Understated Elegance

Fashion designers--like the fashions they design--go in and out of style with the irregular cadence of the female whim.

Very much in this year is slight, soft-spoken Donald Brooks, 34, who has given to middle-income womanhood the understated elegance hitherto associated with high-price high fashion. Last April the New York Drama Critics presented him with their annual award for his costumes for Richard Rodgers' No Strings. This week the Coty American Fashion Critics (75 top fashion editors) gave him their Winnie award (like an Oscar, only chic) for his fall collection.

Brooks's success is largely due to the U.S. woman's shift to the basic philosophy of French chic: comfort and simplicity as opposed to the cinched-up complexity many another designer has confused with high style. Brooks's clothes are generally sleeveless and unclinging; he does not think that tight fits are elegant. Says he: "My clothes are not meant to be worn by people who have no personalities of their own." One of his personality people is Jacqueline Kennedy, who picked three of his dresses for her tour of India and Pakistan.

Filled Gap. Brooks came to the garment trade from Syracuse University, wangled a job with a second-rate house that specialized, says Brooks, in "hopped-up, jazzy sportswear--the kind of place where they put rhinestones on Irish linen and the sales staff called it raindrops." For a year he designed similar monstrosities and studied the ups and downs of the business.

One of the ups of the business is canny Adolph Klein, owner of Townley Frocks, Inc., home of the late Claire McCardell, whose casual, comfortable "American Look" (no buttons that don't button, no bows that don't tie) made the U.S. the world's sportswear capital. When Claire McCardell died in 1958, Klein chose Brooks as the man with the best chance of filling the gap she left. Townley's sales have doubled since Brooks took over, now run to a handsome 40,000 or more dresses a year, retailing at $65 to $200.

Dropped Jaw. When Brooks heard that No Strings was a musical with a fashion background, he made an appointment with Richard Rodgers. But instead of appearing with a portfolio, he brought four eye-popping models, stationed them outside the door of Rodgers' office. "All of a sudden the door opened, and this impromptu fashion show started," Brooks recalls. "It really took Dick by surprise.

My eyes never left his face, and I could see his jaw drop." Brooks designed Diahann Carroll's clothes in No Strings as exaggerations of his loose, clean-lined trade designs--"not because I believe in exaggeration, but because subtleties don't carry beyond the fifth row." Brooks's designs carried far enough.

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