Elegance Describes Two Designers’ Collections

Murray Arbeid

London designer Murray Arbeid recently attended a large afternoon wedding in New York and, being interested in these things, counted only six women’s hats in the crowd.

“I was shocked,” Arbeid recalls. “At home, if a woman hasn’t got a hat she doesn’t go. But it’s a different life style here. People eat much earlier and are in bed by 10 p.m.

“As I see it, you need two important kinds of clothes here: sports clothes and party clothes. The dress to go to lunch in just doesn’t carry the same weight.” And what Arbeid calls “afternoon clothes”--dresses for afternoon receptions and teas often worn with matching hats, which are so popular in England--hardly exist in this country.

But where party clothes are concerned, he says, a ball gown is a ball gown, be it in Beverly Hills or the British Isles. And these ball gowns were the mainstays of the collection he brought to Gunn Trigere in Beverly Hills.

“There is absolutely no difference at all in the way women dress for important evening occasions. They all want to make an entrance and look glamorous.”

Arbeid should know. He’s been on the British fashion scene for 31 years and has made evening gowns for Queen Noor of Jordan, Estee Lauder and Princess Diana. The latter is a “fantastically marvelous person--absolutely lovely,” he says. “And far too much importance is put on her clothes.”

Miriam Parkes

Miriam Parkes hasn’t designed for royalty yet, but she has made dresses for some of the city’s most stylish women.

Before going into business 18 months ago as fashion designer Maruscha (her Hungarian grandmother’s pet name for her), Parkes was a customer of Valentino and other leading European designers.

But her interest in clothes went beyond merely shopping for herself. Parkes says she always has had a natural flair for fashion, but as she puts it: “I was too harassed to listen to my own urges.”

She raised a daughter, now 36, served on boards of philanthropic organizations and enjoyed an active social life with her husband, Dr. Morey Parkes.

But the urge wouldn’t go away, so she decided to invest her own money in a small 10-piece collection.

Now that the collections have expanded to 30 pieces and Parkes has earned back her initial investment (“I’m clear and free”), the rigors of business seem to agree with her.

Dressed in one of her tunic dresses (“my signature look”), which she had embellished with a combination of Schlumberger topaz jewelry and Giorgio fakes, Parkes recently brought her line to Neiman-Marcus.

She dubbed one simple, slim, wool daytime dress with a removable white pique bib her “kitchen cabinet” dress because, she says, it was bought by the wives of two of President Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet” members--women whose names she would not reveal.