When a Tidy Little Suit Won’t Do
Short of sending models down the runway nearly nude, it’s difficult for a designer to stand out here amid the glut of nearly 90 international fashion shows scheduled over 10 days. (Even the naked trick is so commonplace by now that it barely raises an eyebrow.)
The man with the surest chance of catching the limelight was Narcisco Rodriguez, the American designer for Cerruti whom Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy chose to create her wedding dress. By virtue of his friendship with the Mrs., forged six years ago when they both worked for Calvin Klein, the fame trapeze swung Rodriguez’s way. He seized it with a sure grip that demonstrated his clear understanding of the current direction of fashion.
In his third outing for Cerruti, Rodriguez showed sensual clothes so understated that some in the audience, expecting more fanfare, were disappointed. They should have studied the bridal photos of the woman who has haunted the designer’s creative daydreams.
One could imagine her--willowy and self-assured--in the tight, side-slit skirts and simple, sleeveless chiffon tops. Kathleen Turner, long a Cerruti fan, could have been another muse. The first time she encountered William Hurt in “Body Heat,” she wore high heels, a snug, straight skirt and white shirt (and she knocked his socks off). With the aid of time travel, that young actress could have stepped from the scene on the pier into Cerruti’s spring fashion show and fit right in.
You wouldn’t have to be 30 and beautiful to wear a slender white cashmere cardigan and tobacco menswear plaid trousers to a dinner party, or a beige nylon shirt and high-waisted white tube skirt to lunch, but the sophistication of Cerruti’s casually assembled sportswear is beyond the college girl’s grasp and comprehensible to only the hippest matron.
As bare, clingy and sexy as a number of pale, narrow jersey dresses were, a longer skirt length--either just below the knee or at the bottom of the calf--made them right for a woman of good breeding. The hem of a light wool slim skirt gradually dipped from calf length in front to slightly lower in back, the most attractive uneven hem in a season of messy ones. “I thought Cerruti did lots of great tailored suits,” puzzled Beverly Hills boutique owner Fred Hayman after the show. “Maybe they have more back in the showroom.”
Maybe they did, but young women like Bessette-Kennedy don’t buy perfect suits. They’ve adopted an unstudied style that’s often described as edgy. It’s fashion’s favorite term for the new, different or risky. There is good edgy and bad edgy, just as junk food can be tasty or repulsive. In part, the purpose of edgy designs is to postpone the moment a maturing woman looks in the mirror and says, “It’s official. I’m becoming my mother.”
You don’t have to be a post-graduate designer toiling in a garret in Antwerp to be edgy. The edgy winners in Karl Lagerfeld’s signature collection were ingeniously cut crepe dresses and gowns that hugged the body. (In navy, brown and graphite, they were similar to the slinky dresses of Calvin Klein’s last collection, but better.) New erogenous zones were revealed by angled slices in fabric that bared a beautiful collarbone or sections of the shoulders and back. With such a parade of flesh and lingerie visible under the many transparent clothes shown in Milan and Paris, the opacity of Lagerfeld’s wonderfully glitz-free dresses was refreshing. He showed few pants, no prints, and nothing that could pass as work clothes, save for a long skirt in beige leather paired with a fitted, belted brown cardigan.
“If we bought the best of what we’ve seen on this trip,” complained a buyer for a luxury department store in the Northeast, “we’d have 85% evening clothes. Everyone’s designing for women who don’t get out of bed till five in the afternoon.”
The more edgy, intellectual and experimental Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons becomes, the more she fits the title Most Admired Designer No One Wants to Wear. Her collection was the most extreme example of a movement toward mutant fashion, in which clothing creates the illusion of appendages and growths a healthy body doesn’t have. By stuffing tumor-like pillows under stretchy pastel materials, she might have been commenting on how diseases fostered by pollution threaten to grossly distort the human species. Perhaps I’m kidding. Maybe she was. How else to explain a rust sleeveless dress with its own inner-tube swaddling the hips, a fat sausage of down stuffed under a skirt or a Quasimodo hump riding the shoulder blade under a blue gingham top? “Women are so obsessed with having the perfect body,” said Maxfield buyer Kay Truszkowski after the show. “This is like, get over it.”
Mutants surfaced at Ann Demeulemeester’s presentation too, where shapeless knee-length dresses bunched and folded in front and back, creating awkward lumps. The designer provocatively featured a different kind of ugly, harsher and less playful than fashion’s last yucky siege, when the goofy styles of other eras were revived with a campy spirit. Diagonal and one-shoulder necklines that looked much like Jennifer Beals’ homemade sweatshirt in “Flashdance” appeared on toga dresses and loose sweaters. But no matter how somber and unflattering her collection, Demeulemeester is to be applauded for creating the most terrific suede shoes and boots, most with a distinctive, wide, curved heel.
Another modernist, Austrian Helmut Lang, attached blank beauty-queen banners to simple sheer dresses and separates, asymmetric stripes of black, white or hazard-light yellow. The bands sometimes flapped free of the garment, suggesting extra body parts devoid of function. Lang’s dresses suffered superfluous bulges too, protrusions neither a trim nor an imperfect midriff needs.
Perennial British cut-up Vivenne Westwood used the same sort of Girl Scout sashes in a period milieu. Drawing as usual from history, she offered the requisite wench blouses and peplumed jackets. With all the fuss and smocking, a trio of draped, slim-skirted gowns in muted colors were sleek enough for an Oscar presenter allergic to sequins.
Close your eyes, stick your finger anywhere on the world map, and that’s as good a point of origin as any for Dries Van Noten’s pan-exotic collection. Turkey, Africa, Pakistan, Persia? Whatever. Indulging a happy penchant for lunatic layering, Van Noten showed color-drenched sheer dresses over skinny pants patterned like traditional Indian bridal tattoos. He mixed cargo pants and military jackets with filmy saris, as if a colonial officer added a little local color to his dress khakis.
Jean Paul Gaultier, considered avant-garde but never sloppy thanks to superior tailoring skills, presented a trompe l’oeil collection of jacket, shirt and tie combinations that zipped up the back and jumpsuits masquerading as double-breasted suits. The show opened to the strains of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” For the next 45 minutes, seemingly every recording of that song ever made played, from Elvis to Tom Jones to Wayne Newton to several overheated French versions. Some designers grate on the audience’s nerves with endless displays of awful clothes. Gaultier, whose tuxedo jumpsuits and nautical looks were adorable, found a different way to be annoying, and funny at the same time.
