SHOPPERS’ SPECIAL : Cash, Check or Charge? : Think excess is passe? Think again. Some women aren’t shy about admitting they spend thousands a year on clothing. New things, it seems, are quite a pick-me-up--particularly when they’re on sale.
She walks into Armani, the temple of the sleek latter-day L.A. woman, and buys seven outfits. That will hold her for four months. Last week, she strode into the Harari boutique on Melrose Avenue, known for its beautiful print silk dresses and funky jackets, and scooped up three suits, a shirt and a jacket. The transaction took her 1 1/2 hours and cost $4,500.
“I always spend in one fell swoop $2,500 to $4,500,” says Beth Cannon, a personal manager in the entertainment industry. “What clothes do is, they make you feel good.”
Cannon, 37, estimates her annual clothing tab at $30,000. She also makes a mid-six-figure salary, dashes from business meetings to political dinners and shares the expenses of a house and a 20-month-old son (she spends $5,000 on him ) with her husband.
“I don’t do anything with guilt,” Cannon says, then amends: “I just eat with guilt.”
Couture is dying, excess is incorrect, and Wal-Mart is thriving. Americans spent $586 per household on women’s apparel in 1992, according to the U.S. Labor Department, down from $607 in 1991.
Austerity may be the byword of the ‘90s, but not in some women’s closets. These shoppers don’t flinch when admitting that they spend four or five figures a year on clothes, whether they can afford it or not. And others confess that they might spend more if only they knew what to buy. For most everyone, it seems, new clothes (preferably on sale) are still one powerful feel-good thing.
“I love the smell of new clothes. I love the way they feel. I love to be wearing something new,” says hairdresser Nicole Kramer, 28, a cellulite-free former actress.
She juggles her estimated $500 a month in clothing expenditures among a passel of credit cards, from Barneys New York to Bullock’s, and admits that she outshops her income. “If I didn’t shop, I could probably have a savings account,” she says with a laugh.
This level of shopping, whether financially painful or painless, is the province of the privileged and the professional, of course. These are women who do business on the fast track, who want to convey a certain image--and clothes are part of that.
“You want to keep up with the fashions because you’re selling the way you look,” says Kramer, who wears short skirts, leggings and jodhpurs to the Amato salon in Beverly Hills where she cuts hair.
But work is sometimes just an excuse to clothe the soul. After all, Cannon wears her exquisite clothes only to thrice-weekly meetings and events. In her office, “I dress every day the same way,” she says. “Black leggings and a top and sneakers.”
Women who spend a lot know how costly style can be, so they’re skeptical of anyone who weighs in too low. Told that one young professional woman spends only about $300 a year on clothes, another woman scoffed: “Oh, she’s lying.”
Still, some professional women do allocate less money for clothes in a year than they would pay for a pair of in-season Manolo Blahniks.
“I feel like I don’t have taste,” says 34-year-old Alicia Wollerton, a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Providencia Elementary School in Burbank. A former actress, Wollerton traces her last spending binge to a 1990 L.A. theatrical production.
“I was in ‘Tamara’ with all these actresses who had such a unique style,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’m going to do that.’ ” But her shopping spree at Bullock’s was less than successful. She felt awkward in her new clothes: “I’m just a sweat pants kind of girl.” She now spends a mere $300 a year on comfortable pants and tops, and fishes $20 shoes from Sacha of London outlets and $10 Birkenstocks knockoffs from discount stores.
Other women, unable to justify large expenditures, have forced themselves to scale back.
When Marj Baker was a senior publicist at Lorimar seven years ago, she spent $200 to $300 a month on clothes. Now that she’s an independent entertainment publicist with a home office, she can’t rationalize the expense. “And it breaks my heart,” says Baker, 44, laughing. Her uniform of jeans, T-shirts (“shoes are optional”) and other casual wears adds up to about $1,000 a year.
“Every once in awhile you have to splurge,” she says, confessing to buying a jacket and slacks, a vest and two cotton tanks for $270 at Robinsons-May last year. “That was a fabulous sale.”
Some buyers suffer at least momentary remorse: “Every time I ever have anything in my car, I feel terribly guilty,” says Kramer of the post-shopping drive home. “I think I’ve made a terrible mistake, but never terrible enough to return the clothes.”
For those who can take the plunge into serious spending, taste and credos dictate how those dollars are divvied up. If it’s expensive, you must love it to buy it. And almost everyone has some economic stance on shoes.
“To me, over $120 on shoes is out of line,” says Kathy Garmezy, executive director of the Hollywood Policy Center, who often wears $50 Nine West shoes but spends $4,000 to $5,000 a year on clothes.
“I would say it’s rare that I would spend less than $150 on shoes,” says Sue Himmelrich, a partner in the Downtown law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, who favors Ferragamos that may cost $300 a pair. “I had a grandfather who said you can always tell who the person is by the shoes they’re wearing,” she says.
