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That, of course, is an overstatement, as is the insistence by European designers that they are not influenced by their American counterparts. Incontrovertibly, the dynamics of American life and the clothes that reflect it have profoundly affected the way people dress around the world. Says Carrie Donovan, senior fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar. "You really saw it last fall in the Paris ready-to-wear collections. They took wonderful stuff from the Army-Navy store, Bermuda shorts, parkas—it was the American way of dressing done with their particular style."
Because of high Common Market tariffs and a curious lack of support from everyone in Washington, D.C., except Betty Ford, American manufacturers sell few clothes in Europe. In Japan, by contrast, the American look has taken the country by storm. While Oscar de la Renta showed his new collection at the Hotel Okura last week, Calvin Klein's Japanese-made line was selling like sushi at Isetan department store, Tokyo's Bloomingdale's. Kashiyama, one of Japan's biggest garment manufacturers, uses a computer system to adapt John Meyer designs to the Japanese figure. Other companies have signed about a hundred contracts with American firms. American-style clothes rang up some $300 million in sales to the Japanese last year.
No single designer speaks for the American look. None of the Americans, for example, as cunningly and consistently divines what women crave as France's Yves St. Laurent; none shows the innovative brilliance of such younger Parisian stars as Japanese-born Kenzo Takada. Fashion historians will probably look back not on any individual but on American designer-entrepreneurs in general as the School of the '70s—and a very savvy school at that.
¶ At the head of the class is Halston, born Roy Halston Frowick in Des Moines 43 years ago. The first to take the "less-is-more" approach to designing clothes, Halston revived the once fashionable sweater set and sweater dress by using cashmere, argyle and matte jersey, and four years ago introduced Japanese-made ultrasuede, the most sought-after covering since the fig leaf. While he dresses some of the world's most fashionable women,* Halston's soft, tactile approach to sportswear has also won him immense success as a ready-to-wear magnate; his off-the-peg clothes sell for between $25 and $1,000. A three-time winner of the Coty Award (fashion's Oscar), Halston believes "a designer should analyze the needs of the public and draw for all shapes and sizes. Our age group is anywhere from 18 to 80. It includes a businesswoman and a woman of leisure. It's a mother, a daughter, Ms. America at large. It is someone tall and skinny and someone not so tall and not so thin. When I sit and do the collection, I think of everybody." Not for every body, obviously, is his black satin "Savage" swimsuit (see cover), a spectacular $60 loincloth that at least four other designers claim to have brought out before Halston. In 1973, the Norton Simon conglomerate bought the Halston label for about $12 million; Halston Enterprises, which includes more than a dozen franchising businesses, did $90 million retail last year.