"I started out with a genre [of drag] called genderfuck," he says, today in a pristine turquoise suit and Ronnie Corbett glasses, emphasising the word like a patient teacher.
He's straight-backed and broad-shouldered, dressed well in dark blue pinstripe suit, pristine white shirt, red tie and shiny black loafers with tassles.
Elsewhere came more time-honoured symbols of bad taste: sequined cummerbunds, Lurex, a cartoonish giraffe face printed onto a pristine white trouser suit, and the blocking of jarring 1970s colours that has been seen here and elsewhere this season.
Isn't it the twenties?" A beautiful and elegant young woman wearing a pristine white linen suit, whom Ricard knows (and, bafflingly, introduces as "someone I was engaged to eight years ago"), joins our table, as does, when he arrives, the good-looking man — a curator of a small museum in Colorado — she has been waiting for at the bar.
Frequent flying, even long haul, demanded one emerge crisp and pristine in a suit as there was never an opportunity to change before being swept straight into an official reception (or on one occasion straight into a desert outside Dubai to sit in the sand for discussions with a crown prince).
These works possessed the deconstructed quality of his Santa Monica home but began to display a pristine grandeur that suited his increasingly public projects.
On the opposite page, a white boiler suit hangs pristine and lifeless from a tree.
He was an elderly gentleman wearing a pristine, tailored, brown-checked suit with polished brown shoes with leather soles.
Just in case the spell is broken Mr Cipriani himself is wheeled in from the freezer – ancient and pristine in a dark suit and white hair.