Himmelrich contends that she rarely scrutinizes someone else’s shoes, but she adheres to her grandfather’s rule: “I always wear good shoes.”
One thing seems universal among shoppers: Everyone loves a tale of a good sale, those triumphant stories of a $1,400 cashmere coat snagged for $500 or a Michael Kors suit marked down from $800 to $170.
“I really do buy everything on sale,” Garmezy says. She uses family trips back to Minneapolis, where she hits Neiman Marcus and Dayton’s, and business trips to New York to stock up on deeply discounted designer clothes too lightweight for hard winters but perfect for Los Angeles.
Himmelrich has discovered such a jewel of a designer discount store here that she refuses to identify it more explicitly than as “a secret place in the garment center where they sell David Hayes and St. John’s knits.”
Francie Murphy, a 38-year-old vice president at the Casey & Sayre public relations firm in Santa Monica, piggybacks business trips to New York with twice-yearly pilgrimages to sales at the Tahari store. She has the clothes shipped back to L.A., so “I don’t have to pay the sales tax,” she says.
Murphy, who estimates her yearly clothing expenses at $1,500, shuns the pricey boutiques. “When I first moved to Santa Monica, someone told me I should go to Savannah,” she says of the chic Montana Avenue boutique. “I walked in and just laughed. $1,000 for a suit? I walked out.”
Even women who can afford the boutiques get a thrill out of the hunt for discounts. Actress Lynnie Godfrey, who starred in last season’s television sitcom “704 Hauser Street,” found a $4,000 Nolan Miller black jacket for $700 among the designer discount stores in the Downtown Cooper Building.
“I just put on some dark shades and go,” says Godfrey of the Cooper Building. “And believe me, right next to me are people of superstar status.”
For actresses, whose faces and bodies are always under scrutiny, looking good is a constant concern. “I don’t have any sitting-around clothes,” says Godfrey, who spends “tens of thousands” a year on clothes, venturing to South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa for designer clothes and to the Crenshaw area for Ahneva Ahneva’s one-of-a-kind fabric crowns.
“My style is very eclectic,” Godfrey says. “Being African American, I go very American and quasi-African.”
She shops the Sunset Plaza strip of tony stores for shoes. “But I have to compete with the Hollywood divas who wear the same size and buy them in every color,” she says with a chuckle, noting that she once ran into another actress scooping up everything. “I said, ‘Miss Thing, would you leave me a pair of shoes here?’ She had seven pairs of shoes.”
Although some celebrities wear grungy clothes as a disguise against the paparazzi, others accept the impromptu photo sessions as part of the job--and shop accordingly.
“I got off a plane at LAX after a six-hour flight, and there were photographers snapping pictures,” says actress and singer Gloria Loring, who spends about $10,000 a year on clothes. “The other thing is, when you do a number of interviews, you don’t want to be seen in every picture and on every show in the same outfit.”
Fortunately, many actresses have exclusive access to the best kind of secondhand sales around.
When Brenda Strong finished up her stint as the character Jones on the television series “Twin Peaks” (“I tried to kill the sheriff”), she bought her wardrobe from the show. “I probably got about $15,000 worth of clothes for a few thousand dollars.”
Strong grew up shopping at Goodwill and still makes occasional rounds of the thrift shops, searching for such finds as a butter-colored suede London Fog car coat in mint condition, discovered at Savers in Huntington Beach. “It would probably sell for $500,” she says. “I got it for $25.”
Even the most dedicated sales shoppers will splurge on some luxury items. Garmezy limits herself to $240 for a jacket but will spend $250 on a Furla handbag. Murphy may wait for Tahari to go on sale, but she owns four of Hermes’ famous luxurious printed silk scarves at more than $200 apiece.
For some, even the appearance of extravagant shopping carries a stigma.
Murphy, the PR executive, says her eternally frugal mother was stunned a few years ago to witness her daughter spending $250 on Ferragamos. “I go out and visit with CEOs,” she says. “I can’t shop at the corner store. I can’t wear polyester. But I have to explain that to my family.”
Other women justify their habit by pointing to selfless expenditures.
“I give more to charitable causes and political causes than would be in proportion to my income. . . . It’s sort of the flip side of spending on clothes,” Garmezy says.
Finally, there is the rare woman who has spent a lifetime amassing the finest clothes. Dona Powell, once the wife of a wealthy man and his partner in a music company, for years spent more than $100,000 annually on European couture clothes. “I am not a compulsive shopper,” Powell says. “I’m a collector.”
She owns a tea dress by Fortuny, the fashion equivalent of owning a Picasso. But even she is changing her ways. Divorced for several years and running her own business, she’s reluctant to spend much--until $20,000 designer clothes go on sale after Christmas.
“It’s 75% off, it’s $5,000. Am I going to buy it?” she muses. “I might.”
* Styling by JOANNA DENDEL / SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
