CULTURE: Fashion: Neiva Exposition 2016

Neiva

As the models lift their bags, as the stagehand adjusts a zipper, the lights flare and the group files onstage. They’re normal people chatting, then for forty seconds they’re mannequins, then they emerge knackered and reborn. An A4 with the word VOGUE is sellotaped to the wall. A designer hectors the model who missed his cue. More snapped fingers are permitted here than anywhere else. A clutch of uglies, of which I am firmly one, watches from the side.

I should be specific, this is the Neiva Fashion Exposition. To be more specific, Neiva is a town known for its heat. Its singsong accent is mocked. Backwards, that’s the view from the capital. But here they are, the Bogotá socialites, the designers from Madrid, the svelte or fat men who work in oil, a suited Londoner. They’re here for what Neiva is newly famous for: modelling. To be more specific than is necessary, we are sat in the José Eustasio Rivera Convention Centre, Neiva, Huila, Colombia, Calle 21 #5-81, but this is a place of unnecessary specifics, where gaining a gram can have you kicked out of the catwalk.

A marketplace has grown in the convention centre hall. It hums. Three hat stalls compete for affection. Protein is sifted, alchemised, sold in bars. A woman waxes eyebrows, there and then. The clientele is townspeople exclusively, the models don’t emerge from backstage. It can be tempting to describe those models as masked or guarded because, as with anyone who is beautiful and famous, the audience feels they know them, as if they know them well in fact, certainly as if they deserve a conversation, and it can really put them out when they realise otherwise.

In the interest of journalistic fairness, some of the convention is naff. They’ve hired local performers and, this from a reggaeton fan, they can’t sing, they can’t sing, they can’t sing. Events start hours late, this is Colombia. And sometimes - though here I’m maybe harsh - inexperience shows in the models, as men stumble on the catwalk, as women navigate stilettos. But the result is impressive and the show a success either way.

When everyone is beautiful it isn’t, as you might hope, as if no one is beautiful after all, instead that it all gets switched on and off. This, I guess, is the sign of a professional: the ability to be street-stoppingly attractive and pedestrian as required. Sleight of face, if you like. It’s very disconcerting when it’s done.

It’s something that small, unglamorous Neiva can do too. For a weekend in May, the city muscled up to Bogotá and Medellín. It planted itself in the world of high fashion where no one, frankly, wanted it. It was the same in 2015, when thousands attended, and with this year’s figures double the last, the convention has reason to be smug. Even if the make-up has now been removed, and the banners taken down from the convention centre, there’s still a little glamour left over the next morning, like the eyeliner it couldn’t quite get off.