Local NewsOctober 7, 2007

Patricia McLaughlin
Cheap clothes look best when they're uncomplicated
Cheap clothes look best when they're uncomplicated
Cheap clothes look best when they're uncomplicated
Cheap clothes look best when they're uncomplicated

Epiphanies abound. Great truths are proclaimed in the marketplace. Wisdom arises even from the clamor and chaos of the selling floor of your local big-box sportswear discounter.

For instance, here I am, standing next to a six-armed standing rack packed with a couple hundred pairs of deceptively identical-looking blue jeans at Steve & Barry's, a store the size of several conjoined high school gyms at the Franklin Mills Mall in Philadelphia. I'm focused like a laser, checking the tags on each pair, searching for the elusive magic combo: Bitten Rinse-Wash High-Rise Stretch Jeans in my size. (Full disclosure: It's 18, but only temporarily.)

Suddenly, from on high, I hear a Voice:

"A sweater," it tells me, "shouldn't cost more than your groceries."

So true!

And a little surprising given the source: The Voice From On High introduces itself as Sarah Jessica Parker, an actor best known for playing a "Sex and the City" character who spent $40,000 - the equivalent of a down payment on a (very small) Manhattan condo - on expensive shoes.

Is it redundant to say "expensive shoes"? After all, Carrie Bradshaw could've spent $40,000 on cheap shoes if she'd bought enough of them - but then she wouldn't've been the madcap Jimmy-Choo-and-Manolo-obsessed sex columnist so many came to know and love.

Parker is the nominal designer of a new sportswear line called Bitten - as in "bitten by the fashion bug" - for Steve & Barry's, a relatively young apparel chain on the Old Navy/Target model that, according to one market researcher, "takes extreme value to a new level." (Meaning: Its pricing makes Old Navy look pricey.)

This is the sort of thing that drives my design students nuts. Here they spend years learning to make gussets and godets and cartridge pleats and tell the difference between Vionnet and the V&A, and then they have to scramble for a job fetching coffee and picking up pins for some designer. And then somebody who probably can't thread a serger but happens to be famous comes along and introduces a whole line under her own label with all sorts of attendant hoo-hah and lionization.

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But in this case I have to argue that the fact that the designer probably can't make - or maybe even identify - cartridge pleats may be an advantage. In Parker, Steve Shore and Barry Prevor, who started selling T-shirts made in Prevor's basement at a local flea market when they were in high school, seem to have found a kindred spirit. Her lively, slightly off-kilter way of combining tweaked basics works perfectly with the uncomplicated casual sportswear they know how to make. So does her conviction - unsurprising in someone who grew up wearing hand-me-downs as one of eight kids - that every woman has an "inalienable right to have a pulled-together, stylish wardrobe with money left over to live."

Money left over to live - what a concept! It'd never occur to somebody who was seriously into godets and gussets. Every single thing in the Bitten line costs less than $20.

Steve & Barry's has been described as targeting "the good-enough customer" - somebody who wants her jeans to look good and hold together, but doesn't much care about fancy stitching, ringspun denim or dressmaker details. Parker's collection, said to be based on favorite things from her own wardrobe, infuses "good enough" construction and materials with good ideas and a spirit of adventure, and she gets the shapes right.

Consider the High-Rise Stretch Jeans I was looking for. They're dark denim with perfectly straight, narrow legs. They're long enough even though they come in only one length (probably if they're too long you're meant to turn up the cuffs). And they presumably would've fit perfectly in 18, given that the 16s were almost perfect (buttoned but wouldn't zip) and the 20s were too loose overall. Also, they cost $14.98, and they hadn't even been marked down yet.

Another point: The unpretentious cotton shirts and sweaters look fine even wrinkled and rumpled, straight out of the shipping container. They don't depend on finesse.

And there they have an advantage over many of the styles in the Simply Vera - Vera Wang line I checked out at Kohl's the same day. Wang is a great dressmaker, with inventive ideas you don't often run into in the mass market. There were two tops I loved: Both combined black and navy in a way you're unlikely to see at the Gap, and both had great details. But a dress with a shirred satin front panel looked as if somebody had slept in it, and some of the stitching seemed a little loose. Plus, it cost $120 - some dollars which, after Steve & Barry's, seemed ruinously expensive.

A good steaming might've made all the difference. Even so, by the time I checked out the dress online, it - along with lots of other items from the Simply Vera Wang line - was sold out. Kohl's shoppers must have the imagination to see beyond wrinkles.

Still, my advice to designers who want to sell to the mass market is: If you expect to sell clothes in stores that don't iron them before they put them out on the rack, design things that either don't wrinkle, or that look good wrinkled.

McLaughlin is a syndicated fashion columnist. She may be contacted c/o Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.

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