A Free-Spirited New Dress Code Asks: Are We Having Fun Yet?
It certainly doesn’t look like fun out there: wars, droughts, hurricanes, incurable diseases, environmental destruction, a crisis-level national debt and a lackluster presidential campaign. But, hey, singer Bobby McFerrin (‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy”) knows how to lighten the load. And there are always teddy bears. Not to hug, to wear.
Whatever you call it--tongue-in-cheek chic or maybe laughing all the way to the bank--the fact is happy clothes can provide temporary relief. A man, for example, can slip into Jean Charles de Castelbajac’s comfy, very original sweater made entirely of socks (sold in Neiman Marcus’ men’s department, but going home primarily with women).
And females can turn to coats and dresses decorated with stuffed teddy bears from either Patrick Kelly, the American-in-Paris designer, or Milan’s Moschino.
Closer to home, New Yorker Betsey Johnson creates her ever-amusing clothes (funny how she and Patrick Kelly use the same little-bow-trimmed fabric this fall). And in Los Angeles, young, enthusiastic Bruno Duluc and Douglas Thompson are turning out controversial, wired-to-wow garments.
At $350 to $1,000, Duluc/Thompson’s fashionable fantasies cost less than the witty wearables by designers such as Castelbajac, Moschino, Kelly and Gianfranco Ferre (he does a $2,545 black dress--at I. Magnin, Beverly Hills--with a white linen napkin and black fox tail attached to its only sleeve).
Yet, every are-we-having-fun-yet design has something in common. It’s inevitably sported by a confident, fashion-loving woman who wants to stand out in a crowd. She regards clothes as art, and she would sooner wear a paper bag than a staid, cookie-cutter anything.
Janet Charlton, Star magazine’s gossip columnist, works in her best clothes: “I want something fun and memorable so people will come up to me at parties and tell me: ‘I have news for you.’ ”
For Charlton, “fashion is like art. I just fall in love with something and I can’t sleep at night until I buy it. I think you’re born that way or you’re not.”
In the past, she has fallen for a number of Jean Paul Gaultier designs, including a backless motorcycle jacket. Never mind that when she wore it, she was “sweating in front, freezing in back. It was the
unexpected--fashion for humor’s sake. People would turn around; they were shocked.”
About a year ago, she saw a photograph of Duluc/Thompson’s decidedly original clothes (each piece has at least one wired section) “and went crazy over them.” She has since worn the hoop-constructed garments to parties and on “The Late Show.”
Reactions have been “wonderful,” Charlton says. “You can’t have a bad time in one of their dresses. I meet all kinds of new people. They get a kick out of figuring it out.”
Early on, she realized “you have to perfect methods of sitting down and standing up in them.” And when she steps into a red-white-and-blue patriotic gown that is ringed from top to bottom, she does feel “like I’m going down the drain in my bathtub.”
The clothes might look outrageous, but Charlton insists they travel well: “They go down into a flat circle at the bottom of my suitcase.” They’re also “fun, sweet in a way, flattering and slimming. But don’t wear them if you want to be left alone. People will talk to you--and tease you.”
Fashion playfulness is what Wilmer Weiss, senior vice president of communications for I. Magnin and Bullocks Wilshire, says he likes to encourage. “It makes for excitement, interest.
“We’re all trying to reach out to lighten our loads. Everything is a problem these days. Sometimes the only way we can have fun and zest is in fashion, whether you find it at $2.98 or $2,000.”
Pointing to the November Vogue cover, where a model displays Christian Lacroix’s jeweled-cross jacket, her bare midriff and just the hint of blue jeans, Weiss says: “I think that looks like a lot of fun.”
Italian designer Franco Moschino has been playing with fashion for years, “spoofing other designers,” as David Cardoza, West Coast fashion director for Neiman Marcus, puts it. Moschino’s following is growing in Los Angeles, where, Cardoza says, “People are always trying to be original.” The customer tends to be “very young. Not in age, that has nothing to do with it, but in spirit.”
“Fashion is not a sad process, it is a happy process,” says Moschino, speaking by phone from Milan. Attaching stuffed teddy bears to high-fashion garments is his expression of “fun and tenderness. I’ve had enough of war, guns, bombs, drugs.”
His message, sent out via his clothes and large, lavish books printed in Italian, is: “Let’s relax; let’s love each other; let’s love life; let’s live in a more humane way.”
But there is another side to add-ons, such as men’s ties that wind around a Moschino black dress: “I think we should use any kind of decoration, because we are at the end of an era when the creation of fashion was possible. Everything has been done. The last golden age of fashion was the ‘60s,” he explains.
But is he having a good time? Yes and no, he says, exposing the other side of humor: “The process I use for making fun is very serious, very deep. It’s not superficial. The reason I’m doing this is because I’m very, very serious.”
