Voila! It's Fun a Lacroix

By Martha Duffy

For a Paris haute couture house, the decor is outright iconoclastic. Instead of the usual hushed beige backdrops, little gilt chairs and artfully placed mirrors, rich oranges and reds glow on every side. The black border motif on the rugs and walls summons up visions of black flames. Bright pink branches thrust upward from behind small neo-Martian chairs, and the sconces are big burnished theater masks, enough to scare a timid millionairess right out of her chiffon.

But last Monday morning the bold decor was tamed by the hum of human activity. Black-clad vendeuses -- all pretty, some titled -- were bringing gorgeous garments out to clients. Some of the clients were dyed blonds, past first youth and swaddled in mink. But there were young beauties too, including Lucy Ferry, wife of Rock Star Bryan Ferry, who was swanning around in her Louise Brooks bob, sporting a brown broad-brimmed straw hat topped by, yes, a huge pink branch. Another woman tried on an exquisite Arlesian fichu. She had it on backward, but it was still charming. Acting out their dress-up fantasies, or simply getting to the changing cabins, they all seemed to trip over a dark fellow lying on the rug intently watching a video. He laughed now and then and clapped his hands at the good parts, utterly oblivious to the rock royalty or the clients who could not get his clothes on right. The video was of his latest fashion show, which had triumphed just the day before. And Christian Lacroix was doing what he usually does: he was enjoying himself.

And why not? Lacroix, 37, is the new king of couture. A French newspaper, France Soir, considers him no less than a "messiah." The fashion industry last week honored him for the second time with its most prestigious prize, the Golden Thimble. Since he opened his own couture house a year ago, his ideas have become the most visible in the field, a rare combination of wit, frivolity and knowing thefts from both past designers and the great ages in clothing history. Lacroix is the man whose designs might sport a rude cabbage rose, perhaps on the derriere. He is the one who put middle-aged women into bubble shapes or bustles, often at mid-thigh. That led him to an unintended refutation of the Duchess of Windsor's maxim that one cannot be too rich or too thin. Sometimes his widely copied dresses show more skeleton than flesh, but so ubiquitous are they at galas and cocktail parties in the U.S. that Women's Wear Daily has taken to commenting on "social knees." His influence can now be seen internationally, from a pretty young girl in Tampa wearing a copy of his puff pantaloons to the recent Seventh Avenue shows that blushed with his trademark outsize flowers and don't-bend-over lengths.

Most of all, Lacroix is the man with the magic paintbrush, who revealed a palette and an ability to mix colors that astounded the industry. The red and orange of his salon are the designer's favorite colors. (Had it been possible, he says, he would have brought the sun and the sea right inside.) It is easy to work with navy and white, but taming vibrant blues, pinks and tans, not to mention swirling prints, requires the eye of an artist.

The new spring and summer collection he unveiled last week has many traditional Lacroix touches, if such a short career can have traditions. There are whopping cabbage roses, short lengths and, in the lace-printed fichus, references to Arles, in Lacroix's native Provence. Some expectable hoots were present: bamboo sunglasses, giant hatpins, whimsical buttons. But Lacroix is changing. The collection was better focused than his 1987 offering. And following the advice of his favorite designer, the late Jules-Francois Crahay of Lanvin, he planted some clues to the future. They included high-waisted flowing pants and some variegated lengths. "I am bored with short lengths!" he says. "I refuse to become a prisoner of my image."

After the show, Lacroix took over the fabled Opera Comique for a celebration. When the crowd of 800 old pals, press, dandies and punks arrived, they sat down to a 30-minute video of the making of the American Ballet Theater's $350,000 production of Gaite Parisienne, which opened last month in Tampa and is now touring the U.S. The dancing was effervescent, but the stars of the show were the sassy, spectacular costumes served up from the sketch pad of the host. Gaite was a stand-up, cheering hit. After the lights went up, Lacroix joined the crowds and danced the farandole, the heels-up peasant dance of Provence. He hoofed it until 5:30 a.m.

