The New Old Sports

/ noticed she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes--there was a jauntiness . . . as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.

--Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

For timid--or independent--souls who are still wondering whether to buy those "new" '40s-inspired clunky platform shoes, the question may soon be irrelevant. With its usual fickleness, fashion is already whizzing on. "Down from those three-inch platforms," say the heralds of chic, "and onward to something older!" For many designers and their customers, the In echo is of the '20 --not so much the roaring of the jazz babies in speakeasies as the tinkling of cocktail glasses on Long Island lawns and the rustle of silk against chiffon.

In the U.S., the style is frequently called the Gatsby look, a catch phrase that doubtless will get a boost with the remake this year of a movie based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novella. French magazines are calling it le style tennis or the Deauville look. But it might just as easily be described as the Newport-to-Palm Beach mood, or the John Held Jr. look (after the cartoonist who lampooned the '20s) or the Devereux Milburn look (for the '20s polo hero). Polo, tennis and golf--not as they were played but as they were watched--are central to the sporting-set concept.

Godfather. The idea is elegance--a calculatedly casual, languid elegance suggesting an evanescent Fitzgerald memory of the summer of '22. "To want to walk out on the lawn wearing a white silk shirt and white flannels presents a very rich, dreamlike atmosphere," says New York Designer Ralph Lauren, whose Polo label has looked longingly back at the '20s for some time. There are dissenters inevitably. Designers Galanos and Halston view Gatsby by any name as a banana-oil slick. It is "not an influence on truly fashionable people," says Halston, whose clients include Jackie Onassis and Mrs. William Paley. "Women have finally settled down to pants, and that's the way it will be for a long time. Do you expect a woman today to go back to garters?"

Probably not, but women--as well as men--seem more than willing to go back to the aura, if not all the details, of granddad's illusions. Milan's Walter Albini, who might be called the godfather of the Italian Gatsby look, has drawn on the Fitzgerald era since he first started designing ten years ago. "It was a cultural high-water mark in fashion, decorating, literature, painting," he contends. "Actually, nobody has done anything new since. Everything is still based on Chanel of around 1925." (Designer Coco Chanel revolutionized fashion for both sexes in the early '20s with her loose-fitting, casual styles.)

The current concentration on Fitzgeraldiana seems to have begun in a big way last summer with Paris Designer Kenzo Takada's revival of the classic V-neck, red-and-blue-bordered tennis sweater. It was an instant hit, and Kenzo's spring '73 collection expanded on the tennis theme in earnest.

Rich Wrinkles. The basic elements are similar from designer to designer as they appear in popular ready-to-wear apparel: the tennis sweater, often with a matching long cardigan; three-piece suits in white or pale flannel or muted plaids; wide-legged baggy pants, cuffed or pleated or both; pin-stripe shirts with big butterfly bow ties; and two-tone spectator shoes, all for both sexes. Daytime wear for women relies on little white pleated skirts ending just above the knee, and small cloche hats pulled down to the eyebrows For evening, everything is soft and flowing in chiffon and crepe de Chine, bias cut to drape close to the body, just the thing for a moonlight tango with a gentleman in an Indian silk suit. The fabrics are natural--wool, linens, pure cotton--and difficult to care for, with a tendency to develop the rumpled badge of the thoroughly bred. "A poor man can't afford to look wrinkled," observes Lauren. "A rich man can."

Favored colors are red or maroon and navy blue, dark or pale green, and basic black. White predominates in several hues--stark, off-and creamy--a careless nose thumbing at practicality. The message, explains Los Angeles Designer Marilyn Lewis ("Cardinali") is: "I'm not working. I'm disporting myself with physical pleasure because I have the leisure."

Whether clothes meant for lawn parties and limousines will make it big on the buses and subways remains to be seen. Some retailers, like Boston's Jordan Marsh, say that the tennis look is already selling well for resort wear. Lord & Taylor has enthusiastically bought nearly all of the Albini collection, and New York's giant Alexander's, which specializes in translating luxury fashions into mass sales, is promoting the Gatsby theme in every department. Its mannequins wear short or bobbed hair under cloche and Panama hats, Art Deco jewelry in clunky imitation ivory, long rope necklaces of pearl or amber, narrow belts and long, long scarves. "We've just emerged from an ethnic, costume period," says Alexander's Fashion Designer Francine Farkas. "Halloween is over." Even Levi Strauss is making wide-legged, cuffed pants and V-neck sweaters. "We have more white than we've ever had before," says a Levi's official. "The whole tennis look is the coming thing."

The 1973 Levi's version can never be quite the same as Gatsby's "white suit with a silver shirt and a gold-colored tie." But if designers like Albini and Lauren are right, the zigzag cycle of nostalgic fashion has found its next turn. "Can't repeat the past?" cried Gatsby incredulously. "Why, of course you can. I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before." Got that, Sport?

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