HUMMING THE CLOTHES

By Martha Duffy

It took nearly two years for the hit rock musical Rent to get from workshop to Broadway, but its sassy, sexy downtown look will be available retail this week--a scant nine days after its Broadway opening night--when Bloomingdale's opens a Rent boutique in Manhattan.

While there may be mild irony in an upscale department store peddling a look that is based in part on thrift-store chic, fashion has long fed on pop-culture events for inspiration. Diane Keaton's shapeless slouch gear in Annie Hall and Jennifer Beals' off-the-shoulder Flashdance sweat shirts both set looks that lasted for months on the streets. Bloomingdale's plays the game, selling 500 yellow trench coats a la Dick Tracy in 1990. On the other hand, the store's executives weren't quite quick enough to lock in Alicia Silverstone and last year's Clueless look, so clearly this is a chancy business.

The Rent look, at least as Bloomingdale's sees it, is shiny, colorful, abbreviated and frequently made of materials that hadn't been invented this time last year. Rent the musical is tough and loud, and it deals with AIDS and drugs. It is also a radical updating of Puccini's La Boheme, and the costumes, designed by Angela Wendt, take their cue partly from that. Roger (Rodolfo in the opera) wears plaid pants made from a material similar to a popular trouser cloth of the mid-19th century. Tom Collins (Colline in the opera) follows Puccini in that the young man has a coat he loves, although it is a Tommy Hilfiger-style jacket. Today's Mimi looks nothing like Puccini's seamstress. She wears tight, shimmering spandex pants with a new holographic material annealed to the surface. Mimi literally glows, and this is the look Bloomingdale's is capitalizing on. As the season progresses, more Rent boutiques will open around the country.

In translating the look commercially, designer Ady Gluck-Frankel of Necessary Objects shows how fast the market can react, both to a source of inspiration and to the latest fashion fads. In a collection priced from $30 to $60, she goes with the runway news of just a month or two ago: vinyl; witchy holographic effects; leopard patterns; hot citrus limes, lemons and orange, the season's primary colors; and faux-naive flower prints--Liberty as interpreted by Prada.

Says Bloomingdale's fashion director Kalman Ruttenstein, who dreamed up the scheme: "You put these hot trends together." But Gluck-Frankel disagrees. "You don't put anything together or try to match things. That's the downtown feel." Oddly, they are both right. Sighs Ruttenstein: "No one young wears head-to-toe anything anymore."

The downtown feel is also a bow to the '60s and '70s-- a sort of tribal-rock look. The clothes are cut tight to the body, not to say skimpy. Minis are micro, midriffs bare. Pinpricked Airtex, borrowed from athletes' uniforms, reigns here. Perhaps the chicest outfit in the group is a plain black vinyl shift. The very latest fashion fabric, polyester treated to appear holographic, appears in pretty iridescent tops. Daphne Rubin-Vega, who plays Mimi in the show and models the clothes here, gets to the point when she says, "They're really bohemian." Well, boho goes uptown.