East Village Stars and Stripes

By Jay Cocks.

There's a riot going on. Three rooms full. Free admission. Open five days a week (closed Sundays and Mondays). Come on down.

The place is the museum space at New York City's Fashion Institute of Technology, alma mater of Calvin Klein and other top American design talent. FIT is just in the throes of giving the green trees of academe a good shaking. The institute has devoted much of its gallery space to a show called "The East Village," which offers an eye-scalding, rambunctious and appropriately free-spirited tour of boho fashion, Manhattan style. There is a lot of fun- house art on the walls, and sculpture that looks as if it belongs at an after- hours club on Easter Island. Jewelry resembles a collection of body ornaments from some lost tribe out of H. Rider Haggard--adornment for young natives swacked on pop culture who listen to Husker Du and go to art openings the way uptowners might check out the 8 o'clock movie.

It is the clothes that give the exhibit its full zest."The East Village" celebrates invention and the kind of creativity that is uninhibited by the fine points of technique, and it presents, in one humongous Day-Glo capsule, the liveliest fashion scene in the country. Some of the designers' names --including Susan Backus, Keni Valenti and Bayard--may pop up some day soon in more commercial settings. The show as a whole may or may not be a barometer of where street-savvy American fashion is headed, but downtown is the direction to go for spirit, smarts and a little by-the-way hilarity on a hanger.

FIT is close to the heart of Seventh Avenue, the hub of the domestic rag trade. Staging "The East Village" there is a bit like lobbing a firecracker into a country club where the members are all snoozing in their lounge chairs. Geographically, the East Village is about two miles from the garment center, but spiritually the distance could be measured in light-years. Many of the women and men who started the American garment business came from immigrant families who clustered in the tenements of the Lower East Side. That is much the same territory covered by today's East Village, but if the roots are still around the old neighborhood, the connection has been broken.

The young designers and artists who live there now could be the grandchildren of the people who made good in the rag trade and moved away to the sanctuary of the suburbs. Nonetheless, the surges of prismatic energy in the clothes they make and wear have little relation to the settled design ideas of Seventh Avenue. Some garments, like an outfit by Eva Goodman that resembles a series of sewn-together Hula Hoops sprayed with an Earl Scheib paint job, press hard on the outer edge, looking for the place where far-out goes too far.

The FIT show, which runs through May 3, not only has been smartly curated and edited but also imparts a solid, vivid sense of the East Village scene. "It's about clubs, it's about theater, it's about music, it's about fashion," says Richard Martin of FIT, one of the show's organizers. "We wanted to convey the lively sense of the East Village as a place where all the arts interrelate." Citizens of the area see themselves as being a little like social pioneers and a lot like artistic avatars of previous generations. A gifted designer named Julia Morton makes comparisons to the Greenwich Village of the 1950s, where "painters were creating their own original concept of art. It's the same sort of thing that's going on down here now." That kind of freewheeling climate has encouraged inspired variations even on hidebound forms. Anyone who thinks there is nothing more to be done with a necktie ought to check out one of Morton's dazzling silks, cut on a crazy, sawtooth diagonal.

"When I first came to the East Village, there was nothing here but methadone clinics," says Morton, who is 28 and a partner in an intrepid boutique called Einstein's. "It was a chance for me to break out of Seventh Avenue and really do my own thing. The East Village is just a location, just an area, but it became a launching pad for young designers." Some of these flamboyantly monikered tyros (like Animal-X, Katpeacent, Nick Nix) could be easily confused with the local rock talent (Cargo Cult, Live Skull), which is no accident. The relationship between music and design is especially tight along these streets. The designers catch a spirit from the tunes, and tune in to new ideas at clubs as various as the trendy-tony Palladium and the ever elusive Love Club, which moves at regular intervals. "The clubs are where you go to find out what people are wearing," says Stephen Saban, associate editor of Details, which began chronicling the downtown scene four years ago and has fast become the smartest style magazine in the country. "People who design clothing go to clubs because kids who are the fashion innovators go to them. There is lots of getting ideas and exchanging ideas."

On view in the new show, or on sale in East Village boutiques from Black Market and Batislavia to Tribe and 109 St. Mark's, are such items as an Eva Goodman nylon raincoat, colored like a beachball, done up with sailing-line pullies and decorated with squirmy rubber fishing lures; a black rubber dress with a zip from back to hem by Mariann Marlowe; and an all-vinyl snakeskin suit by Animal-X. Some of the clothes go for immediate impact over staying power. But there are a fair number of designers, like Morton and Goodman, who are imaginative enough to be in no immediate danger of a burnout, and there are others, as well, who show signs of staying the course. Three examples:

Susan Backus, 30, could be the most promising talent in the field. The daughter of a superior-court judge in Sacramento, she has flair, ideas aplenty and enough stylistic maturity to sidestep some of the goofiness that colors the fringes of the scene. She also has her technical chops down: her white knit outfit, which uses garters to shape the fabric over the body, is not only a bit of virtuoso craftsmanship but a shrewd little essay in sensual body wrapping. Her cut felt tops with black topstitching suggest some deep runic mystery and look like Miyake after a trip to the high Andes. Backus is already making her move away from the neighborhood. "I need a middle ground," she says. "Someplace where I have more freedom of movement, so I can spend time designing something a little more commercial, a little easier to sell."

Bayard, 29, has no other name he likes to give out, hails from Long Island, N.Y., and works in the sort of cold-water-flat chaos that gives anxiety attacks to anxious parents. "I know where everything is," he insists, and from an exposed wall rack produces a cocoon-shaped coat, printed in stars and stripes. The motif might prompt an approving letter from the White House, but this garment has more in common with the goofy irreverence of Abbie Hoffman's emblematic flag shirt. It also has a swashbuckling cut, guaranteed to turn the wearer into a club- circuit Scarlet Pimpernel. Bayard, bold with form but still uncertain of technique, has also completed a group of dresses and wraps he calls his "In God We Trust" series: the print motif is $1 bills. "Money is the root of all happiness," Bayard observes. "Why not wear it?" So far, no one from the Treasury Department has stopped by for a fitting.

Keni Valenti, 27, grew up in the New York City borough of Queens and spent about a year apprenticing with the proto-punk designer Betsey Johnson. He makes supple shapes in basic, low-key colors that stir echoes of the work of Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons and look as salable as peak Halston. At least as ambitious as--and probably more mainstream than--his East Village neighbors, Valenti favors "fabrics that strut, where you can do a lot of weird shapes that change on the body." Far down the block from weird, however, these clothes look smart enough for Madison Avenue, and it probably will not be long before Valenti moves uptown to those pricier reaches.

Valenti, indeed, has already signed a deal for five boutiques in Japan. Backus is turning out a full fall collection, and Julia Morton is working on Seventh Avenue designing a line of dresses. Eva Goodman, along with four other neighborhood designers, has already presented in Tokyo. The East Village scene is an open secret by now and, with the coming of spring and tourists, is bound to heat up even more. Fair enough. Looks like downtown can handle anything, even a change in the weather.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/New York