Eastern look from Italian designers

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33904, 25 July 1975, Page 5

Eastern look from Italian designers

(By

JUDITH HARRIS,

N.Z.P.A.-Reuter correspondent.)

ROME, July 24. Fashion for this northern winter is going east, judging by couture collections introduced here. Last autumn and winter the rage in Italy was the Russian-look popover tunic, an overdress worn with Cossack boots. This year the Russian i style remains in tunic overblouses and long, loose smock dresses and jackets. But things also go more Oriental with Chinese, Japanese, or Mongolian touches — here an obi sash, there a Mandarin collar. > Tita Rossi dubbed her collection “Chinatown.” The mannequins wore Orientalstyle wigs with a straight pageboy short bob and a stiff fringe. And, like a sailor out of Shanghai, one of the models had a tattoo on her wrist.

In the Tita Rossi collection, designed by the clever young South American, Manolo Verde, daytime suits, worn with either pencil skirts or straight-lined trousers, came with jackets with kimono sleeves. The fabrics ranged from costly vicuna to homely corduroy.

Afternoon dresses were angora kimonos, worn under a mink kimono. Here, the trendy touch was to tie a triangular angora scarf casu-

ally over the hips, knotted at the side. The cocktail dress is one of the many fifties fashions providing the basic shapes behind the various “Chinoiserie” and Russian motifs. Tita Rossi’s were deceptively simple little black kimono dresses in pure silk with lace trim and obi sashes for a wasp-waist look. Heavy sportswear Instead of floor-length evening gowns there were printed silk or voile straight skirts and velveteen overblouses. The sole exotic outfit for evening had embroidered velvet bloomers teamed with suede boots, a tunic shirt and a Mongolian-style mink jacket with pelts worked to look like quilting. Barocco’s handsome collection demonstrated that some fashion ideas manage to survive for years. In this case it is the multi-layered look, one of the rare constants of fashions in the 1970’5. Barocco’s models were definitely out to beat the energy crisis, dressed in a multitude of fleecy wool jerseys, jackets, coats and broad-knit shawls, plus coal scuttle hats.

The look of sportswear was top heavy and mannish, with a Prince of Wales tweed pencil-slim walking skirt (hemline well below the knee) and, over the matching

jacket, an enormous triangular wool shawl knotted at one shoulder.

Waterproof taffeta raincoats came in grey mattress ticking stripes and were worn with a striped jersey, grey flannel trousers which did not quite reach the ankle, and high-heeled wedgie ankle boots.

A sure winner was a cocktail outfit- in black velvet. A loose, baggy fisherman’s jacket was worn over clamdigger trousers, for the casually chic look that is one of the hallmarks of Italian fashions.

Andre Laug put a barnyard touch to his ultrasophisticated autumn-winter collection, introduced in Rome mid-way through a week of couture fashions by some 30 designers. Laug, the sole French high fashion designer based in Italy, phicked such farm fowl as turkeys, chickens and guinea hens to trim a collar, make a pierrot ruff, or for big feather bracelets linked by taffeta ribbons. Laug’s collection was personal and individualistic, bypassing the Chinese motif that most of the designers are showing, including the big-name furriers and the likes of Pino Lancetti and Valentino. The clothes were frankly mannish and tailored, but in the suggestive way of Marlene Dietrich in a man’s tuxedo.