In Milan, All Masculinity, No Pretense

By GUY TREBAY
Published: June 26, 2008

“FASHION needs to generate dreams,” Roberto Cavalli said before his show here on Sunday. Figuring in the dreams of the always optimistic Mr. Cavalli this season, according to his show notes, was an “extravagant man who explores, a hippie, a nomad who wears his memories from safari on himself.”

The designer then went on to further list his inspirations: “Africa’s savage and sublime atmosphere, Magnificent colors of Morocco, Paul Bowles’ Berber fascination in ‘The Sheltering Sky,’ Devendra Banhart’s neo-hippy bohemian attitude.”

Fashion, in one’s experience of it lately, generates many things, but dreams ... not so much. Certainly it is a reliable source of amusement, particularly when you consider the gap between what is going on in designers’ minds and how that translates to what men wear. Pajamas, for instance, were seen all over the runways in the collections for spring and summer 2009, shown here through Wednesday.

“I don’t know what they’re thinking,” said Tom Kalenderian, the vice president for men’s wear at Barneys New York. Hardly anyone wears pajamas to bed, Mr. Kalenderian added, let alone to work.

This critic’s personal inspirations for the season here, should anyone wish to know, included the savage, sublime atmosphere along the via Pietro Verri on Monday when Tom Ford opened his new five-floor Temple of Testosterone, nearly inspiring a riot as party guests clamored to get past guards in order to ogle the $5,000 suits, $1,700 shoes and crocodile weekend bags.

Tucked away in a top-floor sanctum, like the idol in a Hindu temple, perma-bronzed and sweat-dewed (Italy is still coming to terms with newfangled inventions like air-conditioning), was the Texan himself. Recently hired to dress Daniel Craig in the new James Bond film, “Quantum of Solace,” Mr. Ford has remarked lately that he is his own customer.

He is equally his own fantasy creation, one who, like the early -film Bond, cultivates an aura of suave tastes and manly appetites that have been lifted from a pop cultural grab bag— Savile Row, old Hollywood, comic strips.

Unlike a Bond martini, the ones served at smart Milanese fashion parties this week came in shot glasses and with a single anomalous raspberry crowding the precious thimbleful of gin and vermouth. The music at those parties, and at many shows, was similarly bastardized, a combination of remixed dance tracks from the 1970s that sampled the spooky ethereal voice of Minnie Riperton in her whistle register, or that mined the tinny effects and pretentious lyrics of the Brooklyn-based band MGMT.

AFFECTATION can be charming, it’s true, but so can things that make no pretense at being other than what they are. The new Gommino loafers Tod’s introduced this week look stitch for stitch like the old Gommino loafers, except that they are rendered in luscious jewel colors.

There is something instructive about a label’s refusal to alter, beyond the occasional aesthetic tweak, a business formula based on a simple $395 driving shoe that has driven Tod’s to billion-dollar profitability. The spring collections for next year are primarily about bottom-line calculations, with fashion houses showing clothes that were mainly conservative, mostly monotone, and if a mite commercial and bland, appropriate for tough economic times.

There isn’t a lot of latitude these days to indulge controversy or ideas in fashion, and so even Miuccia Prada in her strong collection seemed far less intent than usual on engaging in what Carlo Antonelli, the editor of Italian Rolling Stone, termed “the discourse about gender.”

In other words, Prada ditched the peplums and other feminizing elements of her last, determinedly noncommercial collection and sent out a tightly organized presentation that combined elements of sports and formal wear and that eroticized men without rendering them drones.

She placed straps inside coats so the wearer could shrug the garment off his shoulders as one would a backpack. She toyed with long shirts worn over shorts in a way that suggested one was abroad in his skivvies. She used proportions that bared slivers of skin between shirt and waistband. She avoided ties and collars and left chests bared to create a kind of male décolletage.
She also made finely proportioned trousers that were full in the leg without becoming hip-hop clownish and whose waistbands sat just at the pelvic bone; and coats of translucent rubber that gave one the shivers, not because they seemed like the usual designer allusion to fetish wear but because they referenced nature with tender artistry. More than anything, they looked like cloaks of kelp.

Somewhere Ms. Prada said something about her collection combining elements of fragility and power. Somewhere Donatella Versace said that her collection was either inspired by or dedicated to Barack Obama. Somewhere (The International Herald Tribune, actually) Alexander McQueen said his collection was “smoke and mirrors translated into clothes.” Somewhere the designer Raf Simons said his Jil Sander collection was “a determined abstraction of nature and life.”

