Free The Asylum by Simon Doonan Page B

glamorous. A white girl named Pamla Motown. How Afro-eccentric!
    Another of Eric’s designer pals, a guy named Cliff, had a psychotic obsession with Marilyn Monroe. He had bleached his hair blond and, if Eric was to be believed, walked around the streets of London carrying a squirt bottle filled with peroxide. He used it to douse the heads of hostile construction workers and random passersby. His goal was to turn everyone he met into Marilyn, such was his commitment to the deceased movie icon. How Dada and recklessly outré!
    Though clearly deranged, these two, Pamla and Cliff, had accomplished something major. They had found a place to exist, a stylish, safe, satiny, sequined space, where their insane ideas were considered an asset. I knew in my heart that crazy Cliff and Afro-eccentric Pamla were kindred misfits. The world of fashion had given them refuge. Soon it would be my turn.
    God knows I needed a safe haven. I was just as crazy as they were, if not more so. I was obsessed with germs and washed my hands as often as Lady Macbeth. I was subject to overwhelming bouts of anxiety and frequently dreamed about eating my own hair. Looking back, I realize that I wasn’t so much losing my mind as losing my mind over the idea of losing my mind.
    Mental illness being so rife in my family, I was convinced that it was only a matter of time before I followed suit. If I did not find an outlet for my nuttiness and my gayness, if I was forced to live in our crap town for the rest of my days, then I would probably end up like poor batty Uncle Ken. He sat by the fire, rolling his own cigarettes in a nasty-looking metal contraption, staring into the middle distance and chatting to invisible entities.
    I desperately needed to escape my grim town and my nutty family milieu. Fashion seemed just as nutty, but in a good way, a glam-rock way.
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    TWENTY YEARS LATER.
    It’s the early nineties. I am working at Barneys New York. I have long since exchanged my crap town for a life of fashion and fabulosity. I am not famous or ridiculously wealthy, but I am creatively fulfilled. I have found refuge in a world of rolling racks and glamour.
    Though I am involved in all aspects of the Barneys store image, it is in the area of window display that I have made my name. My displays are jarring and punky and intentionally shocking: coyotes abducting babies, mannequins in coffins, fashion suicides, Christmas in July, a trailer-park tornado. My chosen themes have consistently erred toward the bizarre and unconventional. Early on in my display career I made a list of window-display taboos and then proceeded to bust them. Condoms, broken toilets, live vermin . . . it is hard for me to think of something inappropriate which I have not plonked in a display window at one time or another. Tammy Faye Bakker? I created an homage to her in the late eighties. There she was, standing next to a giant mascara wand. I have even plopped a replica of Margaret Thatcher in a black leather dominatrix frock in a holiday window. I see myself as a carny, rather than an artist, presiding over my very own Coney Island sideshow. One day I got sick of making displays that were so relentlessly pristine and simply filled the window with all manner of horrible detritus, including, but not limited to, broken furniture, cigarette butts, old newspapers, shopping coupons, soda cans and half-eaten Twinkies. The perfect backdrop for precious designer clothing.
    Did I lose my marbles? Negative. Window display provided me with a therapeutic outlet for all my crap-town rage and insanity. Uncle Ken and Granny had their basket weaving. I had my windows.
    So there I was, working at Barneys as Head of Creative Services, which sounds dirty but is just a fancy way of saying “marketing.”
    One hideously chilly winter morning an incredibly young Kate Moss entered the Barneys advertising department, wearing what looked like a