For Western chic, this is the year of the coolie who came in from the cold. Starting last spring, when the first Chinese-inspired fashions swept Paris, European and American designers have been having a collective field day redecorating workers' uniforms and baggy pants, overblouses and quilted jackets. The style might be called Mao a la mode. Now, with the fall collections, American couturiers have gone from paddy to palace, digging deep into the treasure chest of Imperial China. Result: high-collared mandarin robes, silk jacquard jackets, sable-lined evening coats of old damask and golden-scrolled pajamas, all done up in poesies of color pirated from the Orient (see color opposite).
Why the Chinese Look? The reopening of East-West trade was a major impetus. Commune-style jackets imported from the People's Republic caught the fancy of the young in Paris two years ago as an alternative to the standard jeans and T shirts. "For the past ten years in the West, the fashion emphasis has been on 'the uniform,'' says American Designer Mary McFadden. "We had to have some resurrection of beautiful fabric and fantasy, and when you go to fantasy you must go ethnic."
This is by no means the first appearance of a Chinese look. Nor is the look exclusively Chinese; the fashion embraces ideas and accents from almost anywhere east of Suez. Designer McFadden's opulent coats are batiked and hand-painted in Java, and other items in her collection speak variously of Japan, Mongolia and the Middle East. The style, says another American designer, Jonathan Hitchcock, "includes anything Eastern—Tibetan, Persian, Indian. It is a much more primitive way of making clothes—simple and functional yet sophisticated." And versatile. Fashions like Hitchcock's side-wrapped, hip-length "Tibetan" jacket can be worn year-round. Moreover, the less extreme Chinese fashions seem unlikely to go out of style. The look, says Joan Sibley, of Sibley & Coffee, a Manhattan design firm, "is elegant and classic. It is not really a fad."
Even Paris-based Kenzo Takada, whose Chinese-inspired collection helped start fashion's current Orient Express rolling last spring, concentrated at first on supple, sensuous clothes with a low hip line. The Japanese-born Kenzo noted that his styles "had affinities with the Chinese look, so we carried on the Chinese line." Among the first U.S. designers to introduce proletarian posh was Cinnamon Wear's Britta, whose workers' drop-shouldered jackets and raincoats flopped like wet rice when they came out last year; now the firm has trouble keeping up with demand.
Today the designer who has most faithfully interpreted classic Chinese styles is a Cuban-born American: Adolfo. His fall collection is heavy on crocheted pajamas and slim, high-collared cheongsam dresses in clingy silk knits with side buttoning and frog fasteners down the front. The look, Adolfo allows, "is very sexy. It is cut to show the fanny, and if you have a little tummy, it shows that too. Men like it very much." So does the Duchess of Windsor, who was carried away by a polka-dotted sheath at an Adolfo show.