A Designer for the Elegant Bohemian
With his cheap, snug-fitting checked shirt, baggy pinstriped slacks, tousled brown hair and signature plaid bucket hat, one might easily mistake Sandy Dalal for one of those beatnik kids who hang at Venice Beach by day and wait tables by night. Even his speech, which is peppered with the occasional “like,” “you know” and “whatever,” betrays him.
But Dalal is no California surf bum. Rather, the 22-year-old New York-based designer is being touted as one of men’s fashion’s most promising newcomers and the youngest recipient ever to win the Perry Ellis award for menswear, an honor handed out earlier this year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
Not only was Dalal’s cheeky and colorful collection of paisley-printed shirts, sartorial striped three-button suits and “flower power” sport jackets among the best at the recent New York menswear shows. But after only three seasons in business, Dalal’s talent--along with those penetrating pale green eyes--earned him a place this year on People magazine’s list of the 50 Most Beautiful People.
Dalal is clearly handsome, in an unkempt, bohemian sort of way. And his youth and quirky sense of thrift-store style make him a perfect candidate for Hollywood stardom, a fact the designer is keenly aware of. Why else would Dalal, who was in L.A. recently meeting with buyers from Saks Fifth Avenue where his collection is sold locally, take time to meet with representatives from the William Morris talent agency?
“We’re having lunch and I’m blabbing about fashion and the person from William Morris asks me, ‘Well what else do you do?’ and I’m sitting there just dumbfounded by this question and, like, feeling really stupid that I don’t have an answer for it,” says Dalal between bites of a melted cheese and tomato sandwich. “He didn’t want to know my hobbies. He wanted to know what else I do that could be commercially exploited.”
Dalal recognizes the parallel between the fashion world and Hollywood. But unlike such hot fashion designers as Isaac Mizrahi, Todd Oldham and Tom Ford, all of whom are said to be banking on future film careers, the soft-spoken Dalal insists he doesn’t--at least for now--have any real designs on Hollywood superstardom.
“Right now everything is just sort of self-generating,” he says of the media frenzy that has followed him since he launched his signature collection last fall, and later when his face appeared in People, an honor that pegged him as a “pretty boy” by his University of Pennsylvania college chums but so far has produced no serious dating opportunities. Dalal is amused by it all, mostly because in his own self-effacing way he sees himself as “a normal guy with normal aspirations” and no more or less talented than anyone else. “Everyone keeps making such a big deal and saying fabulous, fabulous, fabulous; but I mean it’s only clothes,” he insists.
True. But it’s the contradictions between young and old, trendy and tailored that Dalal captures in his collection that have had fashion editors waxing poetic and upscale retail buyers (Barneys New York will have the collection in the spring) scrambling to place an order, even if some of them are still confused about where to hang it in their stores.
Brightly colored and top heavy with prints and patterns converging on one another, the Sandy Dalal collection is youthful enough to appeal to the same teenage boys who wear hip-hop and urban streetwear. However many of the items in this sophisticated luxury line of cotton shirts, wool suits and cashmere sweaters (there is one chunky hand-knit turtleneck in the fall collection) are elegantly tailored like those made on London’s famous Savile Row, and the collection is naturally priced to reflect this fact. Suits, for example, sell for as much as $2,100; sport coats are priced at $800; while shirts top out at $250, which puts the label well out of reach of most of the young fashion trendies it might otherwise appeal to.
“It’s kind of hard for people to understand because I try to bridge young and old,” says Dalal, himself not able to categorize the collection. “It sounds like a cliche but it’s designed for a person who is young at heart.”
Magazine and newspaper pieces have been supportive in spreading Dalal’s name but so far haven’t been able to help define the clothes. Calling the look a mix between “Carnaby Street and Taj Mahal exotica,” one magazine urbanized the clothes by “showing some guy wearing them while lying down near the East River overdosed on something,” says Dalal. Another showed them on an old man alongside high-end suits by Italian makers. But, says Dalal, “it’s kind of neither of those things.”
Then there’s the whole reference to the designer’s Indian heritage (his parents emigrated from India in 1970; Dalal was born in 1976 in the Bronx). “It’s so frustrating because, of course, everybody has to connect the fact that I show paisleys in my collection to this whole Raj of India thing,” even though, he says, that was neither his intention nor his inspiration. “Maybe it is subconsciously,” he says. “But after awhile it’s like, whatever.”
Stereotypes don’t bother Dalal, especially once the product is in the stores. “If people are interested they can come and check it out. And if they like it, they like it,” he says. “And if they don’t like it, then they don’t like it. Both are fine with me.”
