7

Dressing the Dolls:
The Fashion Backlash

JUST TEN DAYS after the October 19, 1987, stock market collapse, French fashion designer Christian Lacroix unveiled his “Luxe” collection at a society gala on Wall Street. The setting, aptly for a postcrash event, was the ground floor of the towering World Financial Center. As brokers upstairs sorted through the shambles, hollow-cheeked models with crosses around their necks drifted down the courtyard’s runway, their clothes-hanger bodies swaying under the weight of twenty pounds of crinoline and taffeta. The pushed-up breasts of “Maria, Mounia, Veronica, and Katoucha” blossomed with roses the size of cabbage heads; beneath their tightly laced waists, pumpkin-shaped skirts ballooned. Three layers of bustles brought up the rear. These were clothes, Lacroix said, for women who like to “dress up like little girls.” The Lacroix price tags, however, were not so pint-sized; they ranged as high as $45,000—among the costliest raiments ever to come out of Paris.

When the lights finally came up, the fashion writers leaped from their seats to litter the runway with pink carnations. Applause was deafening for the “Messiah” of couture, as the fashion press had anointed him a year earlier, when he displayed his first “Baby Doll” line in Paris. As fireworks burst outside in a Revlon-funded salute to the sartorial savior, the well-heeled guests adjourned to a $500-a-plate meal in the Winter Garden atrium. There, surrounded by three thousand votive candles, couture-industry boosters served up reverential testimonials in strategic earshot of the fashion press: Lacroix’s bubble skirts exuded “independent strength and sensitivity;” it was like being “in a room full of Picassos,” a designer told the New York Times.

The Luxe gowns went on sale at Bergdorf Goodman, and, with Lacroix on hand to sign autographs, seventy-nine society matrons hurried to place their orders for $330,000 worth in two days. Maybe the Messiah would convert women after all to the look of High Femininity—or “frou-frou,” as less worshipful observers dubbed the fashion world’s sudden detour into frills and petticoats in the spring of 1987. At least designers and retailers hoped he had converted them. After Lacroix’s July 1986 Paris “fantasy fashion” debut had won rave reviews from Women’s Wear Daily, twenty-one of the twenty-four couture houses had rushed out their own versions of High Femininity; apparel makers had begun promoting “the idea of women as dressed-up dolls;” retailers had stocked up on poufs, miniskirts, party-girl gowns and body-squeezing garments that reduced the waist by three inches. And the fashion press had smoothed the way, promoting “the gamine look” and declaring 1987 “the Year of the Dress.” But all the preparation was for naught. That spring, women just quit buying.

Lacroix’s messianic appellation was more fitting than intended; by the end of the ’80s, it would indeed have taken divine intervention to resurrect the women’s apparel market. Black Monday, which dampened enthusiasm for conspicuous displays of wealth, was only the latest blow to an industry staggering from foreign competition, massive merger debts, record costs for raw materials, a declining dollar overseas—and then that final indignity, the rebuff of American women.

That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing—from dresses to underwear. The shaky economy played a role, but mostly women just didn’t seem to enjoy clothes shopping as much anymore. In one poll, more than 80 percent said they hated it, double from a decade earlier.

Throughout the decade, apparel makers and retailers tried to make up for a shrinking shopper base with rapidly inflating clothes prices. But the more stores marked up the tags, the less likely women were to take them to the register. Then, in the High Femininity year of 1987, dress prices jumped as much as 30 percent. Women took one look at the tickets, another at the thigh-high dresses—and fled the stores. That year, even with higher prices compensating for lower volume, total sales dollars of women’s apparel fell for the first time in a decade. In the so-called Year of the Dress, dress sales alone dropped 4 percent. Even during the height of the Christmas season, fashion sales fell; that hadn’t even happened under the 1982 recession. And this was a one-gender phenomenon. In fact, that same year, men’s apparel sales rose 2.1 percent.

