The Color of New Blood

By JAY COCKS

Fashion is a young game, all right, but consider: most of its grand masters are well settled into middle age. It is easy enough to make a splash with a giddy collection when you are fresh from art school, but making a mark takes an unwieldy combination of staying power and stubbornness, a good deal of money and a knack for sidestepping the competition even as you shoulder the weight of history. Against such formidable odds, a lot of talent has blazed for a season or two, then guttered. The recently concluded round of European fashion shows for the spring-summer 1987 season, however, had several bursts of ebullient design wizardry of the sort that seems too bright, and too canny, to be extinguished.

In Paris, an American abroad named Patrick Kelly showed a rambunctious line that had the dash and Technicolor splendor of a Minnelli musical. Rifat Ozbek, whose clothes have an easy, funky swank and a kind of surreptitious sophistication, neatly encapsulated London's trend toward revisionist sartorial conservatism, where rock style has been replaced by bemused manor- house dressing. Milan's Romeo Gigli, working with finesse and the wily eye of a fine stylist, accomplished the inevitable: he took the vaunting ideas of Japan's great fashion designers, tailored them down and gave them fresh commercial pertinence. The upstart fashion of all three designers brought a leavening of zest to what was, in large part, a problematic season.

Politics cut heavily into the semiannual fashion giddiness. Paris, besieged by the fear of terrorist bombings, seemed a risk to everyone. Milan and London, not similarly troubled, still fell under the long shadows from France. The Paris shows, held in tents in the courtyard of the Louvre as usual, proceeded in unaccustomed orderliness, with heavier security measures than most international airports and without the playfulness that makes even the silliest presentations tolerable. If la mode were better used to the real world, this might not have mattered so much. But the glass of fashion is a mirror that reflects only its own wonderland, and it was outside the Louvre shows -- at a frisky but modest presentation in the Grand Hotel -- that Paris picked up some truly vibrant refractions.

Patrick Kelly came to town, via Vicksburg, Miss., Atlanta and New York City, for the first time in 1979. He promptly checked out the fashion shows, and has been in Paris ever since. "I can't say I wouldn't have made it in New York," he says, "because I didn't stay to find out." He introduced himself to the manager of a nightclub, who inquired how fast Kelly could sew. "I can make as many dresses as you want in one day," he replied, a boast that landed him a job making stage costumes in a tiny hotel room he shared with a 6-ft. 2-in. model named Kim and a single Singer. "Once I had an order for 300 dresses, and all I had was that sewing machine," Kelly remembers. "You can't make 300 dresses on a Singer like that. .I mean, it's for making curtains! But I used it and used it till it burned." Though a private client gave him a heavy-duty machine, Kelly's designs still have a jolly incendiary quality that can blow fuses. His clothes are fitted, funny and a little goofy. They have the spirit of sportswear designed with both a high-fashion sensibility and a sensitivity to price. "I'm the hero of people who just don't want to spend a lot of money on clothes," Kelly announces. "Today you can spend $500 for a sweater on sale. How logical is that? I'd rather spend $500 and get on a plane and go to Morocco and see something I've never seen before." Kelly, who covers his muscular frame with large overalls (size 56), favors "inexpensive clothes. But that doesn't mean cheap. It means affordable." (Dresses in his new collection range from $100 for one with a shirred bodice in polka dots and stripes to $200 for a frisky evening number.)

He can get away with a lot because he keeps the price right and the mood light. A characteristic Kelly tube dress, its top covered with buttons or with tiny versions of the black dolls he loves to collect, might seem cumbersome and campy coming from another hand. But, as turned out by this expatriate son of a Deep South home economics teacher, it assumes a happy, homemade quality that is entirely unforced. This may be one reason that models caught on to him early. The whirlwind runway star Pat Cleveland met Kelly in Atlanta in 1974, and "bought a lot of clothes from me. She would even pay me more than they were really worth." She encouraged him to go to New York City, where he scuffled through a variety of gofer gigs and worked part time at Baskin- Robbins. Kelly's color palette, indeed, can be reminiscent of some of the more arcane 31 flavors, just as even his most classical creations retain a streetwise patina. He calls himself a "froufrou kid," but he will toss a Frisbee during a free moment, and admits, "I like going skateboarding with the kids in Les Halles."

Still, Kelly works on a narrow margin. He has a staff of only six, laboring in four penumbral rooms near Les Halles, and the designer will sometimes whip up a meal for everybody "because their salaries aren't too good." He does some free-lance designing (for Benetton, among other companies) but is chary of discussing most matters of figures, whether financial (business doubles with each new collection, he says) or personal. "I'm too old to be a baby and too young to be an adult, but intelligent enough not to be a bad juvenile," he says. "I never tell my age because I hope I'll always be the new kid on the block."

A similar status is ensured for Rifat Ozbek. He is, quite literally, a young Turk, 32 years old and born in Istanbul. He studied architecture for two years at the University of Liverpool, but dropped out after construction technicalities began to overwhelm his design inspiration. Fashion offered a fresher, faster alternative: he was beguiled by the speed with which ideas could become a malleable reality. He showed his first eight fashion sketches at London's St. Martin's School of Art, and was immediately accepted. "He's an enormously talented designer with an original point of view," says Lydia Kemeny, Ozbek's teacher and now head of the St. Martin's fashion design department. "But the originality is tempered by a feeling for elegance."

