Salon Branches Out on Executive Orders
Cristophe, the Beverly Hills stylist who tends Hillary Rodham Clinton’s co-presidential look--the daytime version, not the antebellum do she wore to the inaugural ball--says he is ready to put down East Coast roots. By March he expects to have a branch salon in Washington, close enough to the White House to make house calls. The hunt for locations starts next week. “From now on, I’ll be there once a month,” he says. Actually, this will be his second branch salon. He signed up for a St. Barts location during his Christmas vacation there. Unlike Washington, all the stylists’ chairs at his island shop are outside, on the beach.
* DIVIDE AND CONQUER: Like so many of us, a client of L.A. personal shopper Susan Roth didn’t want her husband to know exactly how much she spent on clothing each month. Like so few of us, this particular woman devised a solution. She simply asked Roth--who counts sugar daddies among her hundreds of high-roller, corporate and Hollywood clients--to cut the charges in two: hubby paid half, her “special friend” the rest. Want to bet that each one of them probably thought the woman spent too much. A dress doesn’t cost more than $50, does it?
* BUFFALO GALS: Riding the crest of glory earned for his very important annual pronouncement of the Worst Dressed Women, Richard (Call Me Mister) Blackwell will play host Saturday at a Beverly Hills fashion show for wives of the Super Bowl-bound Buffalo Bills. Just imagine how pleased all the NFL wives will be when they realize, hey, those aren’t ordinary models sashaying around in Escada, those are cheerleaders! Yeah! Let’s hope the super-peppy L.A. Raiderettes live up to Mr. B’s good-taste standards.
* SHOPPING SAGAS: A robust shopper who only wanted to fortify herself for an afternoon of clothing purchases, instead got a lesson in why the super-models are different from you and me. While our shopper of the hearty appetite downed a falafel at Venice health food restaurant A Votre Sante, a brunette poor-boy-wearing Linda Evangelista (with scruffy lunch mate Kyle MacLachlan) sipped a tall cool carrot juice. “Excuse me, Miss, do these poor-boys come in a Size 14?”
* OUT-TRUMPING IVANA: The night was dark and the suit was yellow. And intrepid KCBS glamour-girl reporter Pat Lalama was live, at 11, from Camp Pendleton. Was she ever: blond hair swept up in an Ivana-style French twist, pale glossy lipstick, waist-nipping buttercup-yellow jacket, she intoned something weighty about Death and Duty in Somalia. Lalama’s about as close to a Camille Paglia fantasy as it gets on local TV. Who knew those hokey in-the-trenches reports could be so riveting? Back to you, Bree.
* LEATHERMEN: Chrome Hearts, the L.A.-based trio of hard-working, hard-biking leather-wood-and-metal craftsmen, will be given the prestigious 1992 CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) award for accessories Monday in New York. Fittingly, leather-loving Cher will present the award, wearing one of her many Chrome Hearts designs. Apparently, a CFDA representative who called with the good news had to leave three messages before Richard Stark finally returned the call. “It’s hard when you’re not really part of the fashion world,” says Stark, who works alongside Leonard Kamhout and John Bowman. “I thought they wanted us to join an organization or something.”
*PARIS, ANYONE?: “I design for women who want to look good, rather than make odd fashion statements,” said Oscar de la Renta at the premiere of his couture collection for Balmain in the Paris spring shows. Maybe it was the stress of nearly doubling his empire by adding two ready-to-wear and two yearly couture shows for Balmain to the five collections under his own name that made de la Renta forget he does have one oddball customer--Pebbles Flintstone. The bone-headed cartoon character will be married Feb. 7 on ABC’s movie special “I Yabba-Dabba-Do!” in an Oscar de la Renta-designed wedding dress. For the purposes of the show’s Bedrock talk, the New York fashion fixture has been renamed Oscar de la Rocka. Yet another label under which to toil. Meanwhile, the Danish-born designer Erik Mortensen--who was fired from Balmain two years ago--presented his premiere collection for Jean-Louis Scherrer. In a fashion industry first, Scherrer was fired from his own house in December by the majority shareholders Seibu and Hermes. While waiting at a cafe to see the Christian Dior presentation, he said: “I’m just attending a few shows and really admire what these other designers do. I hope to get my name in designing back. But fashion is a crazy world.”
* HOLD FOR MR. RIGHT: That merry old soul Prince Charles has nothing on the princes and princesses of Hollywood when it comes to saucy phone banter. It seems a pair of adulterous agents at a really big agency are getting the Star treatment ever since Mr. Agent phoned Ms. Agent from assignment out of town. Let’s just say that what ensued made Charles’ by-now-famous remarks to Camilla Parker-Bowles sound downright charming.
