Do You Get Where He’s Coming From?

By CINTRA WILSON
Published: February 21, 2008
WHEN I first visited Adam, the picture windows displayed a female mannequin that was trapped inside a bell-shaped bird cage, wearing a fur-lined silver vest. A male mannequin in the opposite window was paradoxically free: seated on a wooden bench in a comfortable Mr. Rogers zip cardigan, reading a book about architecture, surrounded by a nifty collection of ornamental bird cages.

In many stores, one feels starved of proper influence from the past. Sophomoric designs spring into the fashion world that are so right-this-second as to be divorced from any history or future; they resolve no tensions that fashion has been feeling for the last several hundred years, or even the last five. They feel haplessly marooned in the present.

The designer Adam Lippes doesn’t have this problem. His designs seem to be moving toward something, or back to something. But this, too, has its dangers: if the specific influences the designer is drawing from lack depth, or he isn’t influenced deeply enough, his overall message can be inscrutable.

The first stuff I glommed onto at Adam was shiny holiday finery, on sale. Gold lamé dollybird dresses with high boat necks, studded along the collarbones with classic rings of Greek goddess/regal Egyptian rhinestones ($169, down from $250).

They transported me to Oscar nights in the mid-to-late 1960s: back when the Oscars meant something. Real men with sideburns wore butterfly bow ties and were fighting drunk, and women back-combed their hair into ice sculptures and painted Cleopatra eyeliner halfway up each temple.

This rack brought to mind the movie “Darling,” a portrait of London right as its behavioral pendulum was swingin’ away from the repressions of the ruling-class establishment into a breezy decadence (that proved as clunky and as bloodless as the old mores it was subverting). New cultural adventures were swirling around those dresses; wars were beginning to end. Captain Kirk kissed Lieutenant Uhura in a space beyond race. Barbra Streisand strapped on a Nefertiti headdress, with no irony whatsoever. Colors were bleeding and minds were beginning to open. It was the tipping point of suggestion that girls still locked in their Goldwater girdles might want to burn their bras in a few years.

The mannequin at Adam obviously wanted to escape her cage... but did she know why?

This wasn’t vital information. There was a laudably uplifting and clever mood pervading the place. Mr. Lippes hits his inspirational nails rather exactly on their heads, but they’re art nails. Fellini beach party bonanzissima! Blouson dresses in billowing stripes made from the cotton of faded circus tents. A yellow chiffon halter dress transports J-Lo through time, to guest star on “The Love Boat.”

Designers generally make the shopper aware of their muses through their clothing; Mr. Lippes takes a bit of a shortcut by displaying his personal library. Art and architecture books by Alex Katz, Jackson Pollock, Richard Prince, Nan Goldin, Tord Boontje and Jean Nouvel are scattered on coffee tables and lean in thick wooden bookshelves alongside hand-blown Danish water glasses ($26) and pastel T-shirts folded in stacks of gradient color.

A tiny woman with a shag haircut and little round librarian glasses emerged from a dressing room wearing a button-up turquoise smock. Smurf veterinary clinic, was what first came to my mind.

“That is so almost there,” I said, hurling my unsolicited opinion at her.

“I don’t really like it.” She tugged at the hem.

“I don’t like it, either, but I see where it wants to go. It’s almost incredibly cute. I like the idea of it on you exponentially more than I like it on you.”

It had bulbous pockets on the hips, which made it an unforgivably eggy, shapeless shmatte such as one might wear to serve pies at the Hickory Pit. But there was something precious about the blouse. It was weirdly innocent and benignly nurse-like. If she had been teaching knee-high children to finger-paint, it would have been glorious. As a garment, though, it was way too spayed. June Cleaver jokes aren’t funny anymore, since our collective sexual maturity started going retrograde.

My sales assistant was a gentle, blushing boy with shaggy hair and a necktie zipped under one of Adam’s baby-blue cardigans, and a pair of thick, square plastic glasses I identified as Early Air Force — a frame once referred to as “birth control,” for its efficacy in repelling girls (which just goes to show, one man’s poison is another boy’s date).