Sometimes it seems that the only way to survive a week of austere but anatomically implausible designs (Sander); Cirque du Soleil illusion effects (McQueen); chirpy Miss America assertions (Versace); and generally vaporous claims on the part of designers about the meanings behind what, after all, amount to racks of trousers and shirts, is to keep a supply of tiny martinis at hand. Hold the raspberry, please.

Among the folks one rarely hears waxing poetic about inspiration are Tomas Maier, Angela Missoni and Christopher Bailey. What these three designers seem to have in common is an aversion to showboating and a deep understanding of what corporate types call brand DNA.

Season after season, Mr. Maier refines a vocabulary and a look that have been more influential than people let on. His snug jackets, taut armholes, roped (formerly pagoda) shoulders and ostentatiously plain but luxurious materials recall the John Held 1920s as they were reinterpreted in the gay 1970s, as do the voluminous trousers with deep crumb-catcher cuffs.

If it was an adman, Peter Rogers, who first coined the Bottega Veneta slogan, “When Your Own Initials Are Enough,” it is Mr. Maier who carried the idea forward, branding a look without a logo in sight.

It is no small accomplishment to have created an unmistakable brand identity out of a handful of patterns in yarn, as did Tai and Rosita Missoni, the founders of the knitwear label that bears their family name, and which is designed by their daughter Angela. And it requires considerable humility to work from a template created by one’s mom and dad. Yet Ms. Missoni’s collection of shorts and safari jackets in sharp, almost acid colors, detailed in patterns of broken stripes, had a confident feeling, like a quirky riff on a jazz standard, something minor key but endearing, like a Blossom Dearie song.

Christopher Bailey’s Burberry show evoked another kind of music and a different breed of musician, the chicken-chested rockers you might see in Hoxton or Williamsburg. It is probably high time for those guys to lose the wallet chains and corduroy Levis and take some of the money from lucrative deals every garage band seems to be making and put it toward one of Mr. Bailey’s elongated scoop-neck cardigans, narrow trousers in mossy colors or skim-weight three-quarter length coats.

Cooler still would be a band dressed up in the Day-Glo suits that Italo Zucchelli sent out on Tuesday in a Calvin Klein collection that was cleanly proportioned, cut to suit a body type that, while not steroid-muscled, is clearly athletic, this in itself a break from the trend of recent seasons to show men’s clothes on underfed boys.

Before Calvin Klein (when it was being designed by Calvin Klein himself) became an extended porn loop passing itself off as a mass-market label, Mr. Klein’s clothes made a persuasive case for showcasing the newly toned male physique. Clothes were required to suit the broad shoulders, narrow waists and levels of aerobic fitness many guys worked so hard to attain. Mr. Klein provided them. Mr. Zucchelli does again.

The Nordic waifs favored by casting agents for other designers would look pretty pitiful in the knee-length fencing trousers or cleanly squared suits by Mr. Zucchelli. So would anybody who’d slacked off on treadmill and let himself to go to pot. Tailoring, as Mr. Ford recently told me, is great for concealing one’s anatomical flaws. A little shoulder padding helps offset a large head. Wide lapels narrow a bull neck. A deep suit vent adds length to a torso.

But there is only so much a designer can do about a widening middle except provide inspiration to stave it off. As much as anything else, Mr. Zucchelli’s fine collection was a manifesto against the muffin top.

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Soft Touches, Too Heavy-Handed

By CATHY HORYN
Published: July 1, 2008
PARIS

Jean-Luce Huré for The New York Times
YVES SAINT LAURENT A silk suit worn with a sweater and suede belt.
Whether designers have been looking at the same art, reading the same books or just wishing they were anyplace but here, their spring 2009 men’s collections seem to have hit the same wall. They aren’t so much about real dreams and opinions as random thoughts.

So there is a meaninglessness about the collections, which ended on Sunday, and more than the usual serving. It’s odd to look at all the femmy touches — the puffed-sleeve blouses (can we use that word?) at Lanvin, the soft cowl-neck sweaters at Louis Vuitton, the ruffles at Comme des Garçons and Number (N)ine — and actually think that fashion is having this discussion. Now. Haven’t we had it before?

Milan designers were also obsessed with ambiguous states of gender, revealing a clavicle, um, in an arresting way. But it’s doubtful that most men care, and if they are young and already love the freak-show possibilities of fashion, they are not going to find new material here for their act.

