Real Genius

With some scratchy Edith Piaf songs wafting through the cavernous room, Levy's designs were borne by a half-dozen models whose only adornments were cameo mourning brooches, Edwardian lace collars, and white mascara. They silenced the restless and stunned the jaded. Leeched of their colors, the silvery, smoky, snowy pieces could be viewed as subversive constructions, their intentional runs and rips both endearing and intimidating. In suitable Nijinsky homage, several groups of people got up and walked out midshow (how damn rude!), yet there was a distinctly Miami moment: One woman, wearing a baroque fuchsia and gold brocade Jo-Ann Fabrics creation jumped onto the runway and strode a lap with the real models!

Levy, who normally is quite visible at her own events, was nowhere to be seen, even when the models, whose final-round outfits were semimatched white and silver gowns, took a final turn. The audience didn't linger. It dispersed quietly, murmuring about the spectacle.

"I've seen the Galliano show at the Louvre, and it wasn't this breathtaking," said a music and event promoter known for her own fashion sense.

Levy stayed out of sight to keep, in fact, from seeing. She didn't want to observe the rejecting faces she remembered from the "Sherbet" situation.

During the Election Day session at the studio, after some begging by the insistent dog, Levy showed a few pieces from the killed collection. They were darker, more burnt-looking than described, but to The Bitch, whose favorite color is orange, the few shrugs and sweaters seemed beautiful.

"Well, maybe I'll bring them back someday," Levy mused. "Maybe we'll have a 'Sherbet II' or a 'Presence.'"

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Finally Not Staying the Course

So, if in the past few months you have been to the Sagamore, the boutique hotel owned by the Taplin family on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, you must have asked yourself: What the heck is going on here?

The Sag once had a solid identity as a quiet oasis for locals, with its sunken library and staggered, ivy-trellised terraces. But from the video installation art show in the lobby, to the pea-soup-green frilly-shirted freak show at Social Miami, it has seemed recently to wobble off course.

This can perhaps be attributed to the mashup of publicists handling various aspects of the hotel's beyond-lodging commerce. Agents from Supermarket, Tara Ink, and even no-longer-erstwhile PR scion Theodore Ault help out at Social Miami and throw the confusingly named Whiskey Samba party there on weekend nights (sometimes). A few weeks ago, when The Bitch spotted a woman wearing a five-dollar Maidenform bra — and nothing else from the waist up — at the hotel's Horseshoe Bar, she put her head on her paws in dismay and nostalgia.

However, there is perhaps hope, not hoes, on the horizon. Ric and Raquel Watters, owners and very hands-on operators of the unique RikRak Salon on Brickell Avenue, this past week opened the RikRak Beauty Bungalow in a quiet corner of the Sag. "It's not quite a full-on spa, though we offer spa services, and I wanted to stay away from the whole 'holistic' thing — that's so over," Ric Watters told The Bitch. Watters, who gives Barbra Streisand her honeyed highlights and recently helped Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon primp for the Bang Music Festival, is the antithesis of the celebrity hairstylist. With shaggy leonine locks of his own, Watters is down-to-earth, pragmatic, hard-working, early-rising — just the tonic the hotel needs.

Further, The Bitch has learned that in the past six months, Jennifer DeMarchi from Park Avenue-based Dan Klores Communications stepped in as the Sagamore's meta-public relations magnate. You don't see DeMarchi's name as a stand-alone newsmaker too often. This bodes well, The Bitch thinks, for the beachfront resort.