Dressing Down in Sloppy Chic

The rumpled, crumpled, wrinkled, crinkled look

It was said of Columnist Heywood Broun that he resembled an unmade bed. This summer that dubious sartorial distinction is being emulated by fashion-conscious men and women from Fifth Avenue to Rodeo Drive. The look could be called Sloppy Chic. Its adherents insist that the clothes they wear be made of natural fibers--cotton, linen, silk--and that they look natural: unstructured, unlined, unstarched, unpressed. Their aim is to look carefree not careless, modish not messy, though the distinction may at times be more in the eye of the wearer than the beholder. "This year," says a buyer at Chicago's I. Magnin, "wrinkled is rich."

For women, the Annie Hallmark is tailored blazers, skirts and wrinkly fabrics, as exemplified in Calvin Klein's spring/summer collection. The paradox is that classic clothes end up looking like thrift shop purchases within a few steamy hours. One of the hottest--or coolest --fabrics around is Indian gauze, dyed with eggplant, saffron, cucumber and other natural substances, maybe even curry powder. Indian fabrics were among the highlights of a huge sales promotion of Indian merchandise mounted by Manhattan's Bloomingdale's last April. The material is so popular in New England that the Rhode Island-based, 80-store Touraine chain expects to sell 50,000 Indian gauze garments this season and regularly dispatches a buyer to the subcontinent to snare supplies.

Going from unisex to unsex, The Lodge At Harvard Square, with 17 New England outlets, sells its women customers huge quantities of old-fashioned men's chino pants, whose seats rapidly become modishly baggy on distaff derrieres.

Buttoned-down American men, of course, are dourly and durably resistant to the whims of fashion; but they too are succumbing in increasing numbers to the "schlepped in" look. When Wilkes Bashford, San Francisco's priciest men's store, ran full-page ads featuring a man whose linen suit looked as if it had escaped from a disaster movie, it was a sellout. Italy's Giorgio Armani is generally acknowledged to be the greatest evangelist of male unkempt. A disarming, blue-eyed Milanese, Armani, 43, is a canny tailor who knows precisely what each fabric can do and undo. Though Italians call his style Il Look Inglese--to which stiff upper-collared Englishmen might well object--Armani has managed to steer the national aspiration to la bella figura toward an image of bohemian nonchalance. His bellows-pocketed, unlined suits are sellouts in the U.S. at prices ranging from $475 to $650.

Conscious dishevelment is a far cry from the bandbox-fresh, polyester-crisp image that men and women, particularly men, have cultivated for so long. Yet in a way the rumpled, crumpled look is a logical extension of the recent trend toward self-liberation in fashion. "People today are willing to be comfortable, both physically and socially," says David Tessler, owner of San Francisco's City Island Dry Goods Co. boutique. "They have no use for constraints or formality." Fashion Savant Geraldine Stutz, president of Manhattan's Henri Bendel, declares not only that "the wrinkle is the apogee of casual dressing" but also that it is "the ultimate declaration of independence, the last statement of revolt against fashion dictatorship."

Not every woman or man chooses to revolt. While gauze-gazers in an office may not mind that a woman has gone from the synthetic to the slept-in look, the aspiring businessman who shows up for work in such deshabille may soon find that his future is as unstructured as his suit. Europeans, on the other hand, have never looked askance at a wrinkled, rumpled garment as worn by the likes of Charles de Gaulle or Sophia Loren. Clearly, though, U.S. tastes are changing. In time, Americans may even perceive the beauty in a wrinkled face.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.