The modern exception is Raf Simons. His show on Saturday provided a blueprint for how clothes will look.

To look at the Number (N)ine show was to imagine that its designer, Takahiro Miyashita, had gone to the Macy’s junior floors and loaded up. It was plain that he had taken a lot of contemporary styles and layered them together, making the results seem chaotic or ironic but, in any case, not thought out. And the models wore blond Dutch boy wigs. But the mood, in the end, seemed less manic than monotone.

It’s interesting to contrast Number(N)ine with Comme des Garçons, where Rei Kawakubo sent out predominantly black outfits with white or black cotton skirts. The models had mauve-colored bobby-pinned hair, and some wore the squashed, beribboned hats you associated with New England spinsters. In addition, there were black ruffled tunics, much as if a boy had borrowed one of his sister’s dresses.

So why was this collection the opposite of what it seemed to be on the surface? Because Ms. Kawakubo’s feminine gestures were not merely decorative. They were incorporated into the silhouette, and hardened by the tailored black jackets and the matchstick pants and the grid patterns of dots that appeared on some pieces. It was one of the more modern-looking collections of the weekend.


Several shows evoked the young introspective male in a warm foreign climate living on his remittance from home, a type that Gore Vidal described in one of his memoirs. He added that he avoided them. The spring 2009 version of this character (from Ann Demeulemeester) wears knee-length pants in black washed linen with a loose black jacket and sometimes a faded sweater vest. Or (from Dries Van Noten) safari linens and tie-print trousers with a natty ease.

If his remittance is rather larger, and he has no vices to support, the look might be the safety-pinned silk crepe or velvet jackets from Yves Saint Laurent, and the superfine polo shirts. Stefano Pilati, the designer at Saint Laurent, has some fresh-looking suits in this collection, in particular a three-button style in pale, silvery blue silk. And he knows how to create an individual, sophisticated palette for summer — those sand-to-blue-to-sunset-pink tones. But the character these clothes evoke seems from a well-traveled place.

This was the problem at Lanvin, too. The designer, Lucas Ossendrijver, easily constructed a bookish scenario for his loose, lightly layered clothes: washed silk khaki suits; drainpipe silk trousers with puckered side seams; washed cardigans and shirts over a beaded undershirt; and, of course, this season’s squashy straw hat. And it all came together beautifully. But without the extra styling effects of a Paris show, many of the earth-colored separates would not be all that far from Go Silk of the 1980s.

The non-event of the Paris collections was Dior. Kris Van Assche was neither feminine nor especially masculine in his slim-fitting black suits, blunted ties, white high-tops and orange-colored goggle glasses. His clothes just weren’t relevant in any way. Maybe they would have been about two years ago. Dior Homme now seems stuck in neutral.

Junya Watanabe is Mr. Reliable, delivering great jeans with hayseed patches of gingham near the back pockets and some smart casual jackets that mixed solid cotton with gingham.

And John Galliano’s big man trek from Japan to London via India produced a lot of cool, urban clothes, notably long voile Indian shirts, Japanese cartoon-colored jackets, and faded, stenciled jeans with what looked like a half kilt swinging off the backside. Mr. Galliano has taken similar head trips, but this time the effect was lighter.

The only men’s designer in Paris who seems to really think about his designs, and what they might mean to the future of dress, is Mr. Simons. No one pushes himself harder, or uses his runway as more of a public forum for ideas. Even if in your mind you can’t see someone actually wearing some of the looks he proposes this season — trim-fitting black shorts with a sleeveless white shirt or an all-in-one piece with shorts — he nonetheless opens your mind to what is possible in tailoring and fabrics.

And the future is tugging at fashion. Among the things to consider with this collection is how Mr. Simons combines the formality of the classic suit with the body-consciousness of modern sportswear. The suit jacket is stripped down — the lapels eliminated and reduced to a notch — and at the same time, the material and the finishing are impeccable. As for the black shorts, they are as sharp and spare as a modern typeface.

Mr. Simons has also used embroidery with muscle — thousands of tiny black hatch marks gradually darkening the surface of a minimalist white coat. At the moment, fashion houses are putting out mountains of products. But how much of this stuff actually means anything or has a chance of changing our eye? That’s what Mr. Simons does, now more sharply than ever.

