WHO IS JENNIFER SALZMAN

Who is Jennifer Salzman and how did her unique style come to influence so the landscape of dress design in such a short time with such a brief career? A simple thought dictated and put forward as an ambiguous question. Maybe it was the fleeting glance while perusing a magazine in the aisle of the supermarket that caught your eye and mesmerized your mind, or the starlet sauntering along the red carpet, her curves and breasts and derriere so perfectly exhibited that they dance and flicker before your eyes like something divine. Before you delve into the work of artistic genius and innovation you first have to understand the person behind it. Like so many great creative minds before her, she was initially ignored, misunderstood, overlooked, struggling, recognizing her own gifts long before the savage eyes of an adoring public. And as all glittering treasures in caves often filled with duds and fools gold do, she rose from obscurity, tiptoed along the tightrope of immortality before giving it all up just as the career began to take off.

Jennifer grew up in a small working class town on the banks of the Hudson River, a stone’s throw from New York City. Born in the summer of 1978 in Sleepy Hollow NY, into a respectable hardworking family, she was a witty and charismatic child, some might even say precocious. Her artistic talents had shown through at a very early age.  She was an excellent student, the lead in all the school and church plays, a beautiful singer and ballroom dancer and at one point dreamt of becoming an Olympic figure skater. But as we all know life has its trails and mountainous roads with hairpin turns and potholes the size of economic depressions and life has a way of taking the reins and guiding you down it’s own path, whatever path that might be. But early on in sketchbooks created high both in the Berlin Mountains as well as underneath her pink canopy bed with white posts dazzling and unique designs for dresses that would one day grace the covers of some of the world’s most popular magazines.

Because I am a straight male that has an obsession with golf, buffets and stamp collecting I am somehow viewed as wholly incapable of formulating a coherent opinion of what has become a rather cut throat and salty industry, the brutish knife fight we call the fashion world. But maybe in fact it is my oafish conjectures that should “carry weight” in a world where weight is as faux pas as cheap or outdated before being trendy.

The politics of the business mean nothing to me. Who the big players are and which little players might soar while most fall, is irrelevant, just other passengers on the A-train going through life the best we know how. I wouldn’t know them if I tripped over them in a cockfight. It is mere saloon chatter. To be honest I never paid one bit of attention to the creation or styles of different dresses until Jennifer Salzman came onto the scene.  Though her stint brief, her talents were miraculous and her artistic fingerprint was left for future generations to discover and alas imitate. As English writer Charles Caleb Colton once stated, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” And it is true now that whenever I see a stunning woman on the street, in a mall or gorging ferociously at one of the great American feeding troughs, I picture them lavishly filling one of her slight-of-wrist designs. I became an instant fan. A philosophical follower if you will, not of dresses per say, but the ingenuity of the designs and how they so easily manipulate the bodies of these women lucky enough to get their slinky delicate fingers on one of them. What one comes to realize when one opens their eyes to the world of dress designing is that there are so many talented artists and designers out there. Hundreds of thousands of them, some with names, most nameless, but then you have that 1%. It is those designers that are not only talented but visionaries. Some of them aren’t even the most talented artists but it is their originality that separates them from the rest of the cattle. Jackson Pollock, innovator in the world of painting could barely draw a stick figure but that wasn’t what was important. His work consumed him and transcends the ages, his canvasses selling for hundreds of millions of dollars and rightly so. Jennifer Salzman is the Jackson Pollock of the fashion world except for the fact that she is a brilliant artist. But the brushes and inkwells are collecting dust. The canvas remains propped up, unused, the early morning rays of the sun the only color.

How does it happen that someone with so much talent and so much promise whose work filled up spreads within the most popular magazines, whose dresses were worn by people at the Oscars and other award shows, generating head-turning attention so suddenly lays down the notebook and calls it quits just when it is all taking off?