FASHION : That SWAT Hot Look

THE FILM: “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

THE SETUP: Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured), a Terminator, is a guardian angel sent back from the future to safeguard the adolescent boy in the Public Enemy T-shirt who will one day become the savior of mankind (but whom you’d like to send to his room without supper until then).

THE LOOK: Post-nuclear, even before The Bomb hits. This movie is movement, and its costumes are all pared-down efficiency. Designer Marlene Stewart has dressed performers from Madonna to Mick Jagger. This costuming “had to look real, but it had to look like a fantasy too,” Stewart says. “Above all, it could not get in the way.” This is nothing new for action-man Schwarzenegger, whose roomy shirt-sleeves could sleep a family of four. But it is new for heroine Linda Hamilton and for most other women in film, where “make her look sexier” is the Eleventh Commandment. A star “could be in a convent in 1910 and they’d want her in a Spandex dress,” Stewart grouses. Hamilton’s second incarnation of Sarah Connor was never within pistol range of eye liner. She is all bare arms and bared teeth, in clothes with plenty of flex room for gunning and running and laying waste to the known world in the name of freedom. It is SWAT-team couture: close-fitting black T-shirt, vest, combat pants swagged with military webbing. The film’s colors--oily grays and blacks, ashy atomic blues--are not in the Crayola palette. Even the few seconds of ordinary brights--apple-blossom pink and leaf-green in a dream sequence--are a shock.

THE SOURCES: In the movie, hero and villain arrive naked from the future and steal their clothes. (Find your standard-issue style in thrift shops and war-surplus stores.) Schwarzenegger’s leather ensemble is from a pool-hall cycle bum whose boots creak; villain T-1000 (Robert Patrick) gets his from a cop, a police uniform to die for, which the officer did. (“T2” is subliminally anti-institutional; almost every dupe and bad guy is in uniform--cops, doctors, orderlies.) Stewart created Schwarzenegger’s custom leather jacket from fragments of 1930s bikers’ jackets. Then filmmakers used about 100 copies of it, getting each jacket properly “squibbed”--packed with explosives--perforated and abused for progressive scenes. What is left of the jacket at the end looks as suitably chewed-up as the leftovers from an explosion in a beef-jerky factory. Hamilton’s custom-made fighting gear looks comfortable even if all you want to do in it is type. But although Stewart suggests drolly that “this is what we should wear to work from now on,” it is not likely to set off the copycat craze of items Stewart worked up for Madonna’s videos and concert tours.

THE OOOH-TRE: Patrick is the little-black-dress of villains who can “morph” his shape to go with anything. When he’s his own nasty self, in what looks like a coat of liquid mercury, he resembles a silvery Oscar. On the “T2” set they called Patrick’s regalia the Jiffy-Pop Man suit, and so difficult was it to get into that it sometimes had to be sprinkled with baby powder and put on while the wearer was lying down. The half-costuming, half-special effects look was “quite a technical challenge” for Stewart.

THE PAYOFF: It comes down to this. Who worries about looking great when you’re trying to save the world?