The women’s “fashion revolt” and “sticker shock rebellion” of 1987, as the media came to call it, nearly decimated the fashion industry. And the more the dress merchants tried to force frills on their reluctant customers, the more their profit margins plunged. In the spring of 1988, after another season of flounces, bubble skirts, and minis, and another 40 percent price hike, apparel retailers’ stocks plunged and quarterly earnings fell by 50 and 75 percent. Department stores—where apparel accounts for 75 percent of sales—lost tens of millions of dollars in profits. By the second quarter of 1988, the apparel industry was drawing more than $4 billion less in annual women’s clothes sales than in the period just before the High Femininity look was introduced.

Perhaps the designers should have expected it. They were pushing “little-girl” dresses and “slender silhouettes” at a time when the average American woman was thirty-two years old, weighed 143 pounds and wore a size 10 or 12 dress. Fewer than one-fourth of American women were taller than five foot four or wore a size smaller than 14—but 95 percent of the fashions were designed to fit these specifications. Of all the frilly and “retro” fashions introduced in 1987, only one really caught on: the peplum, an extra layer of fabric that hung from the waist and concealed broadening hips.

How could the industry make such a marketing blunder? As Goldman Sachs’s retail analyst Joseph Ellis pointed out a year later in his analysis, “The Women’s Apparel Retailing Debacle: Why?,” demographics “have been warning of a strong population shift to older age categories for years now.” Yet designers, manufacturers, and retailers went “in exactly the wrong direction.” Ellis charitably concluded that the industry must have lacked the appropriate consumer research studies.

But the fashion world hardly needed a marketing expert to tell them baby boomers were aging. The explosion of frills in 1987 wasn’t simply a misunderstanding; it was an eruption of long-simmering frustration and resentment at the increasingly independent habits of the modern female shopper. “What’s the matter with American women?” a French fashion designer snapped at John Molloy, the author of Dress for Success, while he was touring design houses in the mid-’80s. “They don’t do as they’re told anymore. We tell them how to dress but they just don’t listen.” Or, as Lacroix would complain later, “[W]ith the women’s-lib movement at the turn of the ’sixties [and in the] ’seventies, women became less fashion conscious,” and so many affluent female customers deserted couture that “Arabian princesses and classical dowagers remained the only customers.” High Femininity was an attempt to command liberated women’s attention with a counter-attack. As fashion designer Arnold Scaasi, one of High Femininity’s leading architects, explains it, the new fashion edict “is a reaction to the feminist movement, which was kind of a war.”

The mission of Lacroix and his fellow designers was to win this war, to make women “listen” and rein them in, sometimes quite literally. At a Lacroix fashion show, the designer trotted out his “cowgirl” model, bound and harnessed in a bridle rope. It was not enough that women buy more clothes; they had to buy the clothes that the couturiers told them to buy. Designers wanted to be in charge of “dressing women,” as the Council of Fashion Designers of America phrased it, in its 1987 tribute to Lacroix.

What happened in 1987 had happened before, almost identically, in the 1947 fashion war. Women who had discovered pants, low-heeled shoes, and loose sweaters during World War II were reluctant to give them up in peacetime. The fashion industry fell into a “frightening slump,” as Time described it at the time, with orders shrinking by as much as 60 percent. And women only rebelled when French designer Christian Dior unveiled the “New Look”—actually an old late-Victorian look—featuring crinolined rumps, corseted waists, and long ballooning skirts. More than three hundred thousand women joined “Little Below the Knee Clubs” to protest the New Look, and, when Neiman Marcus gave its annual fashion award to Dior, women stood outside waving placards—DOWN WITH THE NEW LOOK—and booing the man who believed that waists wider than seventeen inches were “repulsive” on a lady. “Let the new look of today become the forgotten look of tomorrow,” labor lawyer Anna Rosenberg proclaimed, and her sentiments were widely shared. In a poll that summer, a majority of women denounced the Dior style.

The women’s declarations, however, only strengthened the designer’s resolve to silence them. “The women who are loudest,” Dior retorted, “. . . will soon be wearing the longest dresses. . . . You can never stop the fashions.” By the end of the ’40s, after a two-year promotional campaign by retailers and the fashion press, Dior won out. Women were wearing the New Look, albeit a toned-down version. And they were obeying Dior’s order that they wear corsets capable of shaving two inches from their waist; in fact, bustiers that reduced the waist by three inches were soon generating sales of $6 million a year.

