> The first sign of trouble was the proliferation of aging deadheads and
>20-something-"I wasn't
>even alive in the 60s, but all that free love and dope seems cool,
>so I'll borrow my parents Lexus SUV to drive over to the mall, buy
>a $75 designer tied-dye shirt and $120 pair of Calvin Klein
>*weathered* cut-offs, and relive the summer of love while I'm
>on spring break"-hippie-wannabes.
>marie
And, on cue, from today's New York TImes (which always seems to know about
THESE things):
April 25, 1999
Feeling Groovy Doesn't Come Cheap
By ALEX WITCHEL
I like a a guy who says "nice to meet you" while he's kissing both your
cheeks. A guy who inventories his outfit -- "Karan pants and top, Gucci
belt, Prada shoes and overcoat" -- and answers the question "How much
do you cost?" with a hoot, declaring: "It's a fortune, darling. But after you
wear good clothing, it's so hard to go back."
Derek Khan, 41, knows from
good clothing. He is a top
music stylist who dresses
Lauryn Hill, Sean (Puffy)
Combs, Salt 'n' Pepa and
Monica. Now, I admit it had to
be explained to me that the
Monica in question was not she
of the Oval Office, but a
hip-hop artist Khan finds so
fabulous he says, "The minute I
saw her, I dropped on the floor
and kissed it." He was so
excited telling the story, I didn't
have the heart to ask what
hip-hop was. He already had his hands full with me.
We were setting off on a styling spree to achieve the latest fashion craze,
haute hippie. Yes, the very term is an oxymoron. Back in the days when I
was a baby hippie myself, all it took was a pair of bell-bottoms and a peasant
shirt bought at a "head shop" (rolling papers situated near the cash
register),
total cost about $30. But these days, the fashion world has determined that
ponchos and peasant blouses, beads and flowers are all back and better than
enough to feed a commune for a year.
Kelli Delaney, the senior fashion editor at Glamour magazine, says the hippie
trend "is a backlash to the almost masculine streamlined forms of spring" --
items like messenger bags and straight-leg suits with boxy jackets. "The '60s
hippie clothes are feminine, flowy, sexy," she says. "You feel groovy
wearing them, loose and unstructured. It's a relief to women to be sexy
again." Not to mention groovy. But looking groovy in the 1990s isn't the old
"anything goes" mentality of the '60s. Today's hippie look is more refined,
pardon the expression: better fabrics and expert tailoring, a nod to the past,
but modern. For this, I needed Khan.
Now, for the record, a stylist is not a personal
shopper limited to the
inventory of one store. A stylist has access to the
private showrooms and
collections of many designers and, as Khan says, "has
an eye and encourages
you." Khan's eye, by the way, costs $10,000 a day for
those without
recording contracts. When I shamefacedly admit that my
idea of a fashion
high is getting into bed with a catalog, he is
surprisingly nice about it. "My
clients are just like you," he assures me. "Most
artists are very understated.
The glamour is a persona."
Our first stab at glamour was Chanel. We would not be
going to Gucci, Khan
announced, because "they have too much press already."
Though Tom Ford,
Gucci's head designer, is a guiding force behind the
resurgence of the hippie
look, sewing feathers onto jeans and beads onto
blouses, Khan was adamant:
"The Daily News did a story on how to make the jeans
yourself. When it gets
to that point, honey, it's overdone."
At Chanel, Khan was greeted warmly by Anne Fahey, the
executive director
of fashion public relations. Neither she nor Khan
seemed to grasp the irony
of searching for hippie duds in the temple of the
pastel suit, which was
standard uniform for all those mothers bemoaning their
daughters'
bell-bottoms. ("Why do they have to drag on the
ground?" I remember, was
a popular refrain.)
Ms. Fahey led us into a suite of offices where Khan
flung open the closet
doors and started pulling clothes. "What do you think
of this?" he asked of a
knit skirt with thick horizontal stripes that looked
more librarian than hippie,
and not haute at all. I shook my head. He immediately
removed it. "I try to
see from your eyes," he said. "I don't throw my full
creative vision at you.
Then it's not you."
