Bullock’s Beverly Center store opened its Antique...
Bullock’s Beverly Center store opened its Antique Boutique department Saturday, and buyer Heidi Bulloch tells us that on the very first day “business surpassed all my expectations. It was phenomenal.” That is to say, she had more customers than she dreamed would appear in search of what we can only call old clothes. Of course, “they’re not ordinary old clothes, the sort you find on Melrose Avenue,” Bulloch advises us. They’re from the same New York-based Antique Boutique firm that rings up Cyndi Lauper, Mick Jagger, Al Pacino and dozens of other celebs whenever owner Harvey Schefren finds a fabulous cache of stuff somewhere in the world. (His most recent find, Bulloch confides, was a German warehouse packed to the rafters with never-worn leather coats from the World War II era.) In any event, many of the Antique Boutique shoppers in Beverly Center last week were women buying golden-oldie beaded prom dresses and little black-beaded cocktail dresses from previous decades, which they told salespeople they were going to wear to the Academy Awards. Bulloch’s Hawaiian shirts for either sex are moving briskly too, she says. The shop, currently located in the Young Attitude area of the store, will move to bigger, permanent quarters in April, as soon as store renovations are completed, Bulloch says.
On Oscar night,Kathleen Turner is one actress who won’t have to worry that someone else has on the same outfit. She’s expected to wear an evening ensemble by Nino Cerruti--the only one in captivity. Turner, who has been wearing Cerruti styles almost exclusively in recent months, inspired that dyed-in-the-wool designer of daytime, sporty separates to style a red Chinese silk evening mini-dress and jacket for her alone. “It’s got nuggets of gold thread all over it; it’s draped in front, with a tight skirt and a slouchy cardigan. So we’re talking short, tight and kind of strutty,” Mary Hall Ross, Cerruti’s West Coast representative, says. Nino’s calling it the Kathleen Turner dress, but Ross says he’s not planning to add it to his ready-to-wear line at this time.
When you see Shirley MacLaine present the Oscar for best male performance on Monday night, you’ll also see a dress by New York designer Fabrice, who says MacLaine ordered it from him especially for the Academy Awards telecast. Fabrice tells us it’s “black, white and taxicab yellow silk crepe in an ankle-length sheath, and it has an exploding houndstooth design done in jet beading.” And now, the envelope please. . . .
CBS reporter Maria Shriver isn’t having an easy time of it. Last week, you may remember, we reported that strange men were stopping her on the street, asking where she bought her sunglasses. This week, the story continues. When we spotted her dashing into the Armando Hair and Makeup Salon to get her hair trimmed (she was in such a rush that she volunteered to wash it herself), we heard her say she’s been searching for the right stuff to wear on television and can’t seem to find it. She likes brightly colored suits and dresses by Emanuel Ungaro or Hubert de Givenchy, but her favorite styles don’t seem to be in Los Angeles, she says. If it weren’t for deadlines (hang the expense), she’d go to Paris. But, she explains: “I can’t get a day off.” What next?
New York designer Jhane Barnes may be having a baby--in name only. A woman telephoned Barnes to say she’d seen her name on a label in a clothing store and wanted to name her expected infant after the designer but wasn’t sure how to pronounce her name. “The ‘h’ is silent,” Barnes assures Listen.
Vicky Davis,New York-based tie designer, has solved the problem of how to get a cab at rush hour. She bought her own. Davis tells Listen that she’s purchased a Checker cab, which she’s painting red, manning with a chauffeur and decorating with lace curtains and Oriental rugs. “It’s a little extravagant,” Davis says. “I think all those old black limousines look like they’re going to funerals.” Yeah, but what a way to go. . . .
While designers such as Ralph Lauren have borrowed wallpaper chintzes for their spring clothing collections, Alan Londin, a fabric designer for such fashion houses as Liz Claiborne, Donald Brooks and Jantzen, has segued into designing fabrics for the home. He now finds five of his pink and white prints (from irises to gingham checks) in Joan Collins’ Beverly Hills home--to be exact, in her daughter’s bedroom. “People now think of coordinating prints and patterns for a room as they do for a sportswear outfit,” Londin said on a recent visit to Randolph & Hein, where his fabrics are sold. Londin notes that “the two fields are becoming closer, more so than ever before. I get more out of reading Women’s Wear Daily than I do from any interior design magazine. And everyone on Seventh Avenue is going to home-furnishing centers to look at the florals.”
More on Joan Collins: She’s so serious about shopping that she bought a jacket right off someone’s back. It happened when Sigute Mikutaitis, a designer’s representative, went to the “Dynasty” set to show costumer Breezy Brooks some hand-painted burlap jackets. They’re designed by Marilyn Pardee, one of Mikutaitis’ clients, and Mikutaitis wore one to her meeting. “Joan happened to come into the room, saw the jacket, wrote out a check and walked out with it,” Mikutaitis says. Brooks had the jacket in mind for Ali MacGraw to wear on the show, Mikutaitis tells us. As it turns out, the costumer bought one for herself too. (The jackets are sold at two shops on Sunset Boulevard, Addiction and Sable, Mikutaitis says.)
Ellene Warren tells us: “This isn’t your typical wedding dress.” And from the sound of it, she’s right. It’s a dress that designer Warren styled for actress Lisa Hartman to wear on an upcoming episode of “Knots Landing” when Hartman’s character gets married. As Warren describes the dress: “It has a built-in lace corset covered with pearls.” The skirt pales in comparison; it’s a pearl-speckled tulle affair. “The dress had to have something traditional about it,” Warren says. “Lisa’s character is marrying a minister.”
While parochial school fashion may seem a contradiction in terms, a new book called “Growing Up Catholic” offers some tips for “plaid-clad schoolgirls” on surviving the uniformed years. “The idea is to appear outrageous enough to raise eyebrows, but not so outrageous as to be sent to the principal’s office,” authors Mary Jane Frances Cavolina Meara, Jeffrey Allen Joseph Stone, Maureen Anne Teresa Kelly and Richard Glen Michael Davis advise. Recommended are leggings (including black fishnets and green-glitter knee socks in the liberal schools that permit optional sock colors), red shoes (or plain black tennis shoes for gym), strangely colored fingernail polish, heavy metal jewelry, inexpensive wigs and hairdos that announce their wearers’ fashion statements. The book also poses the question of what people will wear in heaven. “Are you stuck wearing the same outfit you were buried in?” the authors ask. “Will you ever be able to find a facsimile of that fuchsia Kenzo jump suit that made you feel like heaven on Earth every time you wore it?” There are no answers, but there is possibility: “Possibly, it (heaven) is everything the nuns said it would be. With thousands of rosaries under your belt, it had better be.”
Ralph Lauren’s latest take on the Old Boy look is a brand-new Polo shirt that looks faded, frayed and worn, as though it had weathered hundreds of matches on the playing fields and thousands of washings in the machine. In magazine ads for the prematurely aged shirt, the copy reads: “Until now, its faded, comfortable character could only be acquired after years of wear.” Listen wonders about this. We can see the virtue of broken-in jeans or shoes, but the advantage of a shirt that looks ancient eludes us. We hope there are no built-in perspiration stains. In a totally unrelated move (we hope), Lauren has elevated a man named Macchiavelli to vice president of the Polo/Ralph Lauren firm.
