For Barish, Show Time! : FASHION / INSIDE OUT
With a client list that includes Daryl Hannah, Annabella Sciorra, Cher and Laura Dern, designer Pamela Barish is hardly a newcomer to fashion. But she waited until the time was right to have her first show.
Last week at Santa Monica’s huge supper club Renaissance, the time was right. So was the place. And so were the clothes.
At ringside tables, Barish’s celebrity friends and clients watched a fast-paced show that offered something for everyone: faux fur-trimmed skating dresses, baby-doll dresses that didn’t make us want to puke, brocade overalls, pin-striped vests and matching pants, and seductive velvet robes.
A pregnant Rosanna Arquette, in a turquoise brocade dress, and her husband, club owner John Sidel, shared a front-row table with Dern, who watched the show wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a sapphire-blue velvet coat.
Terence Trent D’Arby, filmmaker Abel Ferrara, Donovan Leitch, Ted Field and actress Lori Petty showed up, as did a lively cross section of beautiful people.
Meanwhile, the black-clad members of a film crew crept like cats through the crowd. Barish’s brother Jeff, a commercial director, was making a documentary about Barish and her work. Only when several of the models pranced around semi-nude backstage did one crew member falter. “I’m used to shooting beer commercials,” he said with a laugh.
At the end of the show, Barish’s 6-year-old son, Jake, wearing a brocade jacket, mounted the runway and presented his mom with a bouquet of white roses. Asked how she thought her first show went, a visibly relaxed Barish said, “You tell me!” Then she and longtime friend Hilary Beane, burst into a screeching, girl version of a high-five.
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: “The Hillary Clinton thing was terrific,” Randy Kemper said before his weekend appearance at the reopened I. Magnin store in Woodland Hills. “America got to know me. But you’ve got to move on.”
Step One in the road to Kemper’s new image was an expensive print-ad campaign featuring model Amber Valetta--a woman about as un-Hillary as they come. Step Two was enticing a Hollywood clientele that now includes “Diane English and that crowd.” Step Three was staging his first show at the New York collections.
Kemper may have sent perky young thing Niki Taylor and curvy young thing Helena Christiansen down the runway, but he said he’s really inspired by such women as “Marlene Dietrich and Amelia Earhart . . . really great women who had this menswear sensibility.”
Not-So-Shocking Revelations: Powerful and moneyed friends of Calvin Klein were reportedly obsessed with halting the publication of “Obsessed,” an unauthorized biography of the designer. Well, their worst nightmare arrives in L.A. bookstores this week and guess what? Authors Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher suggest that Klein--married to the former Kelly Rector--is bisexual.
Klein supposedly had an affair with the late designer Perry Ellis, fell in love with straight men, summered in the Fire Island Pines on Long Island and paid for sex with men. Few people seem stunned by the so-called revelations.
“How shocking is it to learn that someone who designs dresses, sells cologne and plasters a skinny nude white girl and a white boy rapper in his underwear on bus shelters all over town may be bisexual?” said Newsday writer Frank DeCaro.
New Boys on the Block?: Speaking of Calvin Klein, the designer appears set to open his own Rodeo Drive boutique in the space next to Giorgio Armani. While Klein’s people--reeling, no doubt, over the bio--didn’t return calls this week, Beverly Hills merchants confirmed the move.
If they’re thrilled by Klein’s impending arrival, they’re positively swooning over reports that Richard Tyler has come looking for a Rodeo Drive address. Happy Days are here again.
An Appetizing Design: During a lip-smacking chat with Isaac Mizrahi the other day, the subject was fashion but the subtext was food. Longtime Richard Tyler aficionado k.d. lang will switch to a Mizrahi ensemble for her performance at the May 5 AIDS Project L.A. benefit honoring the designer.
“It’s a cut-away tuxedo tail coat made from my favorite black wool mousse crepe,” said Mizrahi by phone from New York. Which differs from a Tyler-style tux--much the way “a chocolate cake your mom makes is completely different from a chocolate cake your aunt makes.” Got it, Isaac.
Food, Mizrahi admits, soothes his frazzled nerves. “Last Sunday, I made a Syrian lunch for a few friends. It’s so nice to just consider some beautiful leaves of spinach.” But that’s all he’ll do between now and the big night, he vowed. “I have to look fabulous.”
Take Your Own Daughters to Work: Because we mostly toil at home, our daughters already have front-row seats to that glamorous thing we call work. A workplace is a tiny dungeon littered with empty Red Hots boxes and cups of cold coffee. A dress code boomerangs between slept-in jeans and a toilette that takes longer than most events we attend. A salary , in case you happen to be reading, darlings, is an amount high enough to buy Mommy a pair of Stefan Kelian pumps but too low for child-size Doc Martens. Which brings us to the most important lesson in capitalism: to the worker go the spoils--or something like that.
