That Easy Feeling for Fall : Hemlines Make Headlines, but the Real News Is Softness, Variety
The party’s over. After an aberrational year of puff-pastry outfits fit for French Barbie dolls, designers here have abandoned the saccharine look for what are being called “serious clothes.” Of course the word serious is defined in different ways, depending upon which French design genius you’re talking to. But more about that later. First, the gnarly issue of hemlines must be addressed.
The seesaw phenomenon that started in Milan persists in Paris. Hemlines are up and then down, sometimes both in the same collection, sometimes both in the same dress. Two factions have formed in response to all this.
One group consists mostly of small shop owners like Los Angeles’ Shauna Stein, who owns a store of that name in the Beverly Center. “Hemlines are irrelevant,” she said. “Women want a silhouette that pleases and flatters. Nowadays there are customers for short, medium and long.”
The other group, who represent department stores and large specialty chains, privately moan that French designers are confusing the issue for women who have just begun to accept short skirts and now may think they ought to wear long.
A Hot Topic
Is America really hung up on the hemline? One journalist, who arrived here over the weekend from New York, says it’s one of the hottest topics in Manhattan and she will write from Paris about little else. New York’s designers, particularly, are hopping mad at their European counterparts for starting the mess, she says, and they’re also blaming the fashion press for putting it in the news.
Maureen Adams, fashion director of 400 Belk department stores in the Southern states, says the hemline question is symptomatic of changes that are brewing. American fashion retailing is entering a transitional phase, she says, and we will see major transformations in the next few years. Those involved in the upheaval simply don’t want yet another problem--hemlines--to complicate their lives.
From a shopper’s point of view, there’s much more than hemline news coming from here. And most of this is good. Clothes for fall look softer and easier to wear. Shoulders are gently shaped. There are handsome pants and jackets for every age and figure and enough different skirt lengths to please everyone. Stores will offer the expensive clothes along with less-expensive versions for those on tighter budgets.
Now, back to the runways and those “serious” French clothes.
Jean Paul Gaultier is serious about jump-suits, and may single-handedly bring them back in style. His one-piece garments range from dressy to sporty, many with high, round necklines, little waistline definition and straight floppy-leg pants. He also showed wide trousers with easy-fit jackets, mid-tunic dresses that hit mid-calf, and a series of small, high-necked capelets that can be worn over suits or dresses when there’s a chill in the air.
Claude Montana is serious about his Shar-pei dog. He loves his wrinkly-faced pooch so much that he has perfected a way of shearing mink and crumpling it to resemble the wizened features of his pet. His tawny “Shar-pei” fur jacket is waist-length, with a huge cape collar that starts halfway down the arm and rises in an inverted cone shape to the chin.
Capes and cape collars show up all over Paris this season, and Montana does them in featherweight fabrics as well as fur. Other jacket styles here are shaped through the torso and stiffened to stand out at the hip. Montana’s pants are wide and straight or narrow and legging-like. There is only one skirt style in the collection, an ankle-length dirndl.
His most applauded suit is pale gray with straight pants and a fitted jacket with one long lapel that drapes down to the hip where it buttons on the side. Colors are tomato, grape, brick, pale gray and camel.
Karl Lagerfeld got serious about convent clothes. Scattered among an almost lyrical assortment of lightly fitted, below-the-knee dresses and coats were long black dresses that swirled away from empire bodices. With these, models wore black velvet, free-form versions of nuns’ caps. Lagerfeld showed pale-plaid trapeze dresses that flared to mid-calf above ankle-length full skirts. A slim, pink wool coat floated above a narrow, red chemise dress. His newest invention is a knit garment with one sleeve that becomes a huge stole to wrap around the body in various ways.
Thierry Mugler awed his audience with the tightest clothes in town, some of which were made of black vinyl with hems that dipped from above the knee in back to below the knee in front. His show was so serious that he played a funeral Mass--Mozart’s Requiem--as his theme. Anything that could happen did happen here. Bosoms popped out of dresses; models lost their shoes while in full strut. Some models had two little devil horns of hair on their foreheads, while others had hair in the shape of pitchforks rising from the top of their heads. It is a tribute to this man’s talent that the audience lasted through it all, applauding him mightily for the beautiful black wool suit with stiffened peplums and knee-length skirt, the pastel knit jacket with matching skinny pants and the black leather coat and jacket which were impeccably shaped.
Of the Japanese designers, Issey Miyake showed the widest range of looks. Pants were cropped at the ankle. Jackets had cutaway fronts, swingy backs or soft lapels that flared sideways to become capes. Long, full skirts hit the ankle, black leather miniskirts with bias hemlines were shown with long matching jackets.
Yohji Yamamoto featured romantic redingote jackets, short and loose pants as well as suspendered skirts with dipping hemlines. Some called his dark color scheme bleak, others called it beautiful.
