Fray chic in the city

Ralph Lauren Spins His Exurban Legend On the Upper East Side

NEW YORK, Sept. 22

On Saturday night, designer Ralph Lauren staged his spring 2003 runway presentation at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum on the Upper East Side. The setting was the most elegant of the week, which in reality would not have been that difficult, since getting to many shows required picking one's way down streets filled with auto repair shops, garbage dumpsters and bags of curbside refuse sitting in puddles of liquid best left unidentified.

That sort of urban reality had its place during fashion week, which ended today. Some designers believe their clothes spring organically from abandoned warehouses, the aromas from street vendors and the microscopic grit that hangs in the air over most major cities. For them, the odors from the street are an inspiring perfume.

But Lauren spins fantasies—delicious, romantic, unnerving. The designer speaks of tradition, but the reality is that he builds history from the ground up. His work requires a setting that evokes frayed wealth. And while some might argue the disingenuousness of Lauren's story line, that complaint sounds suspiciously like jealousy. After all, who wouldn't like to have had a say in the history out of which they were formed?

Lauren's guests passed through a wood coffered foyer, down a stone staircase lined with hydrangea-stuffed urns and glowing candles, and into a garden. There, waiters gliding among the guests offering glasses of champagne and trays of hors d'oeuvres some of which in­volved foie gras—a culinary in­dication that this was not the kind of fashion affair that would include Nelly rapping about the heat, groupies in graffiti print suits and a phalanx of overstuffed security guards protecting a starlet with the bullying swagger of a SWAT team.

To some degree, these few min­utes of artfully created civility— like the sounds of car alarms and garbage trucks at other shows— were as important as the clothes that would eventually come down the runway. As the fashion industry focuses on nostalgia as well as a vi­sion of the present that is defined by comfort and familiarity, the im­portance of mood and subtext has never been more important.

The clothes have lost much of their ability to entice. In some cases, garments churn up no ex­citement because they are unin­spired. But in many cases, the clothes fall flat for reasons that are more complicated. The garments are lovely, the fabrics are luxuri­ous. But the shapes are familiar— cargo pants, T-shirts, board shorts, yoga pants, tennis skirts, jeans. And unlike the '90s, when design­ers took familiar shapes and made them extraordinary with embel­lishments, for spring 2003, the clothes slip quietly into the back­ground. That is both their beauty and their flaw.

Lauren's collection was filled with prints suggesting the faded wallpaper in the powder room of a family estate. The dresses, cut from ivory tulle, had slightly tat­tered hemlines. He mixed dis­tressed linen with silk and paired a long denim skirt with a beaded cot-ten top. They didn't look as though they had been self-consciously de­stroyed but rather as if they had been frayed over time.

What Lauren was championing more than the actual garments on the runway was a belief that age adds value. Logic, then, would sug­gest that one should comb one's closet for an old pair of Levi's. Ask Grandma if she has a favorite old throw that might be turned into an heirloom bustier. Finish things off with a cameo that has been in the family for generations.

But for those lacking the appro­priate family history, Lauren will provide. And for those who are skeptical of the legitimacy of the vi­sion, the elegant setting helps to make the aesthetic more palatable. It argues that even in an un­forgiving city and in uncertain times, there is a place for nostalgic romance. Indeed, one magazine ed­itor bemoaned the fact that she hadn't changed her Saturday work attire for evening clothes. And yet, how often does anyone—other than a tourist—really change for dinner anymore? Another editor reminisced that the calm, the beau­ty, the polite chatter was how fash­ion used to be.

And for an hour—until guests stepped out onto Fifth Avenue to find helmeted roller bladers thrash­ing out acrobatics off the Guggenheim Museum’s stone plaza – Lauren made a valiant argument that fashion could be that way again.

Donna Karan, Jeremy Scott

The fashion industry often uses the past to sell a future that is six months away. Because just as sure­ly as designers are selling clothes, they are also hawking reassurance, comfort and familiarity. What do customers want? They want the same thing they had last season on­ly different.

Donna Karan's collection drew upon the rhythms of New York City, but from a time when this town's possibilities far outstripped its dangers. The collection focused on feminine dresses with full skirts and a cinched waist. Shoulder pads gave the silhouette a squared-off finish. But the garments, in their nostalgic blur, lacked the languid sensuality that is the essence of Ka­ran's work. The presentation for spring 2003 seemed to trip over the awkwardness of a modernist relying too heavily on the past.

Nostalgia can be a tough sell. The purity of a memory has a way of being clouded by personal expe­rience. One person's recollection of the 1950s may be filled with im­ages of family dinners, dressing for the theater and fancy cocktails. An­other person may recall it as a time of stifling social rules and narrow-minded thinking.

