Fashion
A Soap Star’s Dramatic Return to the Runway
Susan Lucci hits the catwalk for the first time since she took a memorable tumble. Plus: giant Loewe vegetables, poufy dresses and browsing for backpacks.
The last time Susan Lucci walked a runway, she fell. At a 2019 New York Fashion Week show promoting Go Red for Women, an initiative that raises awareness about women’s heart disease, Ms. Lucci’s heel caught the hem of her voluminous Rubin Singer gown, sending the actress tumbling to the ground.
“Thank god I do Pilates,” she said on a call on Wednesday. “It helped me pop right back up.”
On Monday, Ms. Lucci, 77, is mounting what she jokingly called her “runway redemption tour”: She is the final model in the designer Dennis Basso’s New York Fashion Week show.
Mr. Basso, who has been working for four decades in New York, is best known for embellished evening gowns and fur coats that exemplify a certain (largely bygone) uptown opulence — the kind possessed by people like Joan Rivers and Ivana Trump, who often attended his shows, as well as by Ms. Lucci both offscreen and onscreen as Erica Kane, the character she played for more than 40 years on “All My Children,” the popular soap opera that ran from 1970 to 2011 on ABC.
That role helped familiarize Ms. Lucci with her turns as a model: One plot for Erica, a diva with a taste for luxury, had the character posing for a photo shoot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Another scene required Ms. Lucci to lie down on the fountain outside the Plaza Hotel while modeling a tiny chiffon dress in the dead of winter. “It was some of my best acting,” she said.
Erica’s grandiose persona was often amplified by an over-the-top wardrobe — big hair, big shoulders, big jewels — that brought some glamour to daytime TV, said Ms. Lucci, who described the era of shoulder pads as a time of “very nice proportions.”
