Bloom Boom : Flowers Are Busting Out All Over
Where have all the flowers gone? Everywhere you can think of: on heads, over hearts, at hemlines. This, you may have noticed, is a spring overgrown with fashion posies.
You can invest a small fortune in a real gold flower that could endure forever, or spend a mere drop in the bucket for fabric varieties calculated to last as long as the trend.
Some fake blossoms do bear a resemblance to the sort grandmother wore. But others are so gigantic or so unusual there’s no doubt they’re a new breed. Whose grandmother, for example, ever wore spandex roses? (They decorate the $32 headbands, $28 cuffs found at Faux on Melrose Avenue.)
Posy passion is rampant all over the city. Jumping on the cart recently, Neiman-Marcus in Beverly Hills had a window overflowing with all the flower accessories (hats, gloves, shoes, earrings) available inside and listed in the spring catalogue under “Bountiful Blossoms.”
Other stores--large, small, chic, trendy, pricey, economical--are brimming over with what many have dubbed flower power: everything from a giant rose, with one cheeky pearl in the center ($90 at Madeleine Gallay, Sunset Plaza), to dresses, suspenders, belts, shorts, shirts, hats, pins, you name it--covered with flora, and sometimes fauna (like the straw hat shown at top left).
Wendy Berman, a 20-year-old University of Arizona student, passed on the hat. But it was love at first sight, she says, when she spotted the Levi’s cutoff jeans. Swept up in L.A.’s bloom boom (which hasn’t hit Tucson yet, according to Berman), she bought the shorts and a $20 hair clip decorated with tiny, birthday-cake roses.
How many posies make you perfect this spring? One will do: a giant bloom on the lapel, for instance. But some designers, such as Betsey Johnson, believe there is nothing quite like overall coverage. She not only promises a rose garden, she delivers.
