The art of fashion.

A conversation among Carolina Herrera, John Simon, and John O'Sullivan.

JO'S: How did you start as a designer? CH: When I showed my first collection in 1981, the whole fashion world was going mad on layer after layer of very loose skirts and free blouses -- and no shapes. I came out with a collection that was all fitted. It was very feminine -- women showing their figures -- so everybody looked at it. It was really quite glamorous. That first collection had one distinctive feature -- big sleeves. Everyone asked me: ''Why big sleeves?'' I replied: ''Well, they are not that new. They have been a fashion feature from Elizabethan times, or even the Middle Ages, up to the Gibson Girls.'' All I did was to adapt them to modern times. They were successful because women liked these big sleeves framing their faces. JO'S: Do your designs come from your subconscious? Or are you consciously inspired by other designers? CH: I was always a great admirer of -- Balenciaga. For me Balenciaga is designing. The simplicity of his line, the way he cuts, he is timeless. But there are many others -- Schiaparelli for instance. Among contemporary designers, I like Armani very much, for his simplicity. I used to dress by Armani a lot. And I adore Saint Laurent, for his classicism. He will never be out of fashion.

JS: Is there any American designer who has especially influenced you? CH: Yes, I think so. Do you remember Claire McCardell? And also Halston is wonderful with his simplicity; he was a real American designer. JS: Doesn't American design tend to be simpler than the European? CH: In general, yes. But fashion everywhere is going through a period when it is not really fashion, when it is a rejection of fashion as traditionally understood. They say you have to go to the streets to see what fashion is all about today. I think the streets look like an army, everybody dressed in black, as if they are in mourning. JS: Maybe it's because black doesn't show how dirty they are. CH: Certainly something is being obscured. Fashion in the past meant that you had to have the guts to wear something different from others -- to express your individual personality -- but within the constraints set by formal standards of elegance and style. Today, people want to be free to wear what they like, in any combination they like, to be confined by no rules, and to set their own standards -- yet they all end up looking exactly the same. They don't really want to stand out. You might describe them as ''a herd of independent bodies.'' JO'S: The historian James Laver argued that fashion is a strong indicator of larger social trends -- for instance, that fashions which emphasize the bosom are associated with eras in which there is a very strict differentiation of sex roles. What social conclusions would you draw from today's fashions? CH: It's less than four years before we enter the year 2000; so designers want to be modern -- so modern that they are forgetting about fashion. They show craziness and things that don't have anything to do with fashion, or with beauty, or with style, or with glamor. JS: Doesn't the political climate too influence fashion? We have somehow become not only democratic but populist -- the proletariat has taken over and the upper classes try to dress like egalitarians. CH: Yes, for the moment fashion is totally proletarian. JS: A frightening situation. CH: A frightening situation, but it will change. There are periods in fashion where everything is very ugly, like the hippies, and then grunge. That lasted only two weeks. JO'S: But some designers have not given in. CH: They maintain their own style. You must know exactly where you want to go, and at the same time you must be very aware of what is going on. You have to have some creativity, some ideas of your own. But you cannot forget that you are in the Nineties. If you do, you may end up designing a dress for Madame de Montespan which wouldn't fit in here. JO'S: Yet if Madame de Montespan wore one of your dresses today, she would be a wonderful advertisement for you. Just as Audrey Hepburn was a wonderful advertisement for the designs of Givenchy. CH: Yes, Audrey Hepburn was the perfect model for him, a movie star but very loyal to him. Nowadays you take a star like Sharon Stone, whom Valentino dresses. He spends hours fitting her in his beautiful dresses, and then she goes out, and when they ask what is she wearing, she says: ''I'm wearing a T-shirt from the Gap.'' JO'S: Your strictures on the current ugliness of fashions suggest some dramatic new development around the corner -- something like Dior's New Look. CH: I think we're going back to real clothes, to women looking elegant and sophisticated, and even a little bit overdressed. And we'll have make-up again and jewels and all that. You see, women are tired of being funny. I mean, you look around and say: ''Oh, she looks so funny,'' not ''How wonderful that woman looks.'' We cannot be afraid of elegance. It's much better than all this. JS: When we are looking back into the past, we can say that Directoire clothes looked like this, Biedermeier clothes looked like that. Can we say about our own age that 1980 or 1990 clothes looked ''like that''? CH: We are already doing it. We can recognize today a distinctive look from the 1970s -- for instance, bell bottoms. Likewise, the Eighties look is very rich, brocaded, with embroidery. The nineties look we can't quite grasp yet. But we certainly can mark the Twenties, the Thirties, the Forties. In the latest collections, the influence is obviously the Thirties. JS: Is there any look in the past that you like especially? Without wanting to imitate it, of course. CH: I really liked the 1940s, when they had the big shoulders and the women were all very glamorous. JS: Can we consider men's fashions? One interesting thing is that in the past famous designers -- Pierre Balmain, say, or Jean Patou -- always dressed beautifully. Now, if you look at someone like Galliano, or Isaac Mizrahi . . . CH: But that's what they think is modern. If they were to dress in a normal suit, very classic, they would look much better, but they wouldn't attract people's attention. And they want people to say: ''Do you see what Galliano's wearing? Necklaces and gold and earrings and . . .'' And the other one wears a bandanna, because it is his signature and everybody will pick him out on the streets. JS: Jean-Paul Gaultier one can recognize on the streets very easily . . . CH: Well, he wears his skirt! I love him. I had to give him an award the other night, and