Living: Cheers for the Home Team

  • Share
  • Read Later

(3 of 3)

JHANE BARNES. "My paperbag pocket?" says Barnes to a visitor as she searches her studio for an example of her handiwork. "Here, it's on this jacket here. I kept it 'cause the cat peed on it." Barnes, 28, admits to doing "kind of spacy designs. But in a time when kids are playing electronic games, we shouldn't be bringing back Argyle socks." Barnes, like Armani, designs her fabric, but goes so far as to weave a sample swatch on her own hand loom, whipping up wild combos of silk, cotton and wool. "I found that I could sell the wildest fabrics for men if the style wasn't outrageous," she says. Barnes has a flexible definition of outrageous: in her first collections, she used curved shoulder pads while removing the conventional shoulder seam so that a jacket seemed to melt along the arm. For her line this fall, the intrepid Barnes is featuring overcoats of exotic tweeds. She is also reworking men's and women's jackets with knitted collars of complementary colors but with different, tighter weaves incorporating spandex. If this sounds a touch outré, her clients—including Saks and Neiman-Marcus—are decidedly down-to-earth, and her 1981 sales take of $2 million is positively corporate for someone who can still use a loom.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. Next Page