London Unveils Fashion Week
It took a seasoned pro, Jean Muir, to give London Fashion Week its credibility. And another, Katharine Hamnett, to give it the spark.
Muir “did it by doing what she’s always done best,” said Joan Kaner, fashion consultant to I. Magnin/Bullocks Wilshire and vice president of Macys Northeast. “She’s made clothes that one can buy and know they’ll be like old friends. Comfortable; easy to understand; reliable.”
Kaner is among the few Americans in town. Although Bergdorf Goodman’s chairman, Ira Neimark, and president, Dawn Mello, are also here, except for Muir, they’ve been skipping most of the runway shows. Ellin Saltzman, Saks’ fashion director and a London regular, skipped this season and went back to New York after the Milan showings.
Muir has been part of the London fashion scene since the early 1960s, and her swingy little black matte jersey dresses are as much her signature as are Chanel’s jackets. She included enough of these dresses, some decorated with blocks of colored sequins, to please her fans. Muir’s suedes are other signature pieces, and next winter’s beauties include shaped, cropped cardigan jackets, some with the seams outlined in bands of colored suede. She showed them with easy, soft pants cuffed at the ankle or cropped slightly above it.
She also offered a variety of silhouettes, slim for the slim or flatteringly on the bias for the less-than-model-slim, lengths either just above the knee or top-of-the calf.
No fashion fireworks here; just a restrained perfection.
Hamnett provided the fireworks with her show, which sometimes looked more like a disco dancing contest than a fashion presentation as the models, male and female, gyrated down the runway. Like Muir, Hamnett knows her customer, the kind of woman who goes disco dancing every night and who uses clothes to provoke; someone who’s out to have a lot of fun, and she’ll have it in one of these panne velvet catsuits with a black leather G-string studded with this year’s message from Hamnett: “Clean Up or Die,” an ecological appeal.
Self-Destruction
Elsewhere, the fashion scene seems out to self-destruct from the poorly organized shows, many with two-hour waits to get in.
One of the most disappointing shows so far was Jasper Conran’s on Saturday night. The designer, still under 30, has been considered “the” young hope for British fashion but, if he’s to achieve his promise, he’ll have to stop digging in his great-grandmother’s trunk for ideas. Coats and skirts drooped and trailed to the floor in heavy folds of black fabric while heads were hidden under cumbersome black felt cloches. Huge, black fox muffs were not a young added touch.
Evening was successful, although too reminiscent of Milan’s Romeo Gigli. One outfit, a long navy crepe jacket with navy crepe bike shorts, with wisps of ostrich feathers floated at the neck and wrists, showed what Conran does best: clean, simple modern clothes, of which there were far too few here this season.
Rifat Ozbeck is another talent who went astray. Everyone knows the designer is Turkish born and while he’s always had hints of his origins, even in a season when ethnic is “in” this was too ethnic. Again, evening worked better and seemed directed to the young women Ozbeck dresses: hip huggers in glow-in-the-dark (he turned the lights off to prove that), colors with coin-fringed metallic bras and patchwork velvet blousons: a disco doyenne’s delight.
Meanwhile at the Betty Jackson show, press attache Janine Plessis told several Americans: “We don’t need you; we have the Japanese.”
The Jackson fashion is voluminous: long coats or capes wrapped in shawl over long, droopy skirts and hip belted-surplice wrapped tunics, flat shoes and over-sizes Napoleonic tricorns.
