm room, and silver flashes or slate sits flat under the lights. The pictures work as well in event coverage as in a lifestyle spread. The best stations are designed knowing they will be photographed. The height of the display, the order of the varieties, the bottles in ice and the flowers at the edges are all composed for the camera.

A fashion event is a party and a photo shoot at once, and a good raw bar serves both: oysters worth eating that also look right in the picture.

Working Rules

A few working rules separate a raw bar the room remembers from one it forgets. Put it beside the natural flow of the reception, where it draws people in without blocking them, rather than dead center. Edit to three or four varieties. A tight selection reads as judgment, a long one as a shopping list, and fashion prizes judgment. Make the shucker visible and make sure they are good, because the shucking is the best show in the format. And have the Champagne open and poured before the first guest arrives, so the first impression is cold shell and a full glass rather than a line.

The guests in these rooms notice the width of a lapel and the angle of a hem. They will notice a warm glass or a struggling shucker too.

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