SPRING COLLECTIONS: NEW YORK : Play Clothes That Go the Distance
The first dress down the runway in Todd Oldham’s fashion show was engulfed in flames. He called the design, in a fabric photo-printed with a roaring blaze, “fire starter.”
That night--Tuesday--Malibu burned to the roots.
It has been that sort of a week here. New York designers, showing their spring ’94 collections, are grappling with new ways to link fashion to the real world. Sometimes, the wires get crossed.
Oldham’s flame-print dress was one in a series of American wilderness scenes. The Arizona desert and the Oregon Trail were others. Narrow skirts, Capri pants, A-line shorts and flared dresses were done in a smart blend of the comic and commercial that have become his personal touch.
Anna Sui’s lifestyle showed through in her spring collection. She has been known to end a late night with a dawn shopping trip to the flea market. The thrift shop-inspired cardigans and flare-hemmed dresses in her new line imitated flea-market finds. Track suits for people who’ve never been near a track had shiny sateen bolero jackets, cycling shorts and an occasional kilt tossed in. The active-wear-as-evening-wear theme is strong lately, on and off the runways.
Navy denims--school dresses, A-line shorts or pleated skirts worn with boxy jackets--were a nice update on the jeans-to-the-office idea. And Sui made kilts for men look new, showing them over baggy thermal underwear. Skirts bared the knees in this and virtually every other collection for spring.
A few designers tested new ways of presenting fashion. They mixed infomercials, skits, smoke screens and wafts of bubbles in with runway modeling. Some left an uneasy feeling, sort of like Oldham’s fire-starter dress.
Geoffrey Beene showed a film filled with disjointed scenes of disturbed women wearing clothes from his current and past collections. These shadowy characters got lost in open fields, were confined to empty rooms, and shot to death in duels.
What would you make of this? Terrible things happen to women in Geoffrey Beene dresses. What would he want you to make of it? Certainly not that. If clothing is about communicating, the message was confusing.
And it was dated at Oscar de la Renta’s show. The front rows were sprinkled with the socialites and celebrities who have attended his presentations for years. Barbara Walters, Nancy Kissinger, Carolyne Roehm, Ann Bass. That lineup used to be a designer’s best endorsement. But times have changed.
“So ‘80s,” a reporter said, ticking off the names. Now, the press would rather finagle quotes from Matt Dillon, Tatum O’Neal or Christian Slater. They all were at the Oldham, or the Sui, show. Young, hard-to-recognize Hollywood actors. It’s so ‘90s.
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If the challenge is to communicate with clothes, anyone might expect Ralph Lauren to get it right. Dress style and lifestyle are mirror images in his world. So try this for a spring wardrobe: cropped military shirts, Eurasian-print sarongs, updates on Dutch wooden shoes, hats from the rice paddies. He showed long, graceful dresses in ethnic prints and shorter versions worn over T-shirts that gave them a young, clean-cut funkiness. Linen pajama pants, suits with Mandarin collars, and frog closures on long tunics were mixed with khaki shirts and straw hats.
The collection suggested a far from idyllic memory of America’s past. Almost 20 years after the country’s most painful military defeat, Vietnam veterans are going back to Southeast Asia as tourists. Lauren’s collection evoked the still-tender memories of that most unpopular war.
Another part of the collection was far more typical and pointed the way to Lauren’s new store, Polo Sport, on Madison Avenue.
“It’s a completely, modern store,” a New York fashion editor pronounced. And so it is. A monument to active-sport dressing, and the lifestyle, the shop’s first floor looks like a high-tech ski lodge; the second, the bow of a cruise ship.
The mannequins are so well dressed you have to stop and take notes: charcoal gray turtleneck tucked into pale gray leggings tucked into thick, tweed socks. Brown leather moccasins. Black leather belt, black suede baseball jacket over all.
Sports paraphernalia are thrown in: basketballs, golf balls, water-bottle carriers. And street clothes mingle with the athletic wear. A herringbone jacket hangs beside cotton sweats. A set of shelves is filled with white cotton pants and striped T-shirts for boating, and dressier white cashmere crew necks with the American flag on the chest.
A gleaming wooden scull with oars in place is suspended from the ceiling. A vintage canoe rests against one wall. Videos of downhill skiing, hang gliding and white-water rafting play on recessed screens.
This store is a way to show fashion that leaves fashion shows in the dust.
Next: The collections of Isaac Mizrahi, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Richard Tyler.