Other top Paris couturiers went for sizzle last week too, especially Emanuel Ungaro, whose bright follies exposed virtually the whole thigh. Yves Saint Laurent presented his customary, imperturbable show of regal but wearable clothes. His only jape was the bridal dress that traditionally ends couture shows. His bride wafted out in a white shirred micro-mini-bustier with an applique dove on her head.

There can be adverse reactions to these champagne clothes, and not everyone is hopping aboard Lacroix's bandwagon. His outfits are not for the dress-for- success crowd -- only for those who have succeeded. Then there are the enthusiasts of top ready-to-wear designers like Jean-Paul Gaultier and Claude Montana and several of the Japanese, all intellectual, all looking toward futuristic silhouettes. To them, Lacroix is a crashing irrelevance. Alan Bilzerian, owner of two au courant shops in Massachusetts, who heavily backs the Japanese, writes Lacroix off briskly: "It's like a foul ball; he hit it over the fence, but it didn't go anywhere. It wasn't in play."

Lacroix may be as much a ponderer of clothes as any of the Japanese. His career was built mostly at the venerable House of Patou, whose line of perfumes (Joy, Moment Supreme) is among the best known in the world. After four years of experiments -- Lacroix never tires of saying haute couture must be a "laboratory of ideas" -- he burst upon the fashion world in 1985 with his Spanish collection. It was earthy, sensual, funny and, above all, fresh. It exuded a feeling that wonderful clothes ought to push their way out of the confines of couture. The crowd in the gilded ballroom of the Pavillon Gabriel cheered and pelted the young master with its complimentary violets.

The industry pros looked further ahead. Couture was comatose at the time, badly in need of inspiration. Poor Yves Saint Laurent! For 20 years he had played the role of fashion's high priest, consistently rewarding his flock with flawless designs, but somehow all that perfection became boring, and the designer himself ever more remote.

Some commentators predicted that Lacroix was too extreme and too irreverent to last, but he has only strengthened his position. Frustrated at Patou's reluctance to start a ready-to-wear line, he abruptly left in 1987, chased by a $13.1 million lawsuit. With Jean-Jacques Picart, a close friend on the business side of Patou, he set up his own house, backed by Agache, the conglomerate that also owns Dior.

The partners' next move will be good news for women who would like to wear Lacroix but not pay his couture prices (for evening wear: typically $8,000 to $18,000). In March they will plunge into off-the-peg. The first collection of about 100 pieces, including some in leather and knits, will be sold in only 110 stores worldwide (price range: $300 to $8,000). Says Lacroix: "There will be no flowers, no ruffles, no bustles, but color, proportion, good cut."

Lacroix and Picart, 40, have already moved into an innovative luxe line, a kind of super ready-to-wear. With an average price of $4,100, the clothes are selling briskly. Bergdorf Goodman says it took $330,000 worth of orders in two days. Saks Fifth Avenue bought 27 styles, or most of the line. "I'm not sure I've ever seen quite as much of a phenomenon," says Ellin Saltzman, the store's fashion director, who remembers the '60s frenzies over Rudi Gernreich and Andre Courreges. Of such skyrocketing designers, she says, "I think it's scary for them."

But the staff (average age: 30) at Lacroix's salon on the splendid Faubourg St.-Honore exudes confidence. On the morning after last week's show, a pretty young American wisely arrived early to make a purchase: while Lacroix had presented 58 costumes, the house can deliver a total of only 120 pieces. She sighed, snapped shut her purse and said, "Oh well, another $9,000 on the American Express card." She is among the youthful clients haute couture should never have lost and whom Lacroix is luring back. Picart speaks proudly of Lacroix's popularity with show-business people, who usually do not frequent the couture. "People like Faye Dunaway and Bette Midler are in a profession of appearances," he says. "They are glad to find street clothes reminiscent of their stage costumes, and they are glad to find that we're not uptight."

With a salon where you can settle down, fool around with the clothes and schmooze with -- or at least step over -- the grand master, Lacroix is attracting other wealthy young people accustomed to haute ready-to-wear. Living for the city lights, they are the type who might sport a subtle Issey Miyake one night, an elegant Giorgio Armani the next.

