The Faces of Eve
Frustrated dancers will tell you that some of the most talented choreographers invent movements that no one else can do quite the way they can. Certain Bob Fosse hip thrusts or Twyla Tharp moves are showstoppers when executed by their originators, but are almost impossible to imitate. That phenomenon’s fashion corollary is that when designers, especially women designers, design for themselves or their fantasy alter-egos, they often do their best work.
That would explain why presentations by Donna Karan and Anna Sui at the end of eight days of spring collections in New York were so successful. Karan has always designed for herself and her friends, and as she has matured, her understanding of the clothes a woman wants to wear has grown. Sui has not an inner child, but an inner teenager guiding her sketching hand. Whenever she lets that Gidget within out to play, the result is cheerful, nostalgic clothes for real teenagers and their older sisters.
Sui has an affinity for a Californian image that “Beach Blanket Bingo” forged long before “Baywatch” beamed around the globe. The pedal pusher that has returned for next spring looked more like a slimmed-down surfer pant in Sui’s hands. Like adorable sundresses blooming with Hawaiian florals and cut-off jeans in Tibetan hand-blocked prints, they seemed the perfect clothes for the senior class barbecue everyone wishes they’d been invited to.
That class has a multicultural student body. In addition to the Tibetan prints, which appeared on clamdiggers and stretch gauze T-shirts, there were Liberty prints from England shaped into small-waisted strapless dresses and bikini tops worn with little wrap skirts. Some of the Liberty prints, especially those on narrow trousers cut off between the knee and the ankle, looked like preppy, all-American Lily Pulitzer patterns. Asia was represented by brightly colored dresses and skirts made of Indian sari fabric. Sui has an extensive Pucci collection, and she paid homage to the Italian master’s way with borders by adding them to chiffon slipdresses, leggings and bandeaux.
A year ago, women who had thought their private parts should be just that were challenged by transparent fabrics to reveal nearly all in public. The underwear industry did what it could to help them maintain a modicum of modesty, rushing into the breach with slips and bodyliners. The artful layering that distinguished Karan’s new collection showed that it’s taken even an experienced designer a few seasons to really figure out how best to show parts of the body while covering others, to use the dreamy delicacy of sheer fabric with a little mystery.
Karan let capri-length leggings of midnight blue jersey show through the gauzy organza of a matching strapless dress. Two layers of fabric composed a pair of narrow trousers--one chiffon, the other silk shantung. Karan presented a collection of gleaming separates that could be put together in a number of ways. Weightless, buttonless coats of organza could top slouchy silk pants or slipdresses ingeniously detailed with darts that defined a slender rib cage.
Crinkled fabric that has appeared in a number of collections looked better in Karan’s show, possibly because she worked in a dark palette, using rich tones of deep blue, olive, purple and gray. Everyone expects Karan to design the dress for Barbra Streisand’s long-anticipated wedding. Perhaps she was already thinking about it when she created a long, randomly beaded white dress lined with a short slip of snug white jersey. The juxtaposition of sheer and opaque, controlled and flowing was beautiful. Karan, who often expresses herself in unique fashion haiku influenced by her own spiritual journey, said, “I think these clothes embrace a woman’s softness and strength, her body and soul.”
The more experimental collection Karan inaugurated a year ago, D by Donna Karan, isn’t meant for her and her baby boomer friends, but for a younger audience. Jane Chung supervises the D design team, and the boss instructed her to create clothes for herself and her twenty- and thirtysomething crowd. Easy, comfortable jackets were dressed down with pants that might have just come off the running track. Sport pants with tabs wrapping the ankles as a protective measure for a bicyclist, T-shirts detailed with ruched sleeves and nylon zippered jackets made strange bedfellows with pleated skirts in soft shades of sheer georgette. The marriage of opposites gave the collection its energy. The D collection looks at clothes in a new way, and women bored with the conventional will welcome that perspective.
It’s always tricky when a big-name designer does basic pieces. Unless a woman is an irredeemable snob, why should she buy very expensive versions of generic pieces? Michael Kors gave his customer a compelling reason to go haute Gap next spring, Calvin Klein didn’t.
Kors added an element of luxury to T-shirts, tank dresses and pajamas relaxed enough for hot weather wearing. The white shirt and chinos he offered were of soft kidskin leather. Not only were his fabrics especially desirable, like a light taffeta that shimmered in the light, but his simple designs were cut just a little better than anyone else’s. Full, gathered trousers looked softer and less bulky than the pleated trousers of seasons past, and lay better than the pants with a drawstring waist that appeared in a number of spring collections.
His idea of evening wear is a pullover of black stretch jersey and a tight white shantung cigarette skirt. Wow. Nothing more elaborate could have greater impact. Or, for the woman who enjoys having all heads turn when she walks through a restaurant, a crimson stretch jersey tank and high-waisted skirt that looks like a dress as clingy as a Band-Aid. All that need be added is a pair of sandals and a becoming blush.
For his collection, Calvin Klein started with the inspiration of American sportswear--track pants, sweatshirts, and other warm-up gear that are popular among armchair athletes as well as dedicated exercisers.
As anyone who has ever tried to reinstate a drawstring into its casing knows, they can be problematic. They bunch in the wrong places. Klein not only puts them at hems of jackets and the waists of pants, but finishes the bottom of skirts of parachute silk with them. The resulting bell-shaped skirts, with strings trailing down the legs, were a sorry mess.
The drawstring is one of those details that will instantly mark something as being of the moment next spring. But it will be widely copied, in less expensive fabrics. They’re bad enough on sweatpants, but not worth adding to real clothes.
For evening, Klein presented pale layers of silk georgette, cut into plain shifts and slipdresses that were neither flattering nor pretty.
There was almost a reverse snobbery to the simple dresses, as if only a lesser designer need go to the trouble of actually designing. The moral is, sometimes simplicity is good. Sometimes it just doesn’t work.