At school, Ozbek dressed like a Lou Reed rock-'n'-roll animal, right down to faithful applications of black fingernail polish, but the clothes he has been designing for his label since the spring of 1985 have a refinement that makes them seem both worldly and weightless. He likes to structure the top ! half of an outfit with heavier fabrics like cashmere or gabardine, then use an airy silk or supple jersey to soften up things below. "My clothes are not of the moment," Ozbek says, speaking in his hurried, lightly accented English. "Take all the accessories away, and they are classical. But can I say modern classic? You can wear them a season past, mix them up with other pieces." Indeed, a bit of Ozbek swank like a long black, clingy dress with a fuchsia moire top that relocates the neckline several miles south would look great at a dance club or -- with slight modifications for modesty and drafts -- at a formal dinner in a stately home.

Sales of the Ozbek line jumped 264% to a neat $1 million last year. He is backed by a Geneva-based oil company, Gulf Shipping, whose owner met Ozbek at a party and considered him such a comer that he has never bothered to see a collection. Unlike Kelly, who has found himself without enough money to ride the Metro, Ozbek receives both salary and commission from Gulf. For a young designer, it seems like a snug setup, but Ozbek keeps things modest. His offices overlook a cranny-like courtyard in Mayfair, his staff numbers seven, and his fashion shows can be like small parties in a studio, with a couple of models strolling out from behind curtains to the recorded strains of music from Lawrence of Arabia.

He is similarly unassuming when discussing his inspiration. An early collection that inclined heavily to a lean black, smoky look evoking the Beats and the Left Bank of '50s Paris seemed "existential" to him. But, he adds, "actually, I had a lot of black fabric that had been delivered late, and I had to use it. I just happened to see a '50s movie with Brigitte Bardot." He is similarly resourceful about tapping into an impulse before it becomes a trend, and fearless as well as funny in his ability to meld styles to his whim and will. "This new collection of mine is the Thousand and One Nights," he explains, adding, "I've mixed the 18th century and the Ottomans." A perfect formula, it turns out, for clothes to be worn with both a slink and a smile.

Romeo Gigli, at 36 the most established of the young comers (annual sales of $12 million, up from $5 million last year), did not have to look so far afield for his inspiration. His sundried colors, the monastic grace of his tailoring, are a direct reflection of the Japanese design innovation of the past decade, especially the work of the formidable Rei Kawakubo. Gigli has simplified and styled down many of Kawakubo's more cerebral inventions for her Comme des Garcons line, added a dash of Milanese insouciance and found himself among the hottest designers in the marketplace since his first show in March 1982. Gigli, who dislikes being photographed, firmly resists intimations of Japanese influence. When he remarks, however, that "my clothes have no shape when they're on the hanger, but they take on shape when they're worn," there are distinct echoes of the Eastern precept that the shape of a garment comes from the wearer's body and is not imposed upon it.

Gigli's eye, whatever it is checking out, is distinctly on target. If his label gives potential pronunciation difficulty (Row-may-o Gee-lee would be a reasonably safe try), the clothes, once worn, are instantly understandable. They indulge the body, bestowing a kind of inward elegance that the designer says "begins with how a woman today moves, how she expresses herself. Women today value their freedom; they do not want to feel compressed or crushed by what they wear." Like Ozbek, Gigli also studied architecture, but he works from individual pieces, not a grand design. The usual fashion practice is to come up with a broad-based aesthetic for each collection. Gigli creates individual pieces -- a lovely evening dress of elasticized linen, for example, that hangs like an unpleated Fortuny -- and fits them into a whole. "Each piece I design has its own life," he says. "Then I assemble them. The clothes, to be strong, should be soft."

By that standard, a Gigli dress is positively brawny. Wearing one is like being brushed by cobwebs. His fashion has an urbane modernity that stands in stark contrast to the antiquity that enveloped him as he was growing up. Born in the soil-rich region of Romagna, Gigli was "surrounded by books" as a boy. His father and grandfather were antiquarian booksellers, and, the designer remembers, "We always lived in houses full of antique furniture and paintings -- beautiful but uncomfortable." His Milan studio, staffed with six associates, is unfussy; his apartment has lots of white space and green plants, and that is where he does most of his designing, "at night, when the telephone does not ring." He weekends at a getaway house near Portofino, where "I turn into a peasant," spending long hours in his garden. The simplicity and the earthy tones he likes may all come straight from there, even if the sun that nurtures them rises in the Far East.

. "People have to make happy clothes," Patrick Kelly says. "There's just too much sadness in the world." In fashion's fractional contribution to the Zeitgeist, he and Ozbek and Gigli have made nonchalance into a high craft, turned zest into a wearable commodity. Spirit does not have shape on a hanger either, but these are three young designers who cut it and fit it like fine fabric, then send it out to play.

With reporting by Dorie Denbigh/Paris and Liz Nickson/London