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Fashion Sees Its Shadow

By GUY TREBAY
Published: March 6, 2008
Paris

Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
FROM THE CASTLE AND THE CONVENT Fashions for fall shown in Paris by Givenchy.
HUGE crowds gathered last summer at the Russian pavilion of the Venice Biennale to see a three-screen video installation by a collective known as AES+F. Filled with dreamy computer-game landscapes, scary monsters, rocket ships, carousels and nearly naked post-pubescent models engaged in elaborate mock battles, “Last Riot” was the apocalypse rendered pastel and made chic.



The artists set the piece to Wagner, as artists often have when the leitmotif is The End. This strategy worked for Francis Ford Coppola when he needed to hit the doom button (and drown out the rotor wash) in “Apocalypse Now,” and it also worked pretty well when Bugs Bunny was playing Josh Brolin to Elmer Fudd’s Javier Bardem in the 1957 cartoon “What’s Opera, Doc?”

Whether the end is nigh is rarely the point. What matters is that, when people fear shifts in the cultural tectonics, they tend to reach for myth and the verities. And, while it may seem like a stretch to extend this observation to a sphere as ostensibly superficial as fashion, it was hard to come away from the season just ended here without thinking that dressmakers are spooked by the cold breath of change.

Like the battle scenes in “Last Riot” (Miuccia Prada’s favorite piece at the Venice art fair, by the way), the Paris season gave the impression of being a valiant defense of the ramparts of chic.

And there were good reasons for this. Faced with overwhelming shifts in the way clothes are manufactured; with the widespread dispersal and pirating of information on the Internet; with markets broadening to encompass not just familiar consumer elites, but entire swaths of the globe; and with the knowledge that their boldest efforts seem puny compared with the chess moves being enacted by the multinational titans who employ them, a lot of designers are befuddled. What should they do? Change careers? Why not, instead, reach into the costume trunks and, like the pretty combatants in “Last Riot,” take up a wooden swords and play pretend.

The recurrent themes of the season’s playacting were nostalgia, full-blown romanticism and crypto-religiosity. These were everywhere visible, but most particularly at Alexander McQueen, Givenchy, Prada, Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent.

The McQueen show, titled “The Girl Who Lived in a Tree,” was inspired by a fable the designer concocted about a maiden who lives in a six-century-old elm in his English garden, and who comes out at night “to meet a prince and become a queen.”

Because the designer has recently toured India, the queen in question was probably Victoria. But Mr. McQueen’s was not so much the image of the dour and hard-headed sovereign of historical record as of a Raj Barbie, a creature from a music-hall pantomime, clad in what one critic described as “ballerina-length, multi-flounced dance dresses, each more insanely exquisite than the last.”

She was a skinny queen, too, trussed up in corsets that added a note of perversity easy to read as a clue to a control fetish, something autoerotic. When a designer takes a girl — a wraith, really — like the English model Lily Donaldson and binds her waist, it’s hard to avoid thinking of how unruly the world must seem from inside his skull.

No one can really blame designers for trying to conserve themselves or to regulate the growing demands on creativity. “People are becoming overwhelmed,” the D. J. Michel Gaubert remarked last Thursday, as he stood by an oval portal to a luminous biomorphic tent constructed inside the Grand Palais for the Yves Saint Laurent show.

Mr. Gaubert, a seasoned D. J. who has spent decades creating aural backgrounds for labels like Saint Laurent and Chanel, noted how the increasing rapidity of fashion’s production cycles seems to affect everyone. “Look at the number of outfits people are showing,” he said. “Look at how many shows there are a day. Look at how many cities and markets buyers have to think about.”

Even the shows themselves are getting faster, it seems, an impression confirmed if one happened to see a video that accompanies a costume exhibition Christian Lacroix assembled from the archives of Le Musée des Arts Décoratifs. In it, the 1980s-era mannequin Dalma is seen sauntering the catwalk at a Lacroix show, pausing, posing, cocking her head, twirling, making a moue.

In those days, Dalma was known as a fairly peppy character on the catwalk (as opposed to, say, Iman, who moved so magisterially she should have been accompanied by tugboats). Yet compared with either of those two, models now break from the gate like sprinters. They almost have to in order to make it up and back a 90-foot runway in time to whip backstage for the next change of clothes.

“The demands on everyone are constantly growing,” Mr. Gaubert said, referring not just to the twice-yearly ready-to-wear collections, but also to the couture presentations some labels produce, as well as precollections and resort collections and — ka-ching! — accessories.

