Richard Tyler was born in Australia, his headquarters are in Los Angeles and his heart is in Hollywood. He made his name by designing for entertainers, and his love of the movies really came through in the spring collection he showed Thursday night
He was thinking about 1940's Hollywood, he said before the show, about a time when actresses like Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich wore broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted jackets.
There were plenty of those jackets in the show, but they were often worn over girdlelike skirts so tight that they brought to mind quite a different screen star: Jayne Mansfield. If it weren't for the wonder of modern spandex, the models would surely have been bursting the seams. And the below-the-knee hemlines didn't exactly make the skirts easy to walk in.
But the jackets were the specialty of the house of Tyler. When they were good, they were very very good.
Long, lean square-shouldered jackets over satin skirts captured the mood of the moment. And a new softer shape he devised, with seams that curve over the shoulder, looked like a winner. But the models seemed to be squeezed into some of the other jackets.
Mr. Tyler's color sense is thankfully sophisticated, so soothing neutrals like stone, gray and taupe predominated, with an occasional splash of peach, aqua, yellow or lavender.
Two versions of a man's dinner suit, in white with side-striped trousers, captured the Dietrich glamour effortlessly.
And you could imagine any number of 40's movie stars in his gray mandarin sweater with a beaded dragon on the front. It was too bad that most of the evening dresses were so clingy that the models looked lumpy.
Perhaps Mr. Tyler is having trouble meeting the challenge of designing both the Anne Klein collection in New York and his signature line in California. There aren't many designers who could.
Michael Kors must have his mind on selling in the stores because he sent out a raft of sure-fire classics in his Seventh on Sixth show at Bryant Park yesterday afternoon.
Blazers, trench coats, one-button jackets that curved in at the waist, pleated skirts, shirtdresses and pencil-slim trousers were the main ingredients, in safe colors like beige, navy, white, sky blue and black.
He even offered something that hasn't been around for a while, the crepe de chine shirt.
And Diane von Furstenberg should be flattered to see her famous wrap dress of the 1970's revived in solid black and camel jersey.
Of course, the trends of the season were represented by Kors. A knee-length bias-cut satin skirt was shown with a cashmere polo shirt, a striped silk bias skirt with a square-necked T-shirt and a narrow white belt. There were sweater sets, dress-and-jacket combinations, short shift dresses, and suits with skinny knee-length skirts or mini-length wrap skirts.
A sage green jacket that buttoned up to a high collar made a winning combination with a front-slit knee-length skirt. So did a shapely black one-button jacket and a straight skirt with a back slit.
It wasn't an exciting show, but it was one filled with slick, well-cut clothes that many women would want to wear.
Correction: November 8, 1994, Tuesday
A picture caption in the fashion pages on Saturday with a report about the scene at the Seventh on Sixth fashion shows misidentified a model with a plastic-wrap hairdo. She was Shiraz Tal, not Jill Wolfe.
Source : http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9406E3DB153EF936A35752C1A962958260
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