Lacroix's casual panache is what draws many young clients. Picart says many may buy only one outfit, and it may be a gift from a relative. The house does a big wedding business. In fact, Lacroix's first garment under his own logo was for the marriage of Pia de Brantes, a well-connected Paris publicist. What she got was a bright pink snap-together gown: the skirt and sleeves came off after the solemnities to reveal a hot little disco number.

Then there is the man himself. If his clothes are sexy, so is he -- dark and sardonic, with a wicked smile, an outrageous wink and a laughing manner. "He looks like Brando; he is pantheroid, catlike," says Anne Hollander, author of the scholarly Seeing Through Clothes. "He is sexy in a way that is absolutely not effete, and his interest in women is utterly trustworthy. He doesn't give the impression of secretly loathing them."

Lacroix's is the art of excess, and it works in part because of the knowledge of vanished grandeur he acquired while studying the classics and art history in college. Says Caroline Rennolds Milbank, author of Couture: "Since he knows all the good things that have happened in history, when women lived to look beautiful, he has a bigger vocabulary than a normal contemporary couturier. Any one of them has available to him the best embroiderer or flowermaker, but Lacroix probably has a bigger sense of the possibilities from having directly studied the past."

Lacroix's billowing nostalgia envelops his own past. Not for nothing did he want to bring the sun and the sea right into his salon. His imagination is almost defiantly rooted in Arles and the rough Camargue area nearby. "I'm crazy about terra-cotta floors, primitive people, sun and rough times," he says. "This is my real side -- goat cheese and bread, elementary things." He warms to his subject. "I suppose that I am really double-faced. I am fascinated by Paris, its elegance, its women, even its artificiality; but with my heart and skin I love the South -- bullfighting, music, nature, the sea."

Lacroix was born in 1950 into a well-off bourgeois family of engineers, and home was, on the whole, a comfortable cocoon for a little boy who can remember sketching all day long when he was three. The designer-to-be was particularly impressed by his grandfather, whom he describes as "very arrogant, like an actor." It is now a secure part of fashion legend that one day the old man asked Christian what he would like to be when he grew up. "Christian Dior," he shot back.

Today Lacroix has a Proustian sense of his childhood. He was taken up by a little band of mini-aesthetes: "We were like dandies, snobbish and arrogant. We might show up in green velvet suits and pink shirts and read Wilde -- anything we thought was daring." Christian was taxed with designing costumes for their amateur shows. He traces his enduring preoccupation with the turn of the century to this early research; at one point he plotted out a season-by-season directory of changes in the minutiae of fin-de-siecle fashion.

He went to college in Montpellier (less than ten miles from his beloved sea) and stayed for three years, doing extensive hitchhiking and sketching -- women, costumes, architecture. Paris, he was certain, would be his ultimate destination, but "I knew it was a tough city, and I wasn't ready."

Ten days after finally arriving in the capital, he regretted his decision to ripen in the provinces. At a party he met a bubbly gamine named Francoise Rosensthiel. "It was a coup de foudre!" he recalls. "Right away I loved her skin, her way of wearing clothes, her hair, her big freedom, her sweet spirit. Once I was with Francoise, I felt I had wasted time in the South." They are still together, though they have never married.

Rosensthiel was already in the fashion and publicity business. Lacroix studied at the Louvre and the Sorbonne with the idea of becoming a museum curator. The young pair prowled museums, went to the opera and bucketed around Europe student style. "Christian was curious about the Mediterranean, so we traveled to Greece and Spain and Venice in a real vacation spirit," says Rosensthiel. "He used to keep little travel notebooks, full of notes and sketches."

Those little sketches were not lost on Rosensthiel: "I thought his drawings terrific. When I saw his talent, I felt it was silly for him to limit himself to being a curator when there were other people who could only do that." Lacroix was finding his scholarly exertions "heavy," so when Rosensthiel whistled up a few introductions, he was on his way. Through her he met Picart, who helped him get a job with Hermes and later with Patou.