“People can’t keep up,” he said. “The demand is insane.”
So, perhaps in response to this, designers retrench. They embrace conservative ideas and the clothes that suit them. They look backward. They outfit models as an army of automatons, the way Stefano Pilati, the gifted Saint Laurent designer, did. His pale-faced cadres wore black lipstick, had eyes obscured by black-bowl wigs and bodies encased in clothes of a stark geometry rarely seen outside the Vatican.


Jean-Luce Huré for The New York Times
MAGNIFIED Chanel’s carousel at the Grand Palais.
“I don’t think you want to go out advertising a brand anymore,” Mr. Pilati told Style.com after the show.

Mr. Pilati was not alone in balking at the idea of becoming a logo machine. At Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquiere produced a collection that was as much about formalist feats as about anything as banal and frivolous as grabbing an after-work cocktail. At Prada in Milan, Miuccia Prada showed a collection of stark widow’s weeds. At Lanvin, Alber Elbaz made ribboned dresses that summoned up Victorian mourning clothes. And at Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci presented dresses that had a renunciatory feeling. They were clothes for a streetwalker who has forgone her wicked ways and taken the veil.

Even the stylized clothes Marc Jacobs showed for Louis Vuitton were devout, at least in their allegiance to traditional French style ideals. A lot of people thought that Mr. Jacobs’s designs looked like monastic vestments, and some (well, I) found the heavy woolens and kooky conical headgear evocative of the uniforms (purple shrouds and two-tone Nikes) worn by the Heaven’s Gate cultists of Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.

Those benighted souls will be remembered, of course, for having committed mass suicide in 1997 with the help of vodka and phenobarbital, in the hope of meeting a spaceship they thought was hidden behind Comet Hale-Bopp. Everybody, as the artists who made the “Last Riot” seemed to understand, is looking for a faith, however misguided or outright spurious.

While some find it in the imagery and crafts of the past, others remain resolutely forward thinking. Few designers treat the idea of submitting to anything other than the zeitgeist with as much lip-curling disdain as Karl Lagerfeld. “I don’t believe in anything,” he said recently in an interview with the French editor Olivier Zahm. “I envy people who have faith. It must make things easier.”

Yet Mr. Lagerfeld, who is now in his 70s, is being disingenuous. Few are more devout about promoting what one French critic called, correctly if pretentiously, “the sacralization of consumer goods.”

As if to prove this, Mr. Lagerfeld set his Chanel show at the Grand Palais this season on an immense carousel adorned with outsize versions of house classics like sling-back shoes, camellias, quilted handbags and ballerina flats. Fashion, he seemed to be saying, may not yet have attained recognition as a global creed. But it takes a true disbeliever to question its role as the outward expression of our deep faith in acquiring things.

Markets may slump. The dollar may become the peso. China and Russia may turn the United States into a rest stop on the superhighway of global economy. None of that is likely to deter people from impoverishing themselves in order to possess the latest who-knows-what.

“Everybody knows the economy is terrible,” Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director of Bloomingdale’s, remarked last week as the sun broke through the winter clouds and gilded the city. “But whatever happens, and I believe this with all my heart,” she said, “there is always something special, that one unique thing, that one special object you want so much you’ll do without food to have.”

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Be Old Money or Just Look Like It

By Cintra Wilson
Published: June 12, 2008

AN arresting image in fashion, these last few weeks, was the wives from the Yearning for Zion polygamist ranch. It is a muscular look primed for cultural combat: identically starched high-collared, pastel box-pleat dresses with huge princess sleeves; shellacked, high, French-braided hair; and Oakley wraparound mercenary sunglasses. You could imagine them stalking out of the courthouse in a horizontal row, slow motion à la “Reservoir Dogs,” their brown oxfords hitting the ground to the drumbeat of “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida.”




Inside the Tory Burch Store in SoHo
There is no war of ideas at the boutiques of Tory Burch — “the most copied designer in America,” according to The Los Angeles Times. Mrs. Burch (who does not prefer “Ms.”) is a blonde of great beauty, who galloped from the Philadelphia Main Line to become a high-profile New York socialite. She introduced her clothing line with her venture capitalist (soon-to-be-ex) husband and has been enjoying a stratospheric ascent since 2005, when Oprah, a fan of her signature tunic, tapped her for the Couch of Destiny.

Now, Mrs. Burch seems to be on a mission to offset her hyperprivileged image as the personification of her thriving lifestyle-brand with a “common touch.” Speaking to The Los Angeles Times this month, shortly before winning the Council of Fashion Designers of America award for accessory design, she claimed: “Women relate to me on many different levels. I’m a working mom and I’m getting a divorce. I think not having a perfect life is something they can relate to, and I’m very honest about it.”

