A Look at What’s Hot and Hip on the Laguna Beach . . .Boardwalk : Ethnic Prints, ‘Crazy Pants’ Are Newest Waves

On the boardwalk in Laguna Beach, there’s a fashion show that takes place whenever the summer sun burns especially hot. All along the winding wood runway, tourists and locals stroll by wearing their brightest beach togs.

A recent heat wave brought out a four-pack of teen-age girls, each dressed in tight cutoff jeans rolled two or three inches above the knees, and white T-shirts. Nearby was a woman in a gauzy batik dress and a black scarf wrapped around her head. Stepping lightly in a sheer lavender skirt and hot pink bikini top was a young blonde. She was under the watchful eye of some of the boys of summer in their fluorescent volleyball shorts and mirrored sunglasses.

“My daughter came here last week wearing a leather bustier and a python,” says a middle-aged woman who declines to reveal her name for fear of giving her daughter further exposure.

“Anything goes,” she says.

It’s hard to find better-dressed beach bums than those on Laguna’s boardwalk. With its influx of tourists from around the world and its affluent locals, Laguna Beach attracts visitors who can afford the very best in beachwear.

This summer, the boardwalk is filled with people wearing cropped tops that leave the midriff exposed, oversize T-shirts, baggy cotton knit pants in wild, colorful prints and skintight biker shorts.

On the basketball court by the boardwalk, where the squeaking of sneakers can be heard all day long, a man in his 20s cuts a sharp figure in his black-and-white checkered bike shorts and a red tank top. A little girl no more than 6 skips by in a pair of leopard biker shorts. Her mother wears a glitter-spattered T-shirt big enough to get lost in and white cotton leggings.

Boardwalk chic also demands the right accessories--plastic sunglasses with Day-Glo temples, wide-brimmed straw hats with neon ties, bright canvas “aqua sox” with rubber soles for venturing onto the tide pools and sandals with wide straps that wrap around the feet like bandages.

People of all ages sport fanny packs, kangaroo-style, around their middles.

“I got disgusted when I saw a Gucci fanny pack,” says Barbara Carletti, who works in an optometrist’s office in Laguna Beach. Carletti often sits by the boardwalk watching the fashion parade during her lunch hour and can give a blow-by-blow description of the trends.

She doesn’t like fanny packs because she says they give people “an Alfred Hitchcock silhouette.” She deplores men’s volleyball shorts with the manufacturer’s logo stamped on the back because “it looks like they sat in something.”

“And I’m sick of neon. I hate neon,” she says, pointing out a man in electric-orange swim trunks. “I thought this would be the summer for change, but there’s still lots of neon at the beach. They’ve been doing it three years, and it’s boring.”

While some have turned off the Day-Glo colors and changed into earth tones in ethnic prints, many beach-goers have yet to realize that neon is fading. They continue to wear blinding colors.

“It looks like there’s roadwork all over the beach,” Carletti says.

Across the street from the boardwalk, one can find the latest summer styles inside small beachwear boutiques.

Main Beach Sunwear has everything for the trendy beach-goer: T-shirts with colorful ethnic prints, hordes of bright trunks by Quiksilver, Neet Feet thongs in funky geometric shapes that look like something worn by the Space-Age Jetsons family and baggy “crazy pants” by Panama Jack, with elastic waists and ankles in loud geometric and cartoon prints.

“I wear them with a tube top and sandals,” says Danielle Dufault, 20, vacationing in Laguna Beach from Las Vegas.

Earl Dawson, owner of Main Beach Sunwear, says he has ordered cartons of the baggy pants to ride out this latest fad. Beach styles change so rapidly, Dawson says, it’s hard to keep up.

“You’ve got to really keep on top of it,” he says, “or 90 days later everything changes.”

Corinth Ladies Apparel stocks short sets with cropped tank tops in shades of coral, lemon and lime, some adorned with lace around the midriff or decorated with a tiny paisley print. There are hand-painted T-shirts, some with leather fringe and rhinestones around a V-neck for $40, and a tank dress in a lime or hot pink batik print for $28.

Ocean Breeze, a women’s boutique, has racks loaded with the gauzy batik and tie-dyed prints that can be worn as beach cover-ups.

“I’ve never seen so much color--it’s vivid and splashy this year,” says Helen Palmer, a sales clerk for the store.

The shop has full skirts made of strips of contrasting batik prints for $70 and a floral skirt of sheer, crinkled fabric for $45.

“Women buy them to dance in or to wear with a swimsuit,” Palmer says.

They can accent the outfits with scarfs made of sheer fabric in brilliant floral prints, and “big, fun and loud” jewelry adorned with seashells or brightly painted wood fish and birds.

“People who come here from conservative areas are amazed,” Palmer says. “One day I sold $1,000 worth of clothes to a gal from New York City who said she’d never seen such bright colors.”

Tourists who have a “vacation mentality” often find themselves buying clothes they wouldn’t buy at home.

Cheryl Baum, a Long Beach resident, wanders in and out of the boutiques looking for a store that will carry her line of hand-painted, lace-embellished T-shirts.

Vacationers will pay $40 for a hand-painted T-shirt so they can take it home and say, “This is what I got in Laguna Beach,” Baum says.

Then they’ll leave the fine T-shirt in the suitcase and wear a fun, sloppy T-shirt to the beach.

People have more freedom to wear whatever they like at the beach, Baum says. Even locals can don the colorful or outrageous clothes they can’t wear anyplace else.

“Beach attire is not going to knock the fashion world on its ear, but it is a look unto its own,” she says.

“You can dress differently when you come to Laguna Beach. You can put on all that tacky stuff and get away with it.”