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Ellis, an elfin 42, made his name with highly imaginative sweater stylings for women. This spring he scored with a collection of women's wear in subtle pastels and shifting shapes that summon up echoes of the ragtime era. "When you're designing for women," he says, "you can do wonderfully imaginative clothes and create lots of different moods. With men you can do perhaps the same thing, but it's still more limited." Trying to work some stretch into those limitations, Ellis' leading men's jacket for fall will be long, narrowing gradually from the shoulder to a nip at the hip and featuring a one-button closing. His women's line will concentrate on "cleanness and wit" and will feature oversize coats and jackets in wool flannel that will remind some observers of the wardrobe a flapper would haul along on her way to a little boola-boola.
PINKY AND DIANNE. Two women who got their start doing custom designs for rock stars, Pinky (Wolman), 36, and Dianne (Beaudry), 37, have simmered down sufficiently since the '70s to produce clothes for men and women that add a silken worldliness to their original down and dirty flash. "We were tired of trash and wanted a smarter look," says Pinky. "We discovered silk, which we used for sportswear." Their designs are sassy and declarative, their colors showy but controlled. "We make clothes for a more urban lady, a sophisticate who follows the fashion magazines," says Pinky, who was recently in Milan showing off a collection at a small hotel whose proprietor clears the entire premises when the two women move in. Their new line for fall features short skirts, knitted sweater dresses with hefty shoulders tapering down to a mid-thigh hemline, and Irish tweed overcoats that look like a Black and Tan fantasy. "We still do avant-garde clothes," Pinky says, "avantgarde and expensive, but we use lots of discipline in the men's things." Examples: silk shirts with small collars, suede as lively as dyed denim and a baseball jacket made of tweed and leather that no pitcher would risk leaving in the bullpen.