Fashion: Instant Originals

Fashion this fall seems to be the work of the Madwoman of Chaillot. Plus elements of a rummage sale, a fancy-dress party, and that haphazard art form based on “found objects.”

The “little nothing” black dress will no longer do, even if it carries a famous designer’s label. Today a woman is expected to design herself, assembling on her body a collage of bright colors, sensuous textures and glittering accessories. There are jeweled vests, billowing felt capes, balloon pants, plus pounds of false jewelry, ribbons, scarves, belts and chains—anything that can be combined to create a fanciful costume of individuality and panache.

The new attitude is free and defiant. “I don’t give a damn any longer what people think,” declares Manhattan Career Girl Pam Zauderer, 23. Not exactly a novel or revolutionary notion. Still, she was raised in Chanel suits picked out by her mother, and she now goes dining and dancing in pants—shaggy fur ones for the gaucho look at a party given by Vogue Editor Diana Vreeland, fringed satin ones for the Indian look at a Four Seasons reception for Yves Saint Laurent. Post-Deb Cathy Macauley, 21, shows up in Manhattan for the superformal opening of the Metropolitan Opera season wearing black culottes, an extravagantly embroidered red vest and a leash borrowed from her cat as a necklace. “I was going to go barefoot,” says Cathy, “but I guess that’s not right for the opera.”

Take-Off Pants. The costume look—or the “rich hippie” look, as it is sometimes known—is not just the prerogative of the young. Socialite-Artist Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, 44, is one devotee. Greeting guests at her recent one-woman show in Washington, D.C., she wore silver lamé harem pants, matching vest, rhinestone earrings,’bracelets, a brooch and six gold rings. “My dressing is a natural extension of my art,” says Gloria, who specializes in collages.

Much of the impetus comes from the exotic costumes dreamed up by youth, and the watchword is “Do your own thing.” The situation has traditional designers up tight. Old standard setters, like Balenciaga, have retired. Others, like Saint Laurent, reach for youth by focusing increasingly on less expensive ready-to-wear clothes. At 46, fatigued by the efforts that have kept him far ahead of other designers, Rudi Gernreich last week announced that he was taking a year off in order to refresh himself. Says Gernreich, who championed the new attitude all along: “I feel that a woman must buy the basics from a boutique or designer, and then be able to do what she wants with scarves and chains. Women want to involve themselves with their clothes.”

Relative newcomers are providing the best basics these days and usually at medium prices ranging from $75 to $300. Luba Marks, 45, a former dancer (first with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in Paris, later in Broadway musicals, including Annie Get Your Gun), went into the fashion business with her husband nine years ago. In 1965, she showed a collection of pants, and they have been her hallmark ever since. Though Luba, who won a Coty Award for her designs last month, does not pretend that she invented pants, no designer has worked with them more skillfully. As an ex-dancer, she likes their freedom. But she also likes variety: “No reason not to wear pants one day, a short skirt the next, a long one the following day.” In her fall collection, Luba has pants with a tunic top. “If you get too hot,” she explains to customers, “go to the ladies’ room, remove the pants, and you emerge in tunic and tights—perfectly presentable.”

Fur Levi’s. “Girls need to design something that nobody else has, and now they can,” says Michael Mott, 27, successor to Betsey Johnson as chief designer for Paraphernalia. Mott is all for the hippies, hence his American Indian costume. But like many other young people, he is also tuned in to other cultures, as witness his fur-trimmed midiskirts, borrowed from Persia. The same is true for Deanna Littell, 29, who finds ethnic inspiration in the costumes of Polish peasants and Russian Cossacks; Gayle Kirkpatrick, 34, who adapts the dress of Persian houris; Edie Gladstone, 39, who fancies the look of Ukrainian dancers; and Bill Smith, 30, who does Cavalier styles in leather for Samuel Robert.

Gernreich observes: “It is the designers of accessories who are now ascendant.” One case in point is Adolfo, 35. Long exclusively a high-fashion milliner, he has lately added a line of interchangeable boutique clothes, which he sells to the likes of Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, Jacqueline Kennedy and Mrs. William Paley. They take his “bits and pieces”—harem pants, long midi coats, shirts, vests and skirts—and combine them into what Adolfo calls “the anti-Establishment way of dressing for the Establishment.”

Another case in point is Count Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, 29, the costume-jewelry designer noted for his gold-chain bikini. He thinks of himself as a Renaissance man, and not without some reason. He studied architecture in Florence, industrial design in Barcelona, ceramies in Paris. He also studied with Picasso, drew cartoons for Walt Disney, designed hotel interiors in the Caribbean. Now he has produced his first collection of clothes, including Levi-inspired pants suits in broadtail and patchwork explosions of pure color, designed so that individual pieces can be combined in any number of ways. “The hippies made people unafraid of going their own way,” says Sant’Angelo, “and now that they have tasted this new freedom they will never conform again.”

Uniformed Individuality. To Designer Edie Gladstone, the trend means the end of the “investment dress,” which costs so much that a woman feels she has to wear it repeatedly to justify the outlay. To TV Actress Kathryn Leigh Scott, 23, it means making her own clothes and rummaging through thrift shops for old materials and accessories. Fashion Writer Caterine Milinaire, 25, one of Manhattan’s most creative dressers, is also a scavenger; her costume for a recent charity ball consisted of an old, loose-fitting Israeli dress that she picked up in London. “I guess I looked funny to a lot of people,” she says, “but I felt a hell of a lot better than they did.”

Manhattan Socialite Chessie Rayner has gone in for what she calls “the push-pull type of dressing,” gladly spends extra moments before the mirror making sure that the bits and pieces that she has combined for the particular occasion really go together. Designer Sant’Angelo goes Chessie one better by inviting girls over to his apartment for dressing-for-the-party parties. The girls swap clothes freely, creating costumes for each other and parading around like little children turned loose in a grownup’s closet. Sometimes, the designer admits sheepishly, they get so carried away with dressing that they never make the party.

There are other signs that the costume look may get out of hand. Sculptress Marisol finds the speed with which costumes change puzzling and hard to keep up with. Ex-Model Wilhelmina worries because “I want to be a lady in the long run, not a teen-ager.” Alexander’s high-powered Fashion Director Francine Farkas, who is responsible for the store’s considerable success in selling young people on the new way of dressing, nevertheless thinks that it can lead to “uniformed individuality,” meaning that the combination of wide-legged pants, vests and chains has been overworked to the point where the wearers all begin to look alike.

Perhaps so, in the case of people with limited nerve and imagination. But for those with flair, fashion has seldom been more exciting. “Instant individualism” is how Henri Bendel President Geraldine Stutz describes what is happening, and she notes that it is also a safe way to dress. After all, she says, “no two people can really come out with the same combination, even if they use the same six or seven components.”