He assembled piles of beaded necklaces and bracelets,
belts, scarves and
shoes. None of them looked the way I remembered -- but
as Ms. Delaney
says: "Designers have to find their own creative way to
craft a trend, or
what's the point of being in business? You can just go
to a thrift shop." I sat
back and watched Khan, secure in the knowledge that,
like a doctor studying
a slide under the microscope, he was seeing things I
couldn't.
He gave me my first two pieces -- a gold skirt and a
multicolored polka-dot
top. "I don't want it to look like a costume," he said,
but as I put on the
clothes, I couldn't imagine it wouldn't scream
Halloween. He shook his head.
"I hate that skirt," he breathed, and after fussing
with the blouse, tying the
top of it every which way, he shook his head again.
"Try this skirt," he said,
handing me a pale pink slip of material. "We'll go for
a hipster look."
When he came back inside, I winced. "This gives new
meaning to hipster," I
said, showing him how tight it was. He quickly replaced
it with a fuller cut
skirt, white with a black and tan swirl ("reminiscent
of batik," he said), and it
fit perfectly. He paired it with a black camisole top
and flat silver sandals. He
then took a silver belt, studded with mirrors, and tied
it around my forehead.
"You're kidding, right?" I asked, and he considered a
minute before nodding.
"Too fashion victim," he agreed, but then he hooked it
around my hips. It
fell perfectly on the skirt's yoke, giving the faux
batik a touch of glitz. He
finished it off with a silver mesh bracelet on my upper
arm and a small
metallic bag, and I had to admit the entire look
approximated hippiness while
remaining thoroughly contemporary. Total cost? $3,355.
That's haute, all
right. Would I actually wear it? Probably. After
visiting a head shop.
Our next stop was the Chrome Hearts boutique in a town
house on the Upper
East Side. In the car, Khan warned me that this stop
would be for haute
hippie, "but with a biker edge." There was leather,
leather everywhere, lots
of fringe and five-inch platform shoes. It looked like
Cher's idea of a tough
neighborhood. "I would never wear this," I told Khan,
but he was so excited
just seeing the clothes, I let him persuade me to try a
few things on.
Or try to try them on. When the pair of harlequin suede
pants he was
enamored of proved impossible to button, he kneeled
down and with
enormous effort got them closed. Awful. A black leather
minidress with a
fringe bottom was also a bust. And I fell off a pair of
platform Birkenstocks,
twisting my ankle. Khan could see my spirits drop; he
assured me we could
leave and go elsewhere.
But then he saw the leather raincoat, as he called it,
with a belt, and insisted I
put it on. He thought awhile. "Do you have any jeans?"
he asked Lynn Sable,
the store's manager, and suddenly, there were jeans
with appliques and jeans
without. "I had these jeans!" I cried, seeing a pair
with silver buttons I used
to wear in college. Everyone nodded without meeting my
eye, and I suddenly
knew my Goodwill bag had been railroaded. The applique
jeans sell for
$1,000.
The jeans were too big, so an assistant ran out and got
some binder clips, and
they clipped the excess, turning them into
straight-legged tight-fitting pants. I
put on a cropped chenille top that showed some stomach
("You've got a good
midriff," Khan insisted) and he had me climb into a
pair of Dolce &
Gabbana four-inch spike heels. With the coat open, a
choker around my
neck, a leather bracelet on my wrist and a printed
bandana tied on my head, I
suddenly looked vintage Berkeley. Except for the fact
that I was frozen in
those shoes ("For glamour," Khan insisted), the outfit
was great.
I smiled.
"This is my joy!" Khan exclaimed, circling me. It would
have been Ms.
Sable's joy, too, if I were a paying customer. The
total cost was $6,880.
"What you saw today is how it works," Khan said,
excitedly. "Now that I see
your flavor, lots of subconscious things are clicking
in my head. No one likes
trying on clothes. But we want to grasp that inner
thing and expose it.
Finding what within you shines."
I climbed out of the clothes, thoroughly exhausted. I
left Khan, still raring to
go, to his own shopping. He needed to find something
for the VH-1 Divas
party -- in which he would shine, no doubt.
Happily relieved of my own shining duties -- no sit-ins
at Veruka for me -- I
went straight home, put an ice pack on my ankle and
sorted through the mail,
which included a stack of catalogs, not a platform
Birkenstock among them.
It was going to be my kind of night.
