The New Bad Boys of Fashion

By JAY COCKS

Two kindred spirits make bright clothes with rock brio

Crazy? Well, of course, crazy. " 'Natch-ral-ly' crazy," like the hero of the old song who invites derisive snorts because "I'm just a bad boy/All dressed up in fancy clothes."

Go ahead and laugh then: at the open-toed sneakers with the six-inch platforms and the skirts for men; at the silvery ensembles that look like space suits for space cases and the heavy sweaters with turtlenecks and bare backs. You might wonder whether the clothes are a deliberate joke, or if, when wearing them, one becomes a punch line. But a word of caution. Don't laugh so hard that you miss either the talent behind these clothes or the spirit with which they are made, the ebullience, the cunning shunning of convention that exalts fashion even as it seems to mangle it. And consider a revision to the classic Rolling Stones refrain: "It's only rock 'n' roll, but I can wear it."

There are several things that the French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier and Stephen Sprouse, an American, have in common besides an unreserved transatlantic admiration for each other's work. They are young: Gaultier is 32, Sprouse 31. They have, separately, taken fashion off into fresh territory. Gaultier has seized and made salable the dithering extravagances of London street fashion. Hot colors over black? Short skirts? Check out Sprouse for all that. He was hiking up hemlines and pouring Day-Glo over the fashion palette while women were still trying to figure out what the Japanese craze was all about.

Together, Sprouse and Gaultier have become the designers of the moment. The tour boats that cruise down the Seine past Gaultier's Paris apartment, flooding his living room with light, may actually contain rivals doing some industrial spying. Sprouse minis and Gaultier jackets have a very short life on the racks. Their clothes sell out both in pace-setting boutiques and in department stores like Macy's. Not since the Britain of the '60s have rock sensibility and fashion been so close-knit. "The raw energy behind rock 'n' roll inspires me," says Sprouse. "Rock has got everything: art and music and fashion." Gaultier, who likes it that the French press has described him as a "fashion disc jockey," says that "rock was above all a rebellion against the Establishment. My aim is freedom and openness."

His aim is still true, judging from the congenially berserk glad rags for men and women that he showed in Paris last week. Extremely deft, marketable clothing was mixed in with deliberately parodistic fantasies. There were gauzy see-through gossamers over checked bikini briefs for men; hiya-big-boy bathing suits for women that transform breasts into medium-range ballistic missiles; and sarongs for everyone. But there were also roomy, temperate suits for both sexes, and a selection of loungewear and splendor-in-the-grass sunsuits that managed to be forthrightly sexy without turning coy. It was shrewd and prototypical Gaultier; in short: clothes for yucks and clothes for bucks.

Sprouse's new collection has real butt-tickler skirts ("Everything is six inches above the knee or more") and dresses that seem to have been hit by a blitz of citrus bombs. There are four new Day-Glo colors, including furious fuchsia and lightning yellow. "We're going crazy testing all of them," says Sprouse, "but that's the best thing. My colors really glow."

There are thundering echoes of the swinging '60s in Sprouse's work--a lime-green sequined dress with a halter collar could have been filched from Twiggy's attic--but his clothes, as Buyer Jean Rosenberg of Henri Bendel in New York City points out, "are not '60s redos. Those clothes were skimpier and skinnier." Sprouse's lines tend to be a little more careful and deliberate, even sculpted, and a lot of his wizardry comes in combinations, like throwing a man-size coat over a mini. Says Pat Henderson of Bergdorf Goodman: "I've got one of his bright pink wool tank dresses, real short. You take off your coat and show that dress, anything could happen. Men think the clothes are incredibly sexy."

Fittingly enough, it was on the body of Blondie's Debbie Harry that Sprouse's fashion fantasies first assumed public form. One of two sons in an Air Force family, Sprouse had dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design and done some apprentice work with Halston before taking up the boho life in Manhattan nine years ago. He had been coloring huge black-and-white Xeroxes, when he became friendly with Harry and started to make her stage clothes. "Stephen put me into minis and high black boots," she says, "and it just went on from there."

Sprouse, quiet and deliberate, frets occasionally that "I wish I had more time off to work on other stuff, to keep practicing my guitar or do my art." When he sketches and fits, he listens to music--from vintage Rolling Stones to the short-circuited post-punk epiphanies of Public Image Ltd.--and he sees his work as an extension of the same creative impulse that set him to struggling with those Xeroxes back in the '70s. For Gaultier, on the other hand, fashion is a little more whimsical, a tap-source into personal fantasy. "I don't try to do art," he says. "I don't know how to do sculptures. All I propose are currents, what people want. It's not an intellectual approach but something that I feel."

When he was a teenager, living with his parents in a modest Paris suburb, he would read newspaper accounts of fashion shows. "They would say Cardin had presented 250 outfits, so I'd draw 350. Then I could say I did more than Cardin. After that I'd write my own articles about my collection, which were very positive." His grandmother--"my first fashion influence"--endured the brunt of his bolder experiments, which once included dyeing her gray hair purple. "She may," he laughs, "have been the first punk."

Gaultier, who admits readily enough that "I'm a rocker," is nevertheless adamant that his clothes are not meant to appeal to only a single age group. Just as his inspiration careens crazily from Dickens' London to today's King's Road, he wants his clothes worn by anyone who likes "playing with clothes, taking from them what interests you, no matter what the origins." In fact, as most store buyers know, a Gaultier collection is made up of about equal parts of eye-grabbing eccentricities and conventional ideas, "classics with different proportions. A young person won't put them together the same way as a 50-or 60-year-old."

On his 18th birthday, Gaultier landed a job with Cardin, for whom he designed a 1974 collection destined for the American market. He sets the same kind of creative atmosphere that he found at his former patron's, where "everything was permitted." Most of his small staff are just out of lycee and brimming with ideas; others are friends of long standing; none is over 32. Gaultier may be an iconoclast, but he has a deep and sometimes surprising respect for other designers. One would expect him to "adore" Vivienne Westwood, the earth mother of punk fashion. But Gaultier also "adores" Giorgio Armani and Jean Muir, and speaks with respect of the old master Yves Saint Laurent. He spends about 85% of his time working, and rides the Metro both to commute and to store up ideas.

Gaultier often refers to "the game of the clothes." If there is in fact such a recreation, then he and Sprouse have been instrumental in revising the recent rules of play. Acting cagey, Sprouse says he has "this whole new idea for fall." Gaultier's current collection suggests he can flout convention even while crazy. Natch-rally crazy. Yes, indeed. --By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Doric Denbigh/Paris and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York

With reporting by Doric Denbigh/Paris, Elizabeth Rudulph/New York