In Uniform : Fashion: The trendy crowd has dressing down to a science, preferring a prepackaged--albeit pricey--look.
Michael Dawkins, jewelry designer and owner of M Gallery in Los Angeles, attended an elementary school where the dress code was white shirt, black tie, black pants. He liked the concept so much that, at age 27, he’s still in uniform.
Some might agonize over what to wear, but not Dawkins and his fellow men and women in uniform. By exercising freedom from choice (and generally relying on sturdy bank accounts), they have constructed wardrobes that never fail. They always know what they will wear, how they will wear it and how they will look.
“You’re packaging an image that works for you,” Dawkins says. “I think I have the look that suits me best. There’s a bit of casualness, but the jacket dresses it up and takes me through a work day. With the boots, it’s uptown-downtown.”
He purchases his chic, pricey boots--in multiples--from To Boot in New York. Combining “expensive with cheap,” he buys high-ticket wool gabardine jackets ($800 to $1,200) and pants ($300 to $400) from Comme des Garcons in New York. His button-front cotton shirts cost $37 to $50 at the Gap or $60 at Polo Ralph Lauren in Beverly Hills.
He wears Ralph Lauren or Levi’s 501 jeans and speaks highly of his white T-shirts from Barneys in New York. “They’re nice thick cotton, and they have great ribbing around the collar, so the neck doesn’t get baggy.”
Such details matter to the uniform crowd. They have dressing down to a science. Dawkins, for example, won’t wear linen for three reasons: It’s too casual. He hates the wrinkles and dislikes the shine on the fabric after dry-cleaning.
His predominantly black-and-white style (“professional with a flair to it”) is swift and sure. It lets him get to work in a hurry. And all he has to do for evening “is change a small thing here or there. I don’t have to go through a huge ordeal.”
Barbara Leary, actress and wife of Timothy, says she would always be late if not for her prepackaged attire: Giorgio Armani pantsuit (in rayon, because “it flows and doesn’t crease”), long-sleeved Yohji Yamamoto or Comme des Garcons white T-shirt, white Capezio jazz shoes, dark lenses in black or white frames, an armload of bracelets.
She sees her look as “chic, simple and very comfortable.” And it has advantages. “I never have to think two seconds what I’m going to wear,” she says. Her boyish, spiked hair (cut by Atila at M.G.O. Precision Hair Works in Hollywood) requires “just a drop of gel in the morning.” She wears dark glasses indoors and out, “because my eyesight is terrible and clear glasses make me look like a school teacher.”
The entire package, including $43 shoes, $65 to $100 T-shirts and $1,600 Armani suits, brings peace of mind: “I just want to feel secure that I’m well-dressed. This way I’m very secure,” Leary says. “In L.A., you can go anywhere in an Armani suit, except to a black-tie event.”
Black tie is a snap for Cristophe, the Beverly Hills hairstylist. If he knows it won’t offend his host, he merely adds a Gianni Versace tuxedo jacket and bow tie to his daily combination of an oversized white shirt, blue jeans, cowboy boots, long hair, gold chain, tan. That’s how he dressed for his wedding 13 years ago.
Each component is there for a reason. The boots, from Champion Attitude in El Paso, Tex., are custom-made and comfortable. Versace white shirts complement his permanent tan and provide a good backdrop for cutting hair, especially dark hair. He buys them oversized, he says, “because that way they give me the illusion of more shoulders than I really have.”
Any time Cristophe finds something he likes, such as Aviatic jeans from Theodore in Beverly Hills, he buys several. His entire uniform echoes his approach to styling hair: “The look has to be very unfinished, even if you put a lot of thought into it.”
Artist, songwriter and filmmaker Allee Willis, known for her ‘50s-style dressing, which matches her ‘50s-style home, started thinking about her personal style when she was 7 years old. She was on vacation with her parents in Miami Beach.
“I had frizzy hair, Solarcaine on my nose and my bathing suit probably looked like overalls. I saw two little blond girls in bikinis getting into the elevator, and I remember thinking: ‘I will never look like those girls. And I have to never, ever try because I will be miserable.’ “If I exist in my own universe, who can say I look wrong? I figured that one out real early,” Willis says. “I’m never going to look like a fashion model, so why should I go into stores where they have all the new designer stuff and be miserable?”
Instead, she goes into thrift stores. Now that they have become mainstream and picked over, she sets herself apart by mixing vintage pieces with new “toy soldier” jackets from Tyler Trafficante, on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. She is into secondhand “pointy-toed English shoes.” But there was a time when she envisioned spending the rest of her life in saddle shoes and bought 132 pairs.
She abandoned the saddle shoes and her “very spot-able” long, curly hair at the same time. But she missed the length, so now she keeps one side long, one side short and the back divided into long hair, a ponytail and a crew cut. It all makes sense to Willis: “I basically feel one should do what makes one feel comfortable. If you’re going to listen to everything everybody tells you, you’ll never be an individual.”
Wilmer Weiss, senior vice president of communications for I. Magnin, is an individual who wears Italian-silk jackets and pants, velvet evening slippers, a black crocodile belt with a silver buckle (“I only wear silver; it wards off evil spirits”), black socks with tiny white dots or a small paisley pattern, an interesting pocket square and a patterned scarf crisscrossing his chest instead of a tie. He shuns labels, except for Hermes scarfs and Ralph Lauren socks.
The velvet slippers, worn day and night, “make me feel like I’m dancing,” explains the former dancer. “There is fashion and there is style. It’s great to put both together. But if I had a choice, I would rather a person had great style, because it’s like your handwriting. It’s a visual signature.”
To get the signature requires a few tricks. Weiss suggests looking in the mirror with so much objectivity “you think of yourself as another person.” And when you shop, “make believe you’re going on vacation and you can only take enough for a week. Narrow it down to three things that feel right for two or three occasions.”
Loree Rodkin, a personal manager in the entertainment industry and a jewelry designer, says she knows instantly if she should buy something. She advises: “If you have to deliberate over it, don’t do it. It’s the things that I’ve thought about twice that sit in my closet.”
She has a feminine, voluptuous head of hair (tended by Angelo di Biase at Dusty Fleming in Beverly Hills). But she wears only men’s jackets by Comme des Garcons, Matsuda or Thierry Mugler, from Maxfield, on Melrose Avenue.
She puts them over leggings or a unitard (from Diane Merrick, on Melrose Avenue, Dance France or Betsey Johnson). If she wants more coverage, she adds a man’s shirt from the Gap or a Hanes T-shirt. Sometimes she tops the leggings or unitard with a chiffon, antique-look dress (from Diane Merrick) or an authentic antique dress and a vintage leather jacket (from Playback, on Doheny Drive in Los Angeles). She limits her footwear to Nocona half-boots, from Mark Fox, on Melrose Avenue, or Manolo Blahnik flats, from Madeleine Gallay, on Sunset Boulevard.
“If you find a look that works for you, it’s ludicrous to become a slave to fashion. This is my fashion,” Rodkin says. “I don’t even wear a perfume that anyone else has. I buy a few and mix my own.”
While she frankly spends “a fortune” on her clothes, she says “you could get a jacket and a dress at a thrift store for under $100.” With knockoffs of the Nocona half-boots (try Leeds, she suggests) and inexpensive leggings or unitards, Rodkin calculates “you could put the whole look together for $120 to $140.”
