When Paris Is Not Burning

By JAY COCKS

It is quite possible that (plap) the fashion season of fall-winter 1988-89 (again, plap), still being presented this week in Paris, will be remembered less for design and more for sound effects: the dull, liquid thud (plap) made by the chins of dozens of the international fashion elite slumbering forward (plap) onto soft silk and welcoming cashmere (plap, plap) as models mosey down the runways in yet another sanguine incarnation of the new look. Ah, short skirts (plap), ah, mid-length skirts (plap), ah, pants are back (plap), ah, sleep.

Until Paris, went the chat among trade and press, the shows in Milan and London were a cumulative snooze-a-thon. Only Armani, in Italy, showed strength. The designers of England were, as ever, erratic and eccentric. There were signs of disappointment in retail reactions to the shows. Skirmishes over skirt length were blown, in the absence of any heavier action, into epic battles in a generally desperate attempt to bring heat to the placid proceedings. The short-skirt wrangle was a sure sign that the season was falling into something worse than a crisis. At least a critical condition can mean fever and ferment. This was looking more like fashion stasis. Paris was crucial. And Paris was not burning.

< It was up to Christian Lacroix, currently carrying the torch as the mainstream's brightest hope, to kindle some heat. Lacroix, who turned couture upside down and shook out its hand-stitched pockets as no one else has since Saint Laurent, made his ready-to-wear debut, and expectations were high. Lacroix had suggested, while the clothes were still being made, that the giddy shapes and botanical palate of his couture work were going to be a bit muted. But when the lights went up on the first passage, there was a mini-mob of models swarming together at the back of the runway wearing splendiferous coats and short dresses and hats all colored like condiments: mustard yellow, catsup red, hot dog-relish green and purple that looked as if it had come from an eggplant that had suffered a fatal injection of food dye. No plaps from the audience now. There were exclamations of glee and applause as the models swanked and swanned. If Lacroix wasn't staging a feast, it was clear he was laying on a nifty picnic.

Probably too much was expected of Lacroix. He propelled all manner of blinding prints down the runway and showed some inventive accessories, like the kind of mirrored purses backpackers bring back from Third World suqs. But the strain showed too. Some outfits, like a short ballerina-style skirt with a removable poofy apron, suggested that Lacroix was already feeling the weight of his considerable reputation and that it had already got too heavy just to shrug off. He was meeting his own standard, but not besting himself. He was, in a sense, just like every other designer this year: struggling with the challenge that his own success had set down.

When a designer gets as much sudden attention as Lacroix, all of fashion has somehow to deal with the subject, either by reacting to the new boy's work or by resisting it, assimilating all his brio and his swank, sidestepping it or transforming it. "I love doing whatever they say I can't," Lacroix reflected after his show. "I like to experiment, but I don't think of myself as a revolutionary." In a sense, Lacroix got hung up in the reaction he had generated. Both the buoyancy and sweep of his work on view in the scrumptious cut of a high-waisted check suit with a buttoned bolero or in the immaculate simplicity of some caramel-colored coats are easy to see but hard to define.

"Maybe Lacroix is not modern, exactly," says Issey Miyake, whose new collection was one of the few that flew serenely above the Lacroix wave. "But he is not retro either. He is Lacroix, and that is good." He is also a formidable force, whose fashion of light and luxe tries to trump the experimentation with fabric, form and color of Miyake and other modernists. Lacroix has raised hemlines, and he has raised the stakes as well. His works demand a response, but to the best modernists, fashion is an open question that each wearer must resolve and that each designer must continue to pose.

Picking up on the question, however, is getting to be a bit of a problem. Several of the most generative designers are not even showing at the eight-day presentations held in huge tents set down in the Louvre courtyard. Azzedine Alaia, whose clothes remain sexy and shaped like refinements of street fashion, continues to play coy and show well after openings when the press is back measuring hemlines on its home turf. Adeline Andre, who makes clothes as if she were the slightly naughty granddaughter of the legendary designer Madeleine Vionnet, is concentrating all her energies and finances on opening a design house this fall. Marc Audibet, who turns out startling fabric mixtures like Lycra and cashmere that simultaneously encase and caress the body, will make clothes on a limited basis only for sale in the U.S. "All designers have a single story to tell, and tell it over and over again, evolving within it," he likes to say, but just now the climate is not favorable to him. His dresses have a soft-spoken strength and purity of line that defy clamor, but this is a time of ruckus and ruffles. As Miyake remarks, "Things are so conservative now. It's especially hard to be a young designer these days. Fashion is not so much design anymore. It's an industrial game."

In that case, Andre means to compete on the fast track. Her first boutique will open in Paris this fall, selling her pared-down, sensual, bias-cut dresses and coats that wrap up the wearer like a birthday surprise. A two-year apprenticeship at Dior taught her that "the allure is all in the cut," but Andre matches her classical lines to a lively color range of kinetic, kindergarten-bright hues. "What counts," she says, "is the delayed reaction," and Andre makes sure there is a lot to linger over. Her coat of cashmere velours makes an immediate impact with its lilting turquoise color, while its witty cut -- there are three (count 'em) armholes -- continues to flirt with the imagination. Audibet's work is sensitive and ethereal, but ^ Andre tends a little more to the pragmatic. She is not so concerned, she says, with the general climate of fashion as she is with making a niche.

Designing safe inside a creative cocoon, impervious to commercial flux, is an almost utopian ideal. It requires a nearly impossible combination: flinty individuality, a healthy business base, a viable commercial identity and a strong stylistic hand. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des garcons and Yohji Yamamoto have both been around long enough to be considered less revolutionaries than revisionist classicists, but their new collections showed them to be as restless and clever as ever. Kawakubo sent out dozens of outfits with unexpected lapels and seams like overgrown ski trails, most in combinations of black, red and orange, so the show seemed like a massive box of spilled Halloween candy. Yamamoto, the Zen master of the subtle change, struck up a parade of flowing black coats with closings as challenging as Rubik's Cube.

No one, however, continues on his own way as unerringly as Issey Miyake. This new collection is his 31st, but it abounds with so many notions about shape and fabric that it bursts open like a just discovered treasure chest. The waist rises on a short black leather skirt, but the hem falls irregularly. A raincoat is made of polyester that feels and falls like inked paper. One pantsuit in atomic-orange wool knit looks like a drill uniform for fashion insurrectionists. Another pantsuit in silk clings and flares in the jacket, rides the waist, then blossoms out in the cuffs, looking, in its mad dappling of colors, like a loft painter's drop cloth. "Everything is so much the couture look, the expensive look, now it's time to rethink again, to find something different," Miyake says. Even in times of uncertainty, as now, Miyake conclusively demonstrates that there is always one sustaining direction for a designer: inward.

With reporting by Regan Charles/Paris