THE CASUAL, ELEGANT LOOK

THE metaphorists of high fashion made the whole thing sound startling, fragile and very expensive: "Suddenly, with clothes going soft and guileful," cried Vogue, "the beauty aspect is changing from cosy-natural to smooth-as-sapphire." Harper's Bazaar personified it in a Golden Girl: "Blithe spirit, her skin the beige of beaches," dressed in "14-carat comfort, 14-carat chic." What was exciting them was the new effort to add elegance to the casual look of the American woman. Sportswear for milady has never been more abundant, more nearly priced for every pocketbook, more durable, or made more suitable for 24-hour wear. It also emphasizes the bare look, i.e., no sleeves, no back. All across the U.S. last week women thronged fashion shows and department stores to sample the casual wares.

Casual clothes got their first big boost at resorts and spread to suburbia, where housewives needed a single, rough-and-ready costume for the range of home chores, from driving the kids to school to cooking in the backyard. Now leisure dress has invaded the city: even in Manhattan, where women in shorts used to draw unfavorable stares, Bermudas and slacks are now commonplace in neighborhood shops and parks. In the past few years, sales of casual clothes have risen steadily; sales of slacks, sportswear's hottest item, have doubled in four years.

Leather Pants. Variously called Capris and toreadors, the tight, form-hugging slacks are made in everything from plain cotton ($1.95) to kid leather ($75). They ushered in the lollipop look. "My husband doesn't like them," explains a California housewife. "Every time I bend over, he says I look like a lollipop. So one day I wore a dress. First, I caught it in the car door. Then the baby poured soup in my lap. To top it all off, the grocer asked me if I were expecting another child. I've been wearing pants ever since." Next to pants, the staple is the simple, classic shirtwaist dress. It is now--thanks largely to new synthetic fibers and treated cottons --sturdy, wrinkleproof, quick-drying.

For women with too, too solid flesh the revived culottes have proved the surprise hit of the season. The one-and two-piece culottes match a variety of blouses and jackets, thus fulfilling one of the essentials of a sportswear wardrobe: interchangeability. Other leisure items that have scored this year:

P: Italian Designer Emilio Pucci's non-wrinkle silk jersey sheath that weighs only four ounces and helps to keep Italy, along with California, in the leisure-wear vanguard.

P: Knit dresses in cotton, wool and synthetic weaves. Says a Bloomingdale buyer: "It is easier to sell a wool knit for $60 or $70 than any other kind of dress."

P: Embroidered, lingerie-styled tops and pants in sheer cotton for the boudoir look on the beach.

P: Poplin jackets, sloppy-Joe sweaters, and colorful tops designed to provide a public front for the Bikini wearer.

"Immoral." Bikinis, to hear the designers tell it, are favorably regarded only by the well-shaped women who buy them. "Most manufacturers do not like Bikinis," admits Rose Marie Reid, one of the most popular of U.S. swimsuit stylists. "They are vulgar, hideous, immoral." Fred Cole of Cole of California agrees. Bikinis account for about 5% of all swimsuit sales.

Women who once owned only one bathing suit now have four or five. Form-molding Lastex is popular in swimsuits in many areas of the U.S., but cotton suits are more practical for suburban housewives. They like to wear the looser cotton suits around the home, wrap a skirt around themselves to do errands, throw on a sweater for an evening barbecue.

Time was when all a woman needed was to slip on a pair of slacks and her husband's old shirt to play the casual. But with slacks and casual clothes now designed even for evening wear, the idea is to convert "casual" into a fashionable word no longer synonymous with "sloppy" and "convenient."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.