he was wearing a very short skirt. With a big earring and no hair, very funny. JS: What do you think of such elaborately wild fashions, like Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, and Vivienne Westwood? CH: I think Vivienne Westwood -- her work is unbelievable to look at. But how many women can wear that? She really mixes very well, and there are many people who have been influenced by her. It's the way of dressing now, mixing and matching. It's not easy, because not too many women know how to mix. That's why you see so many fashion victims on the street. JO'S: But many current fashions would look ridiculous on any woman over the age of 17 whereas classic fashion looks good on everyone. And it makes the wearer look good as well. CH: But what you wear when you are 15 looks a little bit strange at 30 and looks very foolish when you are 60. The most important accessory a woman can have is a full-length mirror -- so she can see that she can't wear everything. JS: In a charming little play, Full Gallop, about Diana Vreeland, she says (and it may not be an exact quote): ''Blue jeans are the greatest invention since the gondola.'' Have you any use for them? CH: Yes, I do. But it all depends where you use them and how old you are. It's ridiculous to go out for lunch or something like that in jeans. I think you can wear them in the country -- but not for every day. JS: My wife is very unhappy because I've never owned a pair of blue jeans . . . CH: They'd look very chic with your blazer. But you won't wear them? JS: No, because they're a uniform. CH: Why do you think men like this uniform of blazers and jeans? JS: Well, first of all blue is a color that works for a lot of men, especially if they have grey hair. Also, blue is a practical color; it doesn't spot as visibly as lighter colors. I also think that somehow a blazer has a suggestion of sport -- of yachting, or something like that. It makes you look masculine, theoretically. CH: But men don't like wearing the uniform of black tie? Because I always hear when someone is invited to dinner: ''Is it black tie? Oh, what a bore!'' JS: Yes. In the concert hall in the past, the conductor always wore tails. But then Karajan suddenly appeared in a white turtleneck and dark suit. Which suggested that the rest of us didn't have to bother dressing up. CH: Isn't this rebellion because black tie and, still more, tails are connected with Society, and the upper classes, and things like that. If you are an artist and hence a free man, it is not possible to put on the black tie because it's not the image you want people to see. Look as the Oscars. The Oscars used to be a glamorous occasion because the movie stars were glamorous on the screen and in their private lives. Today, you see all these women and you ask yourself: ''Who's that? Is she really the famous movie actress?'' Because they are afraid of showing how glamorous they are. JS: Of course, movie actresses today are not women of great taste. CH: But it is an attitude, too. It is an attitude of being very childish and young and rejecting any formal standards. They don't want to look stylish and elegant, like Marlene Dietrich. JS: Well, some of them are overdressed . . . CH: But in the wrong way. These women say they have no time to go out and shop for themselves. So they have what they call a ''stylist,'' which is someone who tells them: ''You wear this or that, and put your hair this way or that way.'' They don't have time to analyze their own appearance, and then judge that this particular dress is going to look terrible on them. It's a form of laziness. And, of course, it's easy to be lazy when there are no formalities to which you are expected to conform. JS: You know what the problem is: Audrey Hepburn was a star in the day when dressing elegantly was the thing. But to be a star in an era when that is not the objective -- when that is even to be avoided -- then no one can become an Audrey Hepburn any more. JO'S: Unless some movie actress decides to break with this fashion of dressing down and emerges a butterfly from its gloomy chrysalis. JS: Perhaps politics will have to move toward a more conservative way of thinking before that happens. As long as politics are left-oriented, high fashion is likely to remain in the doldrums. CH: Speaking of politics, there are people whose public position allows, perhaps even requires, them to dress with formal elegance. Don't you think that the wife of the President of the United States should dress in a very glamorous way? JS: That would certainly be a nice change. CH: Maybe American designers should dress the wife of the President for free, as they do in France, because it would enable them to show what they can do -- and present a glamorous image of America at the same time. JO'S: Doesn't Princess Diana do something like that? CH: I don't agree. At first, she was a young, fresh-looking girl. Now she is trying so hard that she is beginning to look like one of the fashion models -- so much into fashions that she is becoming a fashion victim. She is pretty, certainly -- but she could be just another model! JO'S: I see your point. At the same time Princess Di is somebody who can get away with dressing with old-fashioned elegance by virtue of her position in society. Nobody would expect even a semi-detached member of the Royal Family to turn up wearing grunge on a formal occasion. So she is allowed to dress with a conformity to traditional style in a way that a Hollywood ''artist'' is not. And the same is true, as you yourself were arguing, about the wife of the American President. JS: A distinguished contributor to NR, Ernest van den Haag, and I had an argument yesterday. He claims that fashion is not an art, and I claim it is. CH: Why did he say it wasn't? JS: He thinks it's just a very nice additive, something that makes a woman look better, and nothing more. CH: It is connected with art, with paintings, with literature. When you read a book describing how people were dressed in a different age or a different place, you immediately place your mind there. You can fantasize and transport yourself at once. JS: Fashion creates beauty. Isn't it that simple? CH: Exactly. Look at Goya -- at how people dressed in his paintings -- at Gainsborough, at all the painters. JS: But no matter how well you dress, if you're going to be painted by Julian Schnabel . . . CH: Ah, well, then it doesn't matter what you wear. JO'S: Is that the last word? CH: No. If fashion is an art, it is also more than an art. Fashion is for the eye, but also for the night.