FASHION / SENSE OF STYLE : We Will, We Will Clothe You
It’s part of the job description: If you’re a pop star, your work wardrobe looks different from a software inventor’s or dermatologist’s. (Guess nobody told Robert Palmer.) The cable music channel VH-1 took notice of how style helps drive the heartbeat of rock by inaugurating, earlier this month, the Fashion & Music Awards. The channel televised the breathless proceedings from New York and created a statuette of a headless woman with a musical note protruding from her rear to bestow on winners from a rather loopy list of categories, including Male Model of the Year (Ralph Lauren’s Tyson Beckford) and Best Designer Ad Campaign (CK One by Calvin Klein).
The evening was a collage of musical performances, supermodels in runway mini-shows, inane backstage interviews with designers and super-models and film-clip discourses on model-rocker romances and fashion history, including images from rock videos. Run on fast forward, the program would have looked like a teenage girl’s bulletin board.
In keeping with the rock-fashion synergy, Madonna, winner of the Most Fashionable Artist award, wore a weight of blue eye shadow and a different Gucci or Prada outfit each time she appeared. (Tom Ford for Gucci won Outstanding New Designer, and Miuccia Prada was chosen Designer of the Year.) A bevy of models in Versace gowns stunningly demonstrated the kind of Versace flash that communicates all the way to the cheap seats. It was clear why he won the Frock ‘N Rock Award, subtitled “biggest influence of a single designer on the music industry.”
The don’t-touch-that-dial moment occurred when two-thirds of TLC strutted onstage in anoraks, oversize khakis and pasties by Chanel layered on neon cropped tops. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas perfectly expressed the high fashion/street fashion/music connection that was the evening’s leitmotif.
According to one theory, the baggy pants of hip-hop artists originated in prisons, where inmates tend to lose weight and belts are prohibited. Once rappers adopted felony chic, such designers as Calvin Klein co-opted it, photographing the former Marky Mark with his logoed skivvies waistband peeking out. The trail then leads to Karl Lagerfeld’s trend-sniffing assistants, back to TLC and ends with clueless Chanel devotees and TLC video fans who don’t know or care who copied what from whom. If we need to find a moral in all this, it would probably be that we are the world, as the song goes, and the proof can be found in fashion and music.
And the Winner Is, Los Angeles: It was with no small swell of West Coast pride that we noticed how fabulous the actresses at this month’s CableACE Awards at the Wiltern Theatre looked, compared to the VH-1 pack. Winners and presenters at the show grasped the mood of elegant understatement that has been one of fashion’s most welcome gifts of late. There was no dearth of designer clothes--Mary Tyler Moore hosting in beaded Armani, Nicolette Sheridan in a steel velvet Richard Tyler suit, Sela Ward in a red velvet column by Pamela Barish and Angela Lansbury in a hunter green velvet tunic and pants by Zoran. And there was a clear choice to be covered-up rather than exposed, to abandon jewelry in a knowing nod to minimalism. Such stars as Linda Hamilton and Anne Archer, whose physiques have been very much a part of their best-known roles, flashed no flesh, but showed a very current and completely successful interpretation of Hollywood glamour.
* Sense of Style appears Thursdays in Life & Style.
