Pop Tops

There’s a fine line in fashion between hilarious and fun. Hilarious is often the stuff that’s so excruciatingly serious that its stupidity becomes legend. Example: the dead swan dress by Marjan Djodjov Pejoski that Bjork wore to the Oscars last year. Laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Fun is harder--it’s the safer stuff that won’t make you the joke but lets everyone in on the humor. It’s everything that makes you smile and--this is the important part--finds you reaching for a piece of feel-good fashion. That’s what is so encouraging about a quickly spreading fall trend for outrageous prints, everything from graffiti-splashed T-shirts to the clever make-believe of trompe l’oeil shirts and dresses.

The designers who engage in this bit of playful printmaking are shaking fashion from its relentless grip on stark and simple cuts and colors. In the process, they’ve discovered shoppers’ pent-up passion for unique and quirky clothes that make ordinary black blazers and dull-as-dirt denims seem smart and jazzy.

There’s John Galliano parading Looney Tunes-bright prints and gigantic boom-box purses down--oh, the shock!--a Christian Dior runway. Or Karl Lagerfeld daring to turn Coco Chanel into a cartoon and splashing her pop-art image onto $450 Chanel sweatshirts. Then trompe l’oeil returns with a high-fashion endorsement in Anna Sui’s dresses with painted-on pockets, belts and buttons, and Cacharel’s stenciled-on western pockets and stitching.

Why bother with the accessory drawer when Cynthia Rowley has sketched the watch fob onto the skirt and Catherine Malandrino has knitted the tuxedo vest and bow tie right into a sweater? Even guys are in on the charade: Moschino painted a men’s tank top to masquerade as a motorcycle-style vest.

Like the grande dame of trompe l’oeil, Elsa Schiaparelli, whose surreal designs came to fame in the 1920s, Marc Jacobs turned his fool-the-eye looks into sophisticated tailoring. While Schiaparelli embroidered fingernails onto gloves and printed savage rips onto evening gowns, Jacobs’ less subversive approach included trompe l’oeil collars delicately sewn right into girlish dresses.

The return of witty, pop-art clothes at the designer level is remarkable, considering that we’re all trying to look so powerful and serious, said Valerie Steele, curator of the Fashion Museum at the Fashion Institute of New York. “Frivolity and fun in fashion tend to be more devalued, marginalized and pushed to the side,” Steele said. “It takes a certain amount of guts to wear something like a pattern. It is out of the take-me-serious, semi-masculine mode.”

Fashion has been taking itself quite seriously for quite a while now, and some of us couldn’t be happier for a change. Louise Coffey Webb , curator of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising museum in Los Angeles, welcomes the new graphics, even if lately they’re mostly on T-shirts. “It’s good to see something wacky and new for the new century,” she said.

Except for the ‘60s and ‘70s, we’ve been busily having practically no fun at all these past 100 years. Just as the 19th century saw menswear gradually shed its ruffles and ornamentation, Steele said 20th century women’s clothes became more masculine as they were made of darker colors and stripped of their surface detail--including patterned and printed fabrics.

“In the last 20 years prints have become much less significant, and if there are any, they are small and discrete,” Steele said, “especially compared to the past.” While combing through the museum’s archives of 250,000 prints, Steele said she’s often surprised by the size and variety of the prints, many so exuberantly large, they’d seem more appropriate for couch upholstery by today’s standards.

But standards change, and one hopes that this fall’s endorsement of vivid graphics may reverse a long-term trend that’s classified nearly all prints and most graphics as declasse. “Prints had become really mass, and therefore, dead in the water in fashion terms,” Steele said. “Once they get down there, they’re hard to rehabilitate.”

The widespread success of camouflage prints and of a funky little Spanish T-shirt firm called Custo Barcelona have alerted every savvy-trend watcher to the potential of prints and graphics. Custo’s introduction five years ago of quirky ethnic graphics now are joined by competitors featuring everything from Japanimation to ultra-realistic photo prints to faux rock concert souvenir shirts.

No one needs another T-shirt, but graphics and bold prints are selling them, said Julie Gilhart, vice president of fashion merchandising at Barneys New York. “What’s inspiring a customer to buy at retail now are things that are interesting, lively and have some sort of spirit,” she said. The store is also witnessing a renaissance of Roberta di Camerino, an Italian designer who has created trompe l’oeil dresses for decades.

As important, designer customers are snapping up artwork applied to bottoms, notably, jeans with pen doodles on them from Marc by Marc Jacobs or paint splashes from Dolce & Gabbana. Todd Oldham even offers jeans that act like a denim Etch-a-Sketch: scratch their surface and the design remains until it’s ironed away. Fall fashion magazines were quick to note the do-it-yourself appeal with articles detailing painting techniques for jeans, bags and shirts.

The powerful graphics trend has staying power, said Andrea Rankin, a partner with the Montebello-based Self Esteem collection of artwork-heavy T-shirts. In her monthly trend-scouting trips to Europe, Rankin has spied graphic T-shirts everywhere. Self Esteem’s fall and holiday collections are featuring airbrushed graffiti, photo prints, cartoons and, in a nod to what’s happening below the shirts, denim.

The graphics trend is soon to spread to jeans, if what she saw at the recent MAGIC menswear show in Las Vegas is any indication. She predicts that trompe l’oeil, now in the designer market, will trickle down to juniors in the spring.

Rankin and others are banking on vivid graphics to stick around in T-shirt obsessed L.A. and elsewhere because of the look’s versatility. Like message T-shirts, the new high-intensity visuals speak a “universal language,” said Rankin, one that’s shared by all ages and sizes of customers. With some exceptions, the appeal is ageless. “You’re not trying to be a mom who wants to look like her daughter,” Rankin said.

Unlike message T-shirts, most of the new patterns are dense, complex images that aren’t necessarily about a slogan. “It’s as if our body has become the MTV of the street,” Coffey Webb said. “People don’t even have time to read, so we’ve got to get the message out quick and fast. They’re the anti-clothing clothes for the new, short-attention span audience.”

Fashion moves so quickly now that to introduce an idea as elementary as “wacky graphics on shirts,” it must be pushed to the extreme just to freeze-frame the trend.

At some point, the pendulum will swing back to the middle, and that’s where wit, subversion and commerce will intersect. And that’s where we’ll see T-shirts featuring trompe l’oeil versions of a dead swan dress. It’ll be hilarious--and fun.