THE FALL COLLECTION / CALIFORNIA : Now and Again : What’s new? An emphasis on ‘contemporary lines’ and a waning infatuation with the ugly past.
It could have gotten ugly. It certainly did in Milan, Paris and New York earlier this spring when some of the most hated abominations from fashion’s past slimed down the runways.
Anticipating similar retro-atrocities, store buyers and press trooped to downtown Los Angeles last weekend to view the last in a series of fall ’96 collections. Thankfully, though, the worst of the petroleum-based fashion revival seems to be over.
There are even signs that Southern California’s wholesale fashion industry is beginning a comeback. The California Mart reports its first upswing in occupancy since 1988, a blip that helps justify the $19-million project launched last year by owner Equitable Life Assurance Society to refurbish the 32-year-old center. Some of that money is also being spent to promote young designers on the runways and within the center, where display windows now showcase their work.
“Maybe only 20% of the ones included in the incubation areas will make it, but they’ll be the Mossimos of the future,” says California Mart President Corky Newman.
The lineup of 12 designer collections shown at the Grand Olympic Auditorium on Friday night underscored that commitment to new talent. The invitation-only event was considered the more prestigious of the two big shows, and many members of the old guard were replaced by such newcomers as Bekke, Mambo, Sunde and Ishino.
“We were looking for the most contemporary lines,” says Tina Sibulkian of the Mart’s fashion office, which selected the participants.
Indeed, old hands Max Azria, the California designer of the year in ‘95, and Tina Hagen were the only holdovers to make the Friday night cut. Hagen showed voluminous ankle-length coats over tiny shorts and close-fitting blouses. Similar combinations of huge wraps over tight suits or dresses appeared in several collections and brought to mind Cruella De Vil, she who would wear a fur of baby Dalmatians.
The villainess would have approved of many of the coats and jackets trimmed in seemingly fake fur (since it was generally ratty and lackluster, as if the contributing animal had been in misery). A road-kill collar of black fur ringed Moschery’s black-and-white houndstooth sleeveless suit, one of the more interesting pieces of the night.
Another recurring theme was sleeveless garments--vests (essentially structured jackets without sleeves), shown with pants and skirts, dresses and blouses. They seemed an odd choice for fall at first, but who hasn’t experienced a winter meltdown in Southern California under a double layer of jacket and long-sleeve blouse?
In many cases, tight-fitting clothes made ventilation a vital consideration. Jackets, dresses and skirts were assemblages of multiple curved panels liberally strewn with darts. In recent years, many designers have relied on stretch fabrics for a good fit. When using unyielding fabrics only the kind of precision tailoring shown by Moschery, Neo Vertu and Sunde can achieve it.
A few vestiges of the recent ugly past occasionally surfaced, but so did beautiful wool suits and coats in glorious shades of gray and black. From the been-there-hated-that department: Ultrasuede jackets, brown vinyl shorts (offered as a concession to modesty, since skirts were sooooo short), poodle fur trim, mismatched plaids and stripes. As lurid as some of these fabrics and prints were, black still got more attention.
It was back on the runway, and the audience, which never gave it up despite being in the fickle business of fashion, breathed a collective and audible sigh of relief.
Los Angeles designer Karen Kane and New York-based Eileen Fisher, who both showed in the second group of 25 on Saturday night, offered gray and black knits, zip-front jackets and micro-fiber trench coats--antidotes to the rash of hideous fashion that broke out elsewhere over the weekend.
As the buyers scuttled quickly to their cars after the last collection, they must have been wondering who would wear the Sonny Bono-esque fur vests and vinyl hot pants. As if on cue, the answer came striding through the parking garage: a runway model dressed in purple patent tennis shoes, a long, narrow black skirt that flapped about her calves, a fake leopard-print car coat and a cloche pulled low over magenta hair. She looked bad. The old kind of bad--as in ugly.
