What would you call a farmhand who doesn`t know a hoe from a haystack?
How about a lumberjack who couldn`t find his way out of the woods with Smokey the Bear as his tour guide?
If you answered ”trendsetter,” you`ve just scored 10 Super Style bonus points.
For anyone with lingering doubts, the latest movement in menswear provides proof positive that the `80s are really over. Wearing your wealth-or at any rate looking like you are-is distinctly out, and glitz and glamor have given way to the rough, the rustic and the rumpled. This fall, what`s new mostly looks old, borrowed and blue-collar.
During the showing of the men`s collections in Milan, Paris and New York, the scene on the runways frequently resembled the Steppenwolf production of
”The Grapes of Wrath,” with some Ellis Island attitude tossed in for good measure. Dolce & Gabbana, a closely watched Italian design duo (even Giorgio Armani stopped in to see their show) reflected their Sicilian heritage in stretched-out peasant knits and elongated cardigans, worn in lots of layers, while Romeo Gigli decked out his New Age immigrants in thrift-shop chic jackets that buttoned high and fit narrow, almost as if the models had outgrown them.
On this side of the Atlantic, Basco`s Lance Karesh picked up the peasant theme with poorboy rib knits, underwearlike pullovers and pants in rugged twills and tweeds, along with recessionary accessories such as fisherman`s skullcaps, suspenders worn over sweaters and fingerless gloves. Andrew Fezza offered oversized homespun sweaters that a sheperd-or a sheep-might feel right at home in.
Others recast classic Americana into a quirky rural theme, a la
”Northern Exposure” or ”Twin Peaks” (still on the air when these clothes were designed): Joseph Abboud took to the timberlands with hunter`s fieldcoats and hooded sweatshirts. Bill Robinson translated similar inspirations into more cosmopolitan statements, using a lumberjack plaid as the basis for a soft-constructed sport coat, for instance, or turning the twill used in mechanic`s coveralls into a fresh suiting fabric. At Perry Ellis, designer Roger Forsyth pieced his plaids into country patchworks.
If some of fall`s rustic trappings were just for show, the meaning behind them is simple, and simply appealing; clothes should be comfortable, natural and not at all flashy. The season`s ”common thread is a return to roots,”
says John Jones of Ultimo, using Dolce & Gabbana as an illustration. Although labeled a peasant look, ”what they`ve really done is taken the whole general notion of the way rural people live, the closeness to the earth, and expanded it in a way we can all understand. It`s great comfortable clothing that has a sense of complete relaxation, with absolutely, positively nothing self-conscious about it.”
”Do I really expect guys to wear gloves without fingers and scarves wrapped three times?” asks Basco designer Karesh. ”Of course not. But I`ve always been a proponent of very casual, lived-in types of looks, and this season the whole peasant immigrant theme seemed a good way to express that feeling.”
Concurs Bill Robinson, ”The whole move toward less slick, less hard-edged clothes was a dramatic way of saying that the `90s are under way, and that the look now is more about `real people.` ”
