Street cred

National Review, Oct 13, 1997 by John Simon

S: Forty years ago models in high fashion Suzy Parker, Dorian Leigh, Barbara Goalen were adults, women. Todays models are girls. What does that tell us about fashion?

OR: Among other things that the career of a model in those times was much longer. They could work way past forty. Today except for very successful faces a model is almost at the end of her career at thirty. The money has changed too. When I started working back in 1965, I could book a model for something like $50 an hour. Today, if you pay $5,000 an hour, you will be lucky. Great models like Suzy Parker made peanuts in comparison to today. A model like Linda Evangelista can make $10 to 12 million a year.

JS: But the youth of the models is reflected in the style of the clothes? Is that sensible?

OR: Fashion is indeed extremely youth oriented. The Sixties with the Beatles, Twiggy, flower children and all that changed the image of fashion and the fashion model forever. Now the biggest influence on fashion is what comes out of the street punk and all that. That is very different from when I started in 1965 and before that. In the Forties and the Fifties every woman wanted to dress like the movie stars. Then in the Sixties it was society women like Mrs. Paley. Now the models are the stars supermodels because they have become the arbiters of how women dress. Fashion is no longer something for the elites. On the contrary. Today you dont make your name by selling one dress to an extraordinary lady. You make your name and your money by selling to the masses.

JS: Will it stay that way? Or change back again?

OR: I dont think it will revert exactly. It will change but more subtly as the everyday woman becomes more secure about her role in the workplace. In the Seventies, when the Womens Lib movement was founded, women started to dress in a more aggressive manner for power the pants suit, etc. In the Nineties the working woman now knows that she doesnt have to dress like a man in order to make it in a "mans world. So we have seen a new approach, a softer way of dressing, after the excesses of the past two decades.

Right now Im launching this new fragrance thats called SO DE LA RENTA. It addresses the new woman who feels that her femininity is an asset, not a liability, in the workplace.

JS: So feminism has an influence on fashion today?

OR: Absolutely. Back in the Sixties, when I designed expensive clothes, my customer was a woman whose first occasion of the day was to put on a nice dress and have lunch with a friend. She bought expensive clothes that were paid for by her husband, and if her husband liked pink, she bought a pink dress. Today she says, "I like the red, but he likes the pink; too bad, Ill buy the red. Its not that she loves him less, its that relationships have changed. Most of the time now she pays for the dress. The clothes I design now must make sense in a womans life a much more realistic one than the life she led in the Sixties.

JS: Have colors changed a lot become more daring?

OR: Not really. Color is a selling point the consumer is often very sensitive to what colors suit her. But when you philosophize about fashion and the impact it has on society, color plays a less important role. When a woman buys a dress today she knows that she will have to wear it many, many times. She is far more concerned with wearability and durability. Just as men wear grey and navy, women today dress in colors that are not vivid, not memorable, because they want to wear an outfit repeatedly.

JS: To what extent, then, can one make really expensive clothes today? Is it easier? Harder?

OR: If you are designing really expensive clothes, you are addressing a very small percentage of the population. If you are talking about haute couture I design for the House of Balmain in Paris the percentage is even smaller. But if you consider the economics of Balmain, or Dior, or Chanel, or Yves Saint Laurent, the publicity that our collections generate is worth a vast amount of paid advertising. If I had to replace it with space bought in the magazines, I would have to spend twenty times more. Today my biggest business is not fashion as such, but fashion-related products: perfume, accessories, and so on. My fashion business is still profitable but for the amount of time and effort put into it, it is not profitable enough on its own. But it is my flagship business, what creates the image, and that is extremely important.

JS: Are there two camps among fashion designers? One that sets out to make a woman look her best, another that treats her as a blank canvas on which to display his ideas? When these are extravagant ideas Im thinking of designers like Vivienne Westwood or Versace dont we get clothes which the ordinary woman cant or wont wear?

OR: Certainly these two designers are extremely talented. Vivienne Westwood in particular is a designers designer who influences others. But today the avant-garde designers are people like Prada or Ann Demeulemeester from Belgium. The big word for this group of designers is deconstruction. But they still draw their ideas essentially from the street. Young people in the street have been the biggest providers of ideas for fashion since the Sixties with very few interruptions.