For Goodness Snakes, the Serpents Have Come

It may be the Year of the Dog in China, but for the world of fashion there seems to be no doubt that the sea son belongs to the snake.

Boots and belts, hats and handbags, shirts, shawls, coats and evening gowns, even linens, lampshades and wallpaper -- all bear the stamp of the serpent. Genuine cobra can be had as a raincoat, simulated copperhead as upholstery fab ric. And women known to keel over at a photograph of a python are now swaddling themselves in the real thing.

Couturiers were the first to be charmed. Yves Saint Laurent showed a staggering array of snakeskins in his most recent collection, which featured a line of python-printed chiffon dresses (Mme. Pompidou took hers to Chicago last month and wore it with a gold ser pent belt). Givenchy's snaky stretch-wool suit is already being copied, scale for scale, and London Designer Jean Muir has a whole group of satin separates, all slithery with the python pattern. America's Adele Simpson and Bill Blass have embossed the markings onto vel vet and chiffon; Halston has gone so far as to tie-dye scarves to look like cobra coils.

Tunics to Trunks. Department stores were only too delighted to respond to the spell. Most took full-page newspaper ads celebrating serpent fashions. Manhattan's Lord & Taylor opened a special shop, "Great Snakes," last month, stocked it with everything from real py thon tunics to synthetic-snake robes, jackets and dresses, and fake python steamer trunks. At Saks in San Francisco snaky accessories are going at such a striking rate there are never enough around for a window display. In Manhattan, boutiques got into the swing, repapered their walls with snakeskin and offered esoteric items like the cobra patchwork belt pouches and spats and the cobra gladiator vest at Kamali. Betsey, Bunky and Nini, another boutique, has appliqued snakeskin stars onto belts and has imported Ossie Clark's $200 cobra patchwork waist jacket. Manhattan's Casa Cuero boutique isn't interested in just any old snake; it is boa that turns them on and their patrons out--in midis, minis, jeans and jackets, everything boa but the belts, which are cobra.

"There is a fascination with snakeskins today," says Shoe Designer Beth Levine, whose all-python boots are doing nicely at $250 a pair. "It's a whole feeling for slithery things, from a crochet knit to a snake; it's textural and natural." For herself, she adds, "I can live my whole life without a snake." Fortunately for Fleming Joffe Ltd., biggest U.S. supplier of snakeskins, many women cannot. The company did a $1 million-plus trade in skins last year, with python the biggest seller (naturally black and white, the skins are often bleached out and dyed other shades or hand painted) and boa and cobra close behind. "In fact," says Snakeskin Salesman Rocco Selvaggi, "where the boas are concerned, we're selling whatever we can get our hands on." Business is expected to double by the end of this season.

Not everyone is bewitched by the fad. Dr. F. Wayne King, Reptile Curator at the Bronx Zoo, insists that "for every animal that's eliminated, our own lives become more precarious. And while eliminating every python in our world may not hurt anything," he adds wistfully, "it is well to consider that without them we would certainly have missed a lot of exciting literature." Genesis, for example?

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