The more expansive the imagination of the designer, the more the clothes invite you to romp around onstage in the lifestyle of the designer’s imaginary playhouse. I nearly succumbed to a black knit dress with a peekaboo neckline, pleated sleeves and silk braiding around the neck and belt ($295). But it was wholly transparent; the fantasy wasn’t my style. It required a Lindsay Lohan-esque urge to stand around at a Hollywood bar showing your panties in a way that looks unintentional.

The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1965 review of “Darling”: “The heroine, as played by Julie Christie, is a vigorous, vivacious sort, full of feline impulses and occasional disarming charms, but uncommunicative of the urges that make her tick.”

Adam’s caged woman must have been imprisoned for something, and we can only hope that she eventually figured out why. Perhaps Mr. Lippes is telling us that in an unpredictable world, it’s best to dress hopefully: white canvas, Rita Hayworthy sailor tap-pants ($185) could be just the ticket for weathering the tail of a long winter. Just add silver tap shoes and fan-kick, sister: this, too, shall pass.

Adam

678 Hudson Street (near West 14th Street); (212) 229-2838.

ADAM-IZED The golden-boy designer Adam Lippes brings his label to a black-tiled showplace in the meatpacking district. Spiffy, trendy confections wrapped in soft-baked minimalism. Girl-friendly.

ADAM-ANT All the stuff you need for play dates with the beautiful art-youths of Bushwick (roll over, Williamsburg).

MADAM, I’M EXPENSIVE Most of the prices are reasonable, but I really wanted the silver fox blanket (sorry, PETA!) to put in a hammock and never get out: $2,300, and that’s just cruel.

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The Bride Wore Very Little

By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: February 21, 2008
THE gown was almost wanton — fluid but curvy with a neckline that plummeted dangerously. “It makes me feel sexy and beautiful,” said Natasha DaSilva, who slipped it on for a fitting last week.

Except that Ms. DaSilva, who will be married on Long Island in September, plans to wear it at the altar.

“Why not?” she asked. “I want to look back in 20 years and feel like I looked hot on my wedding day.”

Ms. DaSilva, 26, thinks of herself as adventurous, but not so brash that she is about to cross a line. Dressing for a wedding as if it were an after-party is accepted among her family and friends. “For my generation, looking like a virgin when you marry is completely unappealing, boring even,” she said. “Who cares about that part anymore?”

Ms. DaSilva is typical of a growing number of brides flouting convention by flaunting their curves. More vamp than virgin, many are selecting gowns that bare a generous expanse of cleavage, midsection, lower back or thigh, temptress styles that may be better suited to a gala or boudoir than to a church or ballroom.

“Brides today absolutely want to look sexy and glamorous,” said Mara Urshel, an owner and the president of Kleinfeld, the venerable Manhattan bridal salon. In recent months, the store has seen a spike in demand for plunging necklines and negligee looks, one that has only intensified since the spring bridal collections began arriving in stores. For brides shopping now for gowns to wear at summer or early fall weddings, “there is a lot of freedom of choice, and these girls exercise every bit of it,” Ms. Urshel said.

Determined to look torrid on their wedding day, they are picking dresses modeled, say, on the one worn by Christina Aguilera, who was married in 2005 in a gown with a plummeting neckline and ruffled fishtail hem. Or maybe the hope is to emulate Sarah Jessica Parker, who, in the forthcoming film version of “Sex and the City,” spills out of the front of her wedding dress.

“Young women increasingly look to the red carpet for style ideas,” said Millie Martini Bratten, the editor in chief of Brides magazine. “They are very aware of how they look,” she added. “They diet, they work out. And when they marry, they want to be the celebrity of their own event.”

To accommodate them, the once rigidly corseted bridal industry has loosened its stays. At the spring bridal shows in New York last October, tastemakers like Vera Wang, Oscar de la Renta, Reem Acra, Angel Sanchez and Carolina Herrera unveiled a preponderance of strapless styles, trumpet shapes and even a few above-the-knee looks. More-daring designers offered filmy peignoir dresses, two-piece looks and skirts slit all the way to the hip.

Some of these va-voom confections seem tailor-made for the bride who envisions the march down the aisle as a long-dreamed-of photo op, and the reception as an after-party on the scale of Oscars night.

