Bottoms Up

Girls prowl the store like hunters on safari. They are identically sleek and skinny, lean and hungry, sloe-eyed, long-legged, small-hipped and jazzy. The jungle's name is Jax, and the girls know what they have come for: slacks that cling like oil to water.

"We were the first," says the store's owner, Jack Hanson, "to realize that a girl's fanny is cute." Among fashion designers, that is, and only so long as she is the right size. For what counts is not being able to afford Jax slacks (they cost as much as $60), but being able to fit into them. With only a millimeter between fabric and skin, there is no room for doubt, or hips.

The salesgirls (average weight: 90 Ibs.), who regard flesh as a disease, treat women of average proportions as carriers, whisk them into the street for quarantine. Anyone weighing more than 100 Ibs. is viewed with scorn. Size 14s are advised to stay indoors, or wear dresses. Nowhere else in the world must the customer alter to fit the clothes.

What's Too Much? But ectomorphs are in heaven. "I wear Jax, Jax, Jax all day," cries best-dressed, lightweight Mrs. Loel Guinness. Audrey Hepburn wears nothing but Jax (and an occasional Givenchy). So do Marlene Dietrich, the Kennedy sisters, Natalie Wood, and Edgar Bergen's daughter Candice. Elizabeth Taylor is a shade too "buxom," says Hanson but she bought $3,000 worth of Jax clothes anyway last month. One reason for the slacks' close, nude fit: a zipper up the back that doesn't bulge like side zippers.

Hanson was 24 and an ex-shortstop for the Los Angeles Angels when he decided he was in the wrong game, and with 500 borrowed dollars he set up shop designing peasant skirts, blouses and slacks in Balboa, Calif. He could not afford newspaper ads, so his salesgirls modeled the pants in --he store windows. It was unique promotion, and it caught on. The second store, in Beverly Hills, was an instant smash, brought big money and the big time. Jack married his favorite salesgirl, Sally (size 8), and settled down to count his blessings.

Some Empire. They come to something like $4,000,000 a year. The Jax empire has spread eastward, now includes seven stores across the country, (the Manhattan branch is lodged in an opulent 57th Street town house), with an eighth scheduled to open in Southampton this May and a Paris outlet planned for next year. Hanson owns a house in Beverly Hills and a cream-colored Rolls-Royce. But best of all he likes his office. For there, in an upstairs crow's nest overlooking a strategically trained 15-ft. mirror below, Jack Hanson is master of all he surveys, king of the castle, lord of the manor, and the busiest peeper since Tom.

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