Bugles, Bangles & All Woman

"In Italy," says Count Ferdinando Sarmi, "when the oldest son tells his father he wants to be a dress designer, it's like a woman saying she intends to be a prostitute." Sarmi's own father responded by packing his son off to the university in Siena. The result was to make Sarmi, some 30 years later, the only Seventh Avenue designer who holds a doctor of law degree.

Women couldn't care less. To them the important thing about Sarmi is that he turns out some of the world's most elegant evening dresses. "Every woman with $600 to spend," says one New York buyer, "wants to own a Sarmi."

At the preview of his fall and winter collection last week, Sarmi produced 50 evening ensembles--every one of them made for a grand entrance. Typically, he committed himself to no single shape, cavalierly offering up silhouettes ranging from tentlike A-lines to baggy harem skirts. What interests Sarmi is fabric. There were amethyst, ruby and emerald velvets, cloth-of-gold studded with glass "jewels," acres of feathery chiffon, columns of ostrich plumes, bands of chinchilla, and bodices of shimmering bugles and bangles.

Each year Sarmi makes two trips to Switzerland, France and Italy to select his fabrics. He has the lace re-embroidered with silver and gold, the chiffon treated to produce a raised velvet pattern, the dress wools interwoven with rows of iridescent paillettes. Often he designs his own: one year it was photographs of raindrops screened onto fine silk, another time it was magnified butterfly wings.

At 49, Sarmi is a heavy-lidded, darkly handsome man who lives for his work. He came to the U.S. in 1951, when Elizabeth Arden hired him as her salon designer. In 1959, with his reputation well established, he went into business on his own. "I make clothes to enhance a woman's beauty or to hide her faults," says Sarmi. "I hate the ambiguity of women's clothes today. What for is the man to marry, if what he gets is not a woman but an ersatz man in pants?" Sarmi creations offer a woman frills but not fuss, flourishes but not flash, take her to the ball secure in the knowledge of her own absolute femininity.

Sarmi's designs are almost copy-proof. Highlight of this season's show, for instance, is a full-length empire coat made entirely of swansdown ($4,500). For the budget-minded lady or fashion pirate who wants to whip up an economy model, the directions would have to start: First you take 14 dozen swans . . .

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