If the fashion story of Lacroix at Patou is one of triumph, the human one contains some sorrow. Jean de Mouy, then 29, had just taken over his family's perfume business when he hired the untried young designer. De Mouy's long shot triumphed, and the House of Patou was restored to its glory days of the '30s. But Picart and Lacroix made demands. They wanted to embark on ready-to-wear as soon as possible. Says Lacroix: "I was creating designs, but people couldn't afford them. I started suffering." About his chimerical designer, De Mouy is philosophical: "I still wish him well. I felt he was much more made for costumes and couture than ready-to-wear. I wanted to consolidate Patou's position in the field in which he was strongest before tackling ready-to- wear."

Today the House of Lacroix is filling in a solid commercial outline. Picart takes care of it, keeping his creative partner free to pursue his fantasies. After launching the ready-to-wear, Lacroix plans a menswear line in 1990. It is a lucrative market, but Lacroix insists that he is going into it because he himself can never find anything to wear, except perhaps in the U.S., where he goes to Ralph Lauren, Paul Stuart and Brooks Bros. In his reed-thin youth he wore -- guess what? -- his grandfather's suits. "They were well tailored, with beautiful shapes, materials and colors. But then ((sheepish smile)) I grew fatter."

The theater is never far from Lacroix's mind, so when he was approached by A.B.T. Artistic Director Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had seen his work, he welcomed a collaboration. In presenting Gaite Parisienne, a fizzy romp set to Manuel Rosenthal's brilliant editing of Offenbach, Baryshnikov knew what he did not want. "I was certain that I didn't want the heavy Maxim's look with the black stockings for the cancan girls. I wanted something light and funny and young." Both men wanted to create their own vision of fin-de-siecle Paris.

When the costumes arrived, Baryshnikov confesses to a moment of panic. There were the spotted stockings, the Glove Seller's skirt with huge black gloves all over it, the primitive palette, the bales of flowers on hats, bodices, skirts. "What have I done?" he asked himself, yet he quickly decided that he had done just fine. "The shapes are so extravagant, but they are never cartoonish or boring," he says. "They say, 'Let's open up our temperaments and not be afraid of exaggeration.' "

Like anyone newly famous, Lacroix is making adjustments, not all of them pleasant. On the bright side, he has assembled an exceptionally warm, cohesive staff. Some observers suggest that Picart is moving too quickly, that the house may have problems delivering on its copious orders. However, the first luxe collection is arriving in stores on time or ahead of schedule. A potentially more serious worry is Picart's contract with Agache President Bernard Arnault, whose expertise is in the real estate business and who may want a return on his $8 million investment unrealistically soon.

Lacroix is learning the hazards of fame. He is now recognized all over Paris, and he is deeply embarrassed when asked for an autograph or cornered in a restaurant. Once an avid night owl, he now sends Rosensthiel to various events. "He stays in more, and I go out more," she says. "And people have got used to inviting him and getting me instead." She is often referred to as his muse, but she denies it. "I'm not a muse, but I amuse him," she says. "I'm not at his feet adoringly, but he can count on me for an objective opinion. Christian designs for a woman with a strong personality. For him I represent the humor and acidity of the Parisienne."

Lacroix has a boutique on the street level of his headquarters but, until his ready-to-wear line appears, no clothes to put in it. Instead he has filled the display window with sand and placed some talismans: bamboo glasses, Camargue grass, a mighty lobster (cooked) and other, more esoteric forms of sea life. When he returned to the salon last Thursday with his Golden Thimble -- all the more precious because his first one is locked away at Patou -- he found that his staff had laid an improvised red carpet, and he responded with a short champagne reception. The staff members were overjoyed. They had, after all, created the winning collection in just three weeks. For the designer, it was a moment for savoring how good his people really are. Sentimental? Yes. But now comes the Lacroix touch. His next move was to take the outsize, gleaming award and plunk it in the middle of the window, on the sands with the crustaceans. Maybe he will get the sun in there somehow yet.

With reporting by Regan Charles/Paris and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York