Back to Basics : Fashion: Once they hit the big time, many stylists no longer want to dress the part. Instead, T-shirts and jeans are the uniform of choice.
Name the designer who put Madonna in black bustiers and created a monster trend that still walks the night.
Give up?
Marlene Stewart has been dressing Madonna since she was the Material Girl. But you won’t find her wearing lingerie in public. She prefers the oversized comfort and sexual camouflage of her boyfriend’s suits.
Bernie Pollack, the costume designer who put a sophisticated polish on Sylvester Stallone (“Tango and Cash”), a tattoo on Robert Redford’s shoulder (“Havana,” due out this year), a Southern California cool wardrobe on Tom Cruise (“Rain Man”) and high heels with dresses on Dustin Hoffman (“Tootsie”), influences fashion just as Stewart does.
Yet like her, he does not stage runway shows or mass-market his designs or make public appearances at department stores. He, Stewart and other top costumers and stylists affect fashion trends without doing any of the things fashion designers do--including dressing the part.
Rather than flaunt their knowledge and show their latest fashion finery, many of them dress down. They opt for tattered jeans and T-shirts while they dress their clients in outfits costing thousands of dollars. The costumers and stylists dress to resemble Gap ads while the subjects of their ministrations end up on the covers of magazines or in movie close-ups.
Pollack eschews fashion trends in favor of a uniform of Levi’s, Lucchese cowboy boots and a shirt, usually one that he made for himself.
“I have become California casual,” Pollack admits. “I’m not a trend-setter.”
When he is called upon to wear something more than blue jeans and boots, Pollack has two suits--a navy blue one for funerals, bar mitzvahs and weddings, and a tan gabardine that “looks great, but I’ll probably never wear it.”
Stewart, a fashion designer for eight years, says there have been times when she wished she was back in the retail business--especially during Madonna’s Boy Toy period when her jewelry-bedecked bustiers were widely copied.
But Stewart has no patience for the tedium of mass production that goes with the fashion ready-to-wear business. She would rather keep moving on to new projects and let other people mass-market the trends she launches.
Stewart turned to dressing stars for photographs and music video shoots five years ago; she recently began doing costume designs for the film industry.
But when it comes to herself, shopping is more of a chore.
“I would rather buy men’s clothes, so that is what I usually wear.” When she looks to her own side of the closet for something to put on, she says, she inevitably picks out a pair of 10-year-old Thai pajama bottoms, her favorite pants.
“I’m pretty unattached to my clothes. Maybe I’m to that point where I can put on anything and feel good about it,” she muses.
Raymond Lee, a stylist with the powerful Cloutier booking agency and part owner of the Mayan club downtown, doesn’t dress up as often as he used to. He often wore the most outrageous garb imaginable--head scarves with velvet waistcoats and striped trousers.
Now, with international fashion credits to his name--among them Italian Vogue, Vanity Fair and Interview magazine--and countless music videos, he wears torn jeans and a T-shirt with a cashmere sweater occasionally thrown over his shoulders.
This combination would look like a dog-washing outfit on most people, but Lee carries it off with style.
“I love myself. I don’t have to dress wild.” And he says his dressed-down style is influencing his work. “You don’t have to put beautiful clothes on a person to make a picture happen. To show the character side, the styling should be minimum.”
Although Lee’s working wardrobe has done an about-face, he takes his traditional Chinese values out of the closet at night and steps out in suits by Giorgio Armani and Jean Paul Gaultier. “In our culture it is important, when you go to a restaurant, to dress up as a sign of respect for the chef. Or to the ballet as a sign for the dancers.”
Lee buys several new designer suits each fashion season when they hit the stores. He says he can’t risk waiting until sale time: They might be gone. Although he doesn’t dress with the same abandon as he used to, he admits that clothes are still his weakness.
Vivian Turner, another stylist with the Cloutier agency, goes for the fashion A team--Azzedine Alaia body suits, jackets and suits by Matsuda, Issey Miyake, Richard Tyler, Calvin Klein and Giorgio Armani. Accessories of the month are jodhpur boots and tiny earrings by Loree Rodkin.
Turner considers her personal style to be classic and does not buy clothes from designers she considers trendy, like Gaultier, Franco Moschino and Rifat Ozbek.
She says her high-end minimalism suits the celebrities she has to dress for photography sessions. Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, David Bowie, Gloria Estefan and Julia Roberts are all treated with the Turner touch of simplicity: a good jacket (she prefers Armani for men and women), jeans (from American Rag) or a body suit (Alaia or Isaia).
“All these celebrities are icons. If you present clothes that are too designed, it doesn’t work. They don’t want to do fashion ,” she says.
The closer the stylists and costume designers are to the top of their profession, the less they are called upon to dress the part. Pollack’s years in the business allow him a latitude in his personal style that designers with fewer credits cannot get away with.
“I have a reputation that allows me to dress the way I do,” he says.
Although Stewart has dressed Madonna in the clothes that created legions of wanna-bes, she had to dress for success to convince director Oliver Stone that she knew her stuff. While working with him on his latest film project, “The Doors” (due out in ‘91), about rock singer Jim Morrison, Stone said that Stewart did not look the part of a costume designer.
“It was a grueling day, we were screen-testing 10 people, and Oliver said, ‘Why don’t you dress better?’ It was horrible to hear.”
For the next five days, she wore body-conscious Spandex clothes.
“After that, he had more confidence in me,” she says.
Once she got the vote of confidence, she went back to her old ways.
