Living: Cheers for the Home Team

Armani’s strength is consolidated, his influence lasting. The fashion world pays homage, genuflects and, like a child peeking out from behind prayers, starts casing the sanctuary for a little diversion. Some are suggesting that the next big fashion push will come from Japan. Others—like Kal Ruttenstein, fashion director of Bloomingdale’s, who wears “only Armani,” and Daniel Hechter, Europe’s top-selling men’s sportswear designer—believe that the U.S. will come to the ascendancy. If they are right, here are a couple of kings and two comers who will be riding the crest of the wave:

RALPH LAUREN. Tom Wolfe once derided Lauren’s “Savile Pseud suits,” and backpacking types have been known to mutter about the imposed funk of his Western look. But no one has so codified American traditionalism, or mined it quite so profitably, as Ralph Lauren. His Polo (for men) and Ralph Lauren (for women) labels, with their assorted subsidiaries, sidelines and licenses, pulled in more than $700 million last year. His logo of a mallet-wielding polo player has galloped across everything from ties to dresses, saddle blankets to note pads, and is well on the way to giving the Lacoste alligator a smart konk on the noggin.

Lauren, like Armani, began as a designer of men’s wear, and both started cutting from the same English bias. The man from Milan worked his unstructured radicalization; Lauren stayed as close as possible to tradition, re-establishing and rejustifying it. His clothes, at first, were deliberately evocative of the 1920s and made their way— in a fashion that would both help and haunt him—into the 1974 film The Great Gatsby. More recently, Lauren has looked west for inspiration. His “prairie look” last fall for women, with the hem of a petticoat peeking out from under a skirt worn with a Navajo colored sweater, was fresh, simple and somewhat startling. It was also a smash, and will be repeated, with modifications, this fall.

The popular success of Chariots of Fire and Brideshead Revisited have, meanwhile, provided impetus for Lauren, 42, to turn back to his beginnings. Many of this fall’s clothes for men and women will feature a British accent, with lots of strict tailoring: heathery tweeds for men, an elongated Norfolk jacket for women worn with a contrasting tweed skirt. Fabrics immaculate, tailoring impeccable: the best off-the-rack American stuff that comes to hand. Wearing Ralph Lauren is not exactly like falling into Jay Gatsby’s closet; it is more like joining one of John O’Hara’s country clubs.

PERRY ELLIS. If Armani rewrote the fashion book, Perry Ellis took a very close look at his opening chapter. “If we want to be honest,” Armani says, “it is not only Perry Ellis but Calvin Klein who has gotten inspiration from my things. But I’d say that, perhaps, Calvin Klein is more of a stylist who can transform a good idea into a commercial success. Perry Ellis is more courageous. He produces a fashion more genuinely his.”

Ellis, an elfin 42, made his name with highly imaginative sweater stylings for women. This spring he scored with a collection of women’s wear in subtle pastels and shifting shapes that summon up echoes of the ragtime era. “When you’re designing for women,” he says, “you can do wonderfully imaginative clothes and create lots of different moods. With men you can do perhaps the same thing, but it’s still more limited.” Trying to work some stretch into those limitations, Ellis’ leading men’s jacket for fall will be long, narrowing gradually from the shoulder to a nip at the hip and featuring a one-button closing. His women’s line will concentrate on “cleanness and wit” and will feature oversize coats and jackets in wool flannel that will remind some observers of the wardrobe a flapper would haul along on her way to a little boola-boola.

PINKY AND DIANNE. Two women who got their start doing custom designs for rock stars, Pinky (Wolman), 36, and Dianne (Beaudry), 37, have simmered down sufficiently since the ’70s to produce clothes for men and women that add a silken worldliness to their original down and dirty flash. “We were tired of trash and wanted a smarter look,” says Pinky. “We discovered silk, which we used for sportswear.” Their designs are sassy and declarative, their colors showy but controlled. “We make clothes for a more urban lady, a sophisticate who follows the fashion magazines,” says Pinky, who was recently in Milan showing off a collection at a small hotel whose proprietor clears the entire premises when the two women move in. Their new line for fall features short skirts, knitted sweater dresses with hefty shoulders tapering down to a mid-thigh hemline, and Irish tweed overcoats that look like a Black and Tan fantasy. “We still do avant-garde clothes,” Pinky says, “avantgarde and expensive, but we use lots of discipline in the men’s things.” Examples: silk shirts with small collars, suede as lively as dyed denim and a baseball jacket made of tweed and leather that no pitcher would risk leaving in the bullpen.

JHANE BARNES. “My paperbag pocket?” says Barnes to a visitor as she searches her studio for an example of her handiwork. “Here, it’s on this jacket here. I kept it ’cause the cat peed on it.” Barnes, 28, admits to doing “kind of spacy designs. But in a time when kids are playing electronic games, we shouldn’t be bringing back Argyle socks.” Barnes, like Armani, designs her fabric, but goes so far as to weave a sample swatch on her own hand loom, whipping up wild combos of silk, cotton and wool. “I found that I could sell the wildest fabrics for men if the style wasn’t outrageous,” she says. Barnes has a flexible definition of outrageous: in her first collections, she used curved shoulder pads while removing the conventional shoulder seam so that a jacket seemed to melt along the arm. For her line this fall, the intrepid Barnes is featuring overcoats of exotic tweeds. She is also reworking men’s and women’s jackets with knitted collars of complementary colors but with different, tighter weaves incorporating spandex. If this sounds a touch outré, her clients—including Saks and Neiman-Marcus—are decidedly down-to-earth, and her 1981 sales take of $2 million is positively corporate for someone who can still use a loom.