The future is a better, but more challenging, option. The slate is clean and folks can envision the best possible world. But it requires no less care in setting the scene, no less eloquence in arguing the point-of-view.

Thankfully, few designers play out the future as a space age fanta­sy in which workers dress like crew members of "Star Trek's" Enter­prise. Only Jeremy Scott remains wedded to the idea of fashion as a craft defined by feathers and glue guns. Fashion has evolved to the point that the dominant vocabulary references sport, informality and comfort. The industry has ceased trying to press artificial formality on customers. Instead it wrestles with ways to transform the banal— cargo pants, T-shirts, board shorts and tank tops—into clothes that can function in an office that aims for decorum and that can go to a gala and not diminish the festive-ness of the occasion.

Rick Owens, John Bartlett

Designer Rick Owens showed his line in a spare loft Friday after­noon. His signature aesthetic is dragging trousers, unfinished hems, jackets that remain ill-formed until they crumple and fold in around the body. Owens layers stretched sweaters over droopy knit skirts. Gauze trousers revel in their wrinkles. His colors are ivory and gray and earth tones diluted of any intensity.

Looking at the clothes, one is tempted to declare them unimpres­sive. And for fall 2002, they are ex­traordinarily dour. But part of their appeal—that is to the wearer, not the observer—is their ordinariness.

They serve the same purpose as the sweats and T-shirts that people regularly slip into on a Saturday af­ternoon. But how much more satis­fying might it be if the T-shirt was soft as a feather? If the baggy pants had an indulgent softness and a more flattering fit than the sweat pants that stick out awkwardly on the side? With those changes, the walk-the-dog clothes now don't look so out of place at lunch. And more importantly, the wearer feels better in them.

Designer John Barlett has a sim­ilar, though not as disheveled, sen­sibility. For spring, he offers men cargo pants in hot pink, board shorts layered over yoga pants, scuba vests tucked under blazers and laminated, linen jeans. He taps into the allure of surfing, blending the ruggedness and adventurous-ness of nature and sports with his own polished version of the aes­thetic that has grown up around it.

Tyler, Anna Sui, Pierrot

Richard Tyler included silk car­go pants in his Tyler collection, a recently established secondary line that aims to attract a broader range of customers. At Anna Sui and Pierrot, the designers tapped into sports such as tennis and golf for their ready-to-wear collections. Sui gave tennis skirts the polish of a kilt, appliqued images of golf greens onto day dresses and paired a sequined football jersey with a skirt. The effect was full of charm and wit.

And Pierre Carrilero, who de signs under the label Pierrot, punctuated his collection of knits with references to tennis togs as seen through the eyes of a Florida retirее with an insatiable passion for terry cloth, crochet and caftans.

Diesel Style Lab, Miguel Adrover

Diesel Style Lab tossed the kind of layered denim, T-shirt and sweat shirt ensembles onto the runway that one typically sees on music videos extras and in editorial spreads in second-tier fashion mag­azines that have an aversion to models who comb their hair. It is a self-conscious, studied look that is often attempted by good kids who aspire to cool indifference. But it is rarely copied with much success. Street-smart bravado is hard to get right in the shadow of a strip mall and a cul de sac without sidewalks.

Dressing well has been rede­fined. It may still be a sign of good manners, not forcing one's neigh­bor to witness ill-conceived en­sembles or garish colors, but more than that, it is successfully incorpo­rating comfort, environment, cool, and the personal into something extraordinary.

Miguel Adrover epitomized that complex stew when he presented his collection on Saturday. Having reorganized after being forced to shut down his business last year, Adrover returned with a collection “Citizen of the World” that remained true to his vision that fashion should reflect a cultural mosaic.

Do-rags were woven into a tank top and a dress. An oversize T-shirt was transformed into a silk georgette dress. Long shirts in the style of North Africa and the Middle East were worn with tailored jackets and trousers. A sharkskin three-piece pantsuit was cut for men and women.

Adrover referenced Hasidim and the priesthood. He used Carib­bean prints. Thai pants, Nuyorican shorts, banker suits and anything else that one might see walking down a crowded New York street. Yet it was all linked by the ways in which people borrow—often un­knowingly—from another culture in the name of comfort and cool. Patterns are embraced, not for their meaning, but because of their beauty. Loose fit trousers are be­loved because of their ease, not be­cause they are particularly Asian or Caribbean. A long shirt with san­dals looks elegant on a hot summer evening—cultural origin is forgotten.

Making it one's mission to cele­brate multiculturalism can easily leave a designer's collection look­ing like a high-priced version of a Benetton shop. And when Adrover sent out a model dressed in the equivalent of the United Nations flag, he tumbled into mawkishness. But his lapses were rare. And throug sheer talent, he convincingly argued that dressing well still matters.