The direct line from fashionable New York

Press, 26 November 1981, Page 10

The direct line from fashionable New York

SALLY BRAMPTON reports for the London “Sunday Times” from America.

New York, never ceases to amaze me with its apparent selt-confidence. Everything is bigger, brasher, flashier, and it never stops. ' Americans take themselves. very, very seriously. They live and work with an enthusiastic intensity. It’s no good lurking furtively in the background or apologising for the “inconvenience” in New York. If you want something you grab it. Using this more than direct approach the Americans have grabbed the rest of the fashion world by the throat and left it speechless. New York over the past few years has become the major directive influence. Fashion capitals come and go. New York, it seems, is Now. A curious thing, say some. Their design is not usually outrageously new and there is none of that off-beat creative energy that runs through Paris and London. The people on the streets look very normal, anyone dressed in extraordinary clothes is a rare sight indeed. What there is instead is a hard-edged professionalism and a marketing genius that perfectly matches the fastmoving consumer-conscious Eighties. America has watched the fashion stages of Europe for years and learned from them. Now they are putting the lessons into practice. New York designers understand the most obvious of fashion functions — wearability (a point that some of their European counterparts seem unable to grasp). They reject the pretention

that Fashion is Art. In New York, fashion means business — and in a big way. Europe may sniff and sneer at this approach but America seems to have proved by its rapid ascendancy that it has hit the nail squarely on the head.

A designer who manages to combine both wearability with new and exciting design is Perry Ellis. In the few years since he established his own label he has been admired and very much copied. The latest darling of the New York catwalk, he is an elegant, soft-spoken Southerner with the very refreshing belief that women should wear exactly what they want.

An innovator himself, he finds it ridiculous that anyone should be frightened or terrorised by fashion. He says that he designs to amuse and please and doesn’t have any belief in “investment dressing” (buying a jacket because you ought to rather than a silly but wonderful shirt because you want to).

“Very boring,” he says emphatically. Boring he is not. His collection this season had his fans slapping one another’s backs with glee — “such darling clothes,” was the reaction after the last “Chariots of Fire”-inspired creation stepped off the catwalk. (“Chariots of Fire” is the film in New York at the moment, and, I presume, the influence on Perry Ellis.) There were very long linen jackets over pleated skirts to just above the ankle, or over wide Oxford bags in varying

widths of stripe: cool, clear colours like white, cream, pale blue and soft pink. The waist had disappeared altogether or dropped to the hip where it was wrapped with bands of fabric, triangular scarfs or narrow leather belts. Knits too were long and

lean (Paris may be bringing back the curve, Perry Ellis has ruled it out completely). Pin-thin tubular dresses to very low calf with wide three-quarter sleeves appeared in supple mercerised cotton, usually white, with bands of soft colour at waist, hem or neck.