SPRING COLLECTIONS / NEW YORK : Seeing the Light, Dressing Down
Imagine yourself with a night light strapped to your forehead, sitting in a dark room beside a fashion runway.
See the darkness light up like a rock concert with flickers from hundreds of other headbands. Note that you feel pretty foolish with this thing on your head. And ask yourself, “Is Barbra Streisand wearing hers?”
These were the opening moments at Donna Karan’s fashion show Friday afternoon, the last in a week of New York designers’ spring previews. And it was one of the best shows of all. But even if it had been a disaster, Streisand could give it an edge.
She arrived late, cloaked in a slouchy black hat and sunglasses. And instantly, the air around her turned electric. Neither Ben Gazzara nor k.d. lang nor Michael J. Fox generated the same high-voltage star power. They were all at the shows last week in Manhattan’s Bryant Park.
Streisand’s not the first person who comes to mind when the topic is fashion plates. But her white T-shirt and blue jeans were very much of the moment. New York designers are into dressing down.
Karan’s collection was built around activewear and tennis shoes. Some of the clothes were coated with reflective fiberglass so they glowed in the dark, as those silly night lights helped demonstrate.
Of course, there was none of the typical cheapo activewear fabric in this collection. New York’s princess of fashion used silk jersey, taffeta or poplin for her line.
She kept the theme subtle, barely suggesting the jock’s life with details such as a drawstring hem on a long trench coat. At her most explicit she tipped activewear on its ear with parkas elongated to just above the knee. They all but covered matching skirts for a proportion seen in many New York spring collections.
For evening, Karan mixed slip-on tennis shoes with long dresses. It’s been done, but she did it in an unexpected way. These dresses were slit on the sides, cut out in the back, sleek and very sexy.
Racer-back body suits in metallic silver were topped by short wrap-around skirts and sculpted jackets, both white. That color proved to be the favorite for spring. Metallics, especially silver, made a comeback, too, here and in European lines.
“What a relief,” sighed Joe Cicio, chairman of I. Magnin. “Not everything looks like a Sicilian funeral.”
*
Dressing down at Calvin Klein featured cardigan sweaters over long nightdresses as the most formal evening wear.
Details included thick-heeled platform sandals and short socks, for almost every outfit. A sleek, three-piece look led Klein’s daywear options--a long skirt flared at the hem, a sleeveless silk tunic with a slightly shorter, open-weave linen tank over it.
T-shirts under low-cut slip dresses suggested new ways of exposing your underwear. The look surfaced in several collections this season. T-shirts offer better coverage, but the whole idea of sheer seems vastly far removed from most women’s real lives.
“It’s too provocative,” scowled Joan Burstein. She is director of Browns, the London store that has introduced a number of American designers to Britain.
“You don’t see anyone here wearing it,” said one veteran fashion reporter as she nodded toward the room packed with high-powered women retailers and magazine editors.
Even nice girls wore navel rings on Isaac Mizrahi’s runway. And they wore evening dresses made of sequins that looked like they were cut from soda-pop cans.
But the rest of his spring styles, shown Thursday afternoon, crackled with the energy of all-American sportswear and activewear. Golf-course colors, boxy shapes and a clean-cut sex appeal ran through the collection.
There were very short “baby” polo dresses, A-line shorts, high-waisted navy check trousers held up by suspenders for young twists on old classics.
A black silk tube top over a hip-riding taffeta ball gown skirt (navel ring exposed) offered a new look for jaded debs trying to get through one more charity ball. Patchwork quilted jackets in pastel vintage prints were the sort of fashion collectibles Mizrahi fits into every show.
L.A.-based designer Richard Tyler got one of the few standing ovations of the week (Karan got one as well). Could it be that the soy sauce into which he dipped his fabrics actually made a difference?
Ivory satin vests and pants swished in a vat of soy gives them a bronze tint, Tyler discovered during several take-out lunches with his sewing staff.
Pale yellow linen jackets with silk file lapels topped narrow, gray trousers as one standout among Tyler pant suits. White blouses with ruffles, ruche sleeves, hand-pleated yokes and other feminine details were long enough to wear as dresses. Short kilts with soft pleats were the favored skirt here, and in a number of other New York spring collections. Anna Sui showed kilts on men as well as women.
Tuxedo jackets with small shoulders and gently fitted waistlines were a strong theme in evening pant suits at Tyler. Mizrahi showed evening tuxes, too. At Tyler, the bridegroom, a female model, wore a white tux. The bride, also female, wore a black dress. Such gender benders seemed to go with the rest of the ricochet realism of this fashion week.
Dressed-down evening dresses, active-wear with office wear, men in baby-doll dresses, women with tattooed spines tripped through these spring shows with the force of a misguided missile. All good intentions of moving fashion forward somehow have not quite paid off yet.