“Women now are looking at their weddings more like a movie premiere,” said Jose Dias, a designer for Sarah Danielle, a New York bridal house.

These steamy fantasies extend to their choice of location. “It used to be that unless you married at home, you were married in a church,” Ms. Bratten said. But today fewer weddings take place in a house of worship, and fewer still in the bride’s hometown.

According to a 2006 survey by Condé Nast Bridal Media, 16 percent of couples choose a destination wedding — a fourfold increase from a decade ago. The same survey found that only 46 percent of brides are married in a church or synagogue, down from 55 percent the year before. With weddings transported to other locales comes a loosening of conventions.

Whether they marry in a walled garden, on a tennis court, on a yacht or at the beach, “brides are more focused on the after-party, and on personalizing it,” Ms. Bratten said.

Beginning with the gown. Today the prevailing fantasy is no longer, “ ‘I want to be a princess in my ball gown,’ ” Mr. Dias said. “A lot of women have done that already for their prom.”

Mr. Dias, who is based in Los Angeles, accommodates clients’ desires for dresses that echo runway trends with halter-tops and off-the-shoulder gowns that are more emphatically provocative than the strapless looks that have become commonplace. His dresses are cut to appeal to the bride who is “confident in her sexuality,” he said.
Similar considerations prompted the designer Monique Lhuillier, a favorite in Hollywood, to fashion a dress with an Empire bodice, wide lace straps and a wispy chiffon skirt — features more often found in a nightgown. A hit of Ms. Lhuillier’s spring bridal collection, the dress is available at Kleinfeld.

Yielding to clients’ demands, Pnina Tornai, an Israeli-born designer, specializes in patently vixenish gowns. Only a couple of years ago Ms. Tornai’s dresses — often cut from semi-sheer panels of lace — met with a chilly reception in New York. “When I first came to show my collection at Kleinfeld, I was thrown out the door,” she said. Undaunted, she modified her dresses and several months later returned. Today her gowns are among the store’s best sellers.

For brides who want to maintain the traditional modesty during the wedding ceremony but cut loose at the reception, there is the increasingly popular option of topping the dress with a shawl, stole or bolero.

When Jana Pasquel, a New York society figure and jewelry designer, said her vows in a convent in Mexico City last November, she wore bouffant dress by Vera Wang; effusively romantic, it was traditional except for the neckline, which revealed more than Ms. Pasquel cared to show.

Her father, who is Mexican, “is a traditional Catholic,” said Ms. Pasquel, 31. “He would not have liked me to walk down the aisle like that, so I had the designer make a cover-up, a kind of a bolero, very full and infanta-looking. It came all the way up to my neck.”

At a second marriage ceremony later that week on a beach in Acapulco, Ms. Pasquel thought only of pleasing herself. Inspired by a trip to India, she wore a tiny midriff-baring bodice and an abundant skirt made of gold leaf. More sensuous than brazen, it made an impression, she recalled. “People talked about it — a lot.”

Catherine Cuddy, an insurance analyst in New Jersey, was similarly focused on turning heads when she married in Bryant Park in New York last October. She dispensed with the customary long, fitted sleeves and train in favor of a halter style that dipped to the small of her back.

Even a veil was too much for her. “I didn’t want to cover up my dress,” said Ms. Cuddy, 33, a self-described Rita Hayworth type. Or the torrents of curls that rushed past her shoulders. Or, for that matter, her gym-toned back.

To get in shape for her gown, a white lace sheath that appeared to have been turned on a lathe, she stepped up visits with her trainer from one to three sessions a week. Ms. Cuddy had no thought of defying tradition or making a statement of any kind. She simply wanted to make the most of her curves, she said.

When she marries in Long Island City next fall, Ms. DaSilva, too, will dress as she sees fit — and with her mother’s blessing. “My mom loves my gown,” she said delightedly. “She thinks it’s very figure-flattering.”

Would her male relatives object?

“Oh, no, no, no,” Ms. DaSilva said. “Besides, in my family, we’re mostly women. It’s pretty much — we’re in control.”

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