While Mrs. Burch may never credibly align herself with single mothers who actually need to work, it is undeniable that her fashions please a great many customers: 300,000 Reva ballet-flat fans can’t be wrong.

Mrs. Burch seems to have been so deeply imprinted in childhood by her own mother’s closet that she has devoted her life to building shrines to it. Her NoLIta boutique has huge Mandarin-orange lacquer doors, high mirrors, olive-green carpeting and her gold, Double T signature medallion everywhere — on bags, shoes, walls, doors, garment hooks, belts, jewelry and, of course, on tunics, inspired by outfits her mother wore while vacationing in Morocco.

Everything evokes a late-’60s, early-’70s country club: a type of relaxed hippie chic with all the hippies tweezed out. (In her school days, Mrs. Burch is said to have paired tie-dyed T-shirts with Hermès scarves.) Dickey sweaters and ruffly high-neck tops are ideal for the Partridge Family (or, for that matter, any all-clarinet band). Oversize pseudo-ethnic prints in AstroTurf green, mustard and white would be perfect for the beshagged Carol Brady to go from the sailboat to poolside, then straight to the Dinah Shore golf classic.

There is a generous attitude toward weight that is rare in upmarket brands. I liked a white silk shift tiled with big, square sequins, mainly because it was a size 14 ($725). It looked like a shower curtain Berry Gordy would have bought for the Shirelles. I liked the idea of the hard-drinking Texas sorority girl who might wear it: “Yeah, I’m fat,” she’d shout, wagging her eighth Cosmopolitan toward a group of cowering young men. “But I’m also loaded!”

A section devoted to nautical garments went about 20,000 leagues too far. A navy blue terrycloth tunic with white anchors all over it, and cotton rope laced through brass grommets ($275), it would have looked over-the-top on one of the society matrons in “Caddyshack.”

The kind and helpful staff was able to find almost everything in my size — another genuine rarity.

I tried a caftan squiggled with Moroccan embroidery ($695). It was flattening at the bust and a bit busy, but if your ideal dress distracts the viewer from the rest of you, it was great.

I always try a garment I would never choose for myself: this time, it was a long Missoni-esque low-cut poly-blend beach-disco dress, perfect for Rachel Zoe to wear to berate her waiter in the Maldives. It was very flattering, and I might have been tempted if I’d had a tan, and the zipper wasn’t stuck.

One garment, a jewel-collar maharajah blouse in turquoise silk ($595), was very pretty both on and off the hanger, but it was a little too “Pat Nixon goes to an upscale Chinese restaurant.”

In interviews, Mrs. Burch has become defensive when confronted with the word “socialite.” “I don’t know the definition of that word,” she once insisted, deriding it for being a “light word” and “commonplace.” To question the validity of the term suggests that Tory Burch suffers from a wont of self-acceptance that would make J. D. Salinger write “The Catcher in the Rye” all over again.

I FIND it difficult not to place visual references to the Vietnam era into the political context whence they sprang. Tory Burch’s style was the conservative sociopolitical counterpoint to the way hip peacenik women were dressing at the same time: Carly Simon, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell were long-haired, braless and empowered, while golf-club wives were still anchored in nautical prints and old-money paradigms of female repression.

Say what you will about polygamist wives, but at least they know they are dressing to please the patriarchy. Tory Burch clothing inhabits a privileged, prim, declawed, deodorized look that culturally symbolizes a state of voluntary submission to the males of her tribe.

But, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s who you are. Be comfortable and open in your squareness, and nobody will find fault with you in your Tory Burch tunic and Reva flats, whether they are made by Banana Republic, Gap or H & M — or even by Mrs. Burch herself.

TORY BURCH

257 Elizabeth Street (between Prince and Houston Streets); (212)334-3000.

PEPPY High neckline, late-’60s shift dresses in oversize prints always seemed to be choking the poet Anne Sexton, but if the Connecticut Junior League picnic look doesn’t happen to kill your soul, it’s perky summer fun!

PREPPY The clientele tends toward girls who never rebelled — and the moms who shop with them. All the matching terrycloth drawstring pants they’ll need to equip themselves for life in the eternal resort.

OVERSTEPPY If you can overlook the entitled persona of the brand herself, it is undeniable that Tory Burch fills a fashion gap large enough to push most socialites into; millions of lemmings will jump in after them.

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to J.D. Salinger. He is indeed alive.

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