Luxury and Restraintpalatable to the consumer, rather than for their innovative ideas. A Calvin
Klein outfit of spring/summer 1997 demonstrates this commercial talent. The
influence of Helmut Lang’s layering is discernable but here it has been
translated into shiny stretch fabrics rendering the ensemble sportier in feel
than the Austrian designer’s edgier style.
While Klein has sought notoriety for his label via controversial advertising
campaigns, Donna Karan has emphasized her empathy with the female
consumer. Also drawing on the McCardell look, she has, like her forerunner,
been seen to personify the easy elegance of her style. Using a limited palette
of mainly blacks, greys and soft putty colours and simple shapes she has
created an empire of clothing and home ranges. In a 1993 coatdress, she
paid homage to McCardell in the basic wrapover style and the ‘important
belt’ McCardell advised adding to plain dresses to enliven them for social
events.
Karan’s eveningwear is equally laid back – a supple dress of 1993 comprised
a column of greige fabric, illuminated by the subtle glow of a pale gold collar.
However, there is a need to create an aura of exclusivity and glamour around
such simple clothes, since they lack the instant status cachet of more elaborate
designer fashions, enticing consumers with the visual images attached to the
designer’s name. Both by association with glamorous star names, (Demi
Moore and Bruce Willis for Donna Karan, Jodie Foster and countless other
Oscar candidates for Armani), and using lifestyle-enhancing marketing
campaigns, the prestige of such labels was raised. The crucial links between
editorial, social and advertising pages that this publicity created forged a
link in the consumers’ minds between image and reality, elevating the status
of simplicity. Halston, himself a purveyor of reworked classics, remarked at
the height of his fame that, ‘You’re only as good as the people you dress.’^14
This is a dictum that has helped many of the designers discussed to raise
their turnover. Mass market brands like Gap’s utilitarian basics fulfilled a
need to ‘downsize’, to strip away unnecessary objects that cluttered up already
complex and confusing lives, in a manner that was cheap and accessible.
However designer goods provided the rational cachet of the stripped-down
lifestyle, with the cocooning feeling of exclusivity.
In 1995 Lisa Armstrong wrote in Vogue, ‘Eighties snobbery may have been
simplistic, but... it was democratic, easily grasped by everyone. This new
version, by contrast, has taken to its heart a completely different system of
status symbols that, far from being recognized from the other end of Bond
Street, couldn’t be identified from next door.’^15
- Gaines, S., Halston, The Untold Story. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991, p. 15.
- Armstrong, L., ‘The New Snobbery’, British Vogue, 1995, p. 172.