IT was hard to tell just who was talking over a plate of scrambled eggs at a cafe in the West Village on Tuesday: was it Elisa DeCarlo, a playwright and part-time vintage dealer, or her online alter ego, the Mad Fashionista? But neither one of her personalities was very pleased with the red carpet parade at Sunday night's Oscars.
"Nicole Kidman was a disaster," Ms. DeCarlo said, slipping into a yodeling voice that was loud enough to cause other diners to look up from their papers. "She looked like a chandelier had fallen on her head. I thought Tilda Swinton was very nice to make a dress out of a black bedsheet she found in a 99-cent store. And someone should get their hands on Jennifer Hudson and get her a bra."
Ms. DeCarlo describes herself as a fashion outsider. She wears a size 14 or 16, and most of her clothes are very old, like the purplish fake fur coat that was crumpled beneath her and once belonged to her mother. But the Mad Fashionista, who came to life two years ago as a blog character (diaryofamadfashionista.blogspot.com), is a fashion freak. Ms. DeCarlo conceived of her as a surrogate personality to shill for the plus-size vintage clothes that she sells on eBay and at specialistauctions.com. But her invented other became so popular that Ms. DeCarlo wrote a play about her called "Diary of a Mad Fashionista."
"A lot of people think the Fashionista is real," said Ms. DeCarlo, whose play is included in the Frigid New York Festival that opened on Wednesday.
"It's scary," she said. "Fashion is the only environment I've seen that is more hysterical than show business."
The plot: the Fashionista, a successful celebrity stylist played by Ms. DeCarlo, has been awarded a grant from Bill Gates to teach a course about fashion to welfare recipients at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The class is called "Haute Cou-poor."
"It's a pun on haute couture," she said. "Nothing rhymes with indigent."
The Fashionista has all the money in the world and no conscience, and also a rival in Sabrina Airchild, who dresses Nicole Richie and Mischa Barton, and sounds a lot like Rachel Zoe. As they do battle over a 1967 Christian Dior cheetah coat with otter collar and cuffs, the Fashionista discovers the price of a lifetime of bad karma, but not so well as to learn a lesson.
As she concludes to her indigent subjects, "You must be superficial in fashion or it will drive you insane."
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