Fashion 88 : Chain-Mail Designer Proves Mettle
What will the well-dressed rocker be seen in next year? Jeans are tired, leather chaps are declasse and and leopard-print spandex is too early ‘80s.
The latest in strut-your-stuff gear is--chain mail.
Once the stylish material for bellicose knights, chain mail has made a comeback, albeit centuries later (with brief resurgences in the ‘60s and mid-’70s).
One person responsible for its reappearance is Michael Schmidt, a 25-year-old rock ‘n’ roll zealot and former jewelry designer who turns chain links into body-clinging dresses, skirts, bathing suits and ornamentation on leather pants, patent leather coats and leather and jeans jackets.
His selective clientele includes Cher, rockers Iggy Pop, Jon Bon Jovi and the Cult, for whom he is designing a line of clothes for their upcoming tour. Locally his clothes sell for $1,500 to $1,800, exclusively at Maxfield in Los Angeles; in New York they’re at Patricia Field.
Schmidt discovered chain mail years ago while researching a line of pre-Edwardian jewelry.
“I thought it was really interesting,” he says while dangling his long legs from a perch on a plywood table in his laboratory overlooking Hollywood Boulevard, where he and two full-time assistants transform aluminum wire into chain-mail links.
“I had seen chain mail before, but it didn’t strike me at the time as being feasible,” Schmidt says, brushing back wisps of long brown hair from his angular face. “But since I had been doing jewelry, and I had worked enough with metal and did fine design work, I knew I could figure out intricate patterns.”
He concedes, however, that at first he was “very naive” about the process: “I was working in brass and doing very small links, so it ended up being heavy and time-consuming. It didn’t hold up very well and eventually fell apart. But I knew I was onto something cool. It made immediate sense to me, and metal as a fabric wasn’t being done.”
Eventually Schmidt found the time and the money to invest in perfecting the chain-mail links and the linking designs that he turns into dresses (worn with a fabric sheath underneath), and details on outerwear and pants.
“It’s such a great fabric,” he rhapsodizes, “but it shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t work but it does, and it’s so cool--cool because the mesh expands and contracts around the contours of the body.”
He picks up a copy of the French Harper’s Bazaar and flips it open to a spread of the latest collection of Paco Rabanne designs. They are dresses done in chain mail and metal.
“Paco Rabanne did it in the ‘60s, and the interesting thing is, he’s doing it again,” says Schmidt, who calls Rabanne “the master, the genius. He’s a forerunner of this thing, and the fact that he’s doing it again acknowledges that there are possibilities for it.”
Je Je Meisinger, a buyer at Maxfield, acknowledges that Schmidt’s pieces may not appeal to all: “They are one-of-a-kind pieces that are not for everyone. But they are very special pieces. And the people who love them really love them.
“Oftentimes,” Meisinger says, “the people who buy them are in the entertainment business, and they are definitely pieces that you can wear on stage. But people who go out to nightclubs also like his things.”
Born and raised in Kansas City, Schmidt says he has been designing clothes since high school, when he made his prom date’s dress.
“It was gold lame and black,” he recalls, laughing, “and I thought it was quite fabulous at the time. I was always into fashion and I was always into rock ‘n’ roll.”
Yearning for life in the Big City, he headed for New York after graduating from high school; 18 years old and jobless, his prospects didn’t look great. He worked in a card store and slept in a friend’s bathtub before realizing that if he was going to make it in New York, he had to have another plan.
“I started relying on making things,” he explains. “I started making jewelry. I was (designing) Chinese pea pods from pre-World War II, wrapped in silver wire. That went over really well. I sold to a couple of stores in New York and London.”
But it wasn’t enough to spring him from the bathtub. He left New York, lived briefly in Chicago and headed back to Kansas City, where he worked in a truck stop until he had enough money to go back to New York.
This time he landed a job with a jewelry designer; it lasted 2 1/2 years. At that point “it wasn’t doing it for me any more,” he says. So he went back to doing clothes.
“It’s what I wanted to do anyway. And I wanted to combine it with my love of music,” he says. “I was a big groupie from the time I was 14. I was never in a band, but I used to go see bands and I always used to get backstage. How? I don’t know. I was always a good talker. And I was always with the band. They would take me under their wing and want to be around me, which I thought was interesting.”
After taking a few classes at the Parsons School of Design, he was ready for the big time. His chain-mail dresses were in the window of Dianne B. one fateful night two years ago when Cher happened to walk by.
She bought one. And Schmidt’s life hasn’t been the same since.
“She helped formulate my idea of what glamour really was,” he says. “I used to think I was going to grow up and marry Chastity (Bono). But Cher was my first goddess, really. I even have a Cher doll. I made a chain-mail outfit for her.”
Through Cher, Schmidt met rocker Jon Bon Jovi, and through other connections (“It’s an incredibly small world, it’s tiny”) he hooked up with Iggy Pop and INXS. Also wearing Schmidt’s chain-mail designs are Kim Basinger, Elton John and Ozzy Osbourne. Five months ago, he opened a studio in Los Angeles after he realized he’d be closer to the entertainment industry on the West Coast.
His modus operandi for clothing a band goes like this: “Usually the band has very specific ideas of what they want--a great pair of leather jeans, and I do special things, too, like detachable linings, so they can wash them on the road. But I don’t inject any of my ideas first.
“Once they’re confident that I’m not out to make them look different from what they’re comfortable with, and the quality is good, and we have a rapport, then I start easing them into a direction I think would be good for them. I don’t dictate, but I do suggest,” he says. “I can work only with people to whom I respond to musically. I’m sort of an elitist that way. And I prefer at this point to stay small and exclusive and have to be sought out, as opposed to being everywhere.”
Schmidt has plans for expanding his line of rock ‘n’ roll gear and is experimenting with leathers, fine metal mesh and a smaller chain link.
