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Grunge was another game whose time was up. No need to buy something new when the whole point was to look used. Inside-out seams, stitched-in wrinkles and prefab holes were a good enough joke for a few months, especially when worn by a beautiful youngster. But, as is often the case, fashion pushed too far; and by last year, when Kawakubo's Comme des Garcons was showing black-and-white prison stripes, concentration-camp survivors were rightly protesting.
A few designers sat out the carnival while making fortunes out of basic, neutral clothes. They include Giorgio Armani, who started the last real revolution in fashion with his destructured jackets, and his colonists-Calvin Klein, Jil Sander and Donna Karan, among others. Now the fashionable cycle has restarted. Versace saw it coming. "I dressed Claudia Schiffer and Madonna like my mother used to dress," he says. "You see, women are changing again. They don't want to look androgynous anymore."
And they don't want to buy the just-kidding clothes that were being pressed on them. The fashion business is suffering. Howard Davidowitz, a fashion-industry consultant, says 1994 "may have been the worst year in 20 years" for women's clothes. Part of the reason has to do with merchandising rather than fashion. There are too many stores selling the same merchandise, too much of too little. "Consumers are having trouble differentiating," says Peter J. Solomon, an investment banker who works closely with retailers and apparel designers. "What's the difference between a Limited and a Gap and a Saks Fifth Avenue?"
U.S. Commerce Department statistics show that women are spending their money on other things: furniture, household paraphernalia like bedding and towels, cars and even computers. That shift may reflect the aging of the baby boomers, who are now more concerned with kids and homes than with their own wardrobes; but it may also be that the car and sheet designers are producing more attractive wares than their fashion counterparts. "Women are shopping in their closets" has become a sad and much repeated tag line in the fashion industry.
The new move toward sensible clothes represents something of a victory for the retailers over the fashion-industry insiders. Members of the fashion press, buyers, stylists and other fashion trend setters see hundreds of shows a year and get to the point where they can only walk along the cutting edge, respond only to extremes. After the March Paris shows, buyers and pundits from the U.S. returned home with long faces. "There's nothing new," they moaned. The translation: there was nothing radical.
But champagne was popping back in the American fitting rooms. Says Kaye Davis, fashion director of the Atlanta Apparel Mart, which serves more than 125,000 stores in the Southeastern U.S.: "The trend is away from trendiness. Women want a more structured, sophisticated look, and designers are finally offering what we want." Donna Castleberry, manager for fashion of the California Mart, expects that conservative chic "will take off. Clean, tailored classics carry people through so much-from the office to wherever." Kaner of Neiman Marcus contends that the new looks will "filter down well," meaning that a $1,500 jacket from a top name like Oscar de la Renta or Bill Blass will devolve easily into a similar jacket that costs $300.