In every backlash, the fashion industry has produced punitively restrictive clothing and the fashion press has demanded that women wear them. “If you want a girl to grow up gentle and womanly in her ways and her feelings, lace her tight,” advised one of the many male testimonials to the corset in the late Victorian press. In the last half of the 19th century, apparel makers crafted increasingly rib-crushing gowns with massive rear bustles. And ridicule from the press effectively crushed a women’s dress-reform campaign for more comfortable, sports-oriented clothing. The influential Godey’s Lady’s Book sneered at such “roomy and clownish apparel” and labeled its proponents dress “deformers.”

When the fashion industry began issuing marching orders again in the ’80s, its publicists advanced a promotional line that downplayed the domineering intent and pretended to serve women’s needs. Like the other contributors to backlash culture, fashion merchants latched on to the idea that contemporary women must be suffering from an excess of equality that had depleted their femininity. In fashion terms, the backlash argument became: Women’s liberation has denied women the “right” to feminine dressing; the professional work outfits of the ’70s shackled the female spirit. “A lot of women took the tailored look too far and it became unattractive,” designer Bob Mackie says. “Probably, psychologically, it hurt their femininity. You see a lot of it in New York, trotting down Wall Street.” Women have realized that they are “beginning to lose some of their feminine attributes,” fashion designer Arnold Scaasi says. “Women are fighting now for their own individuality”—by “going home and dressing up.”

In its desperation, the industry began to contradict its own time-honored conventions. Fashion’s promoters have long rhapsodized that femininity is “eternal,” rooted in women’s very nature; yet at the same time, they were telling women that simply wearing the wrong set of clothes could obliterate this timeless female essence. This became the party line, voiced by merchants peddling every garment from poufs to panties. “We were wearing pinstripes, we didn’t know what our identity was anymore!” cried Karen Bromley, spokeswoman for the Intimate Apparel Council. “We were having this identity crisis and we were dressing like men.”

But the only “identity crisis” that women faced when they looked inside their closets was the one the ’80s fashion industry had fabricated. The apparel makers had good reason to try to induce this anxiety: personal insecurity is the great motivator to shop. Wells Rich Greene, which conducted one of the largest studies of women’s fashion-shopping habits in the early ’80s, found that the more confident and independent women became, the less they liked to shop; and the more they enjoyed their work, the less they cared about their clothes. The agency could find only three groups of women who were loyal followers of fashion: the very young, the very social, and the very anxious.

While the fashion industry’s publicists helped provoked and aggravate anxiety in aging baby-boomer women by their relentless promotion of “youthful” fashions, they certainly weren’t going to claim credit for it. Instead, they blamed the usual culprit—feminism. The women’s movement, they told fashion writers over and over, had generated women’s sartorial “identity crisis”—by inventing a “dress-for-success” ideology and foisting it on women. This was an accusation that meshed well with the decade’s conventional wisdom on women and the fashion press gladly bought it. But it was just another backlash myth. The leaders of the women’s movement had about as much to do with pushing pinstripes as they did with burning bras.

FROM HOUSEHOLD RAGS TO GRAY-FLANNEL STITCHES

“You must look as if you’re working, not playing,” Henri Bendel’s president instructed women readers in a 1978 Harper’s Bazaar article titled “Self-Confident Dressing,” one of many features at the time advising women to wear suits that projected “confidence” and “authority.” “Dress for the job you want to have,” Mademoiselle told readers in its September 1977 issue. “There’s a clothing hierarchy paralleling the job hierarchy.” Its September 1979 cover story offered a “Dress for Success Guide,” promoting gray flannel suits and fitted tweed jackets for “the woman who is doing something with her life.” The well-tailored suit, the late-’70s fashion press had uniformly decreed, was the ideal expression of women’s rising economic and political aspirations.

The fashion press inherited these ideas not from the women’s movement but from the writings of a male fashion consultant. John T. Molloy’s The Woman’s Dress for Success Book became an instant hit in 1977, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for more than five months. The book offered simple tips on professional dressing for aspiring businesswomen, just as his first work, Dress for Success, dispensed clothing advice to men. That earlier book, published in 1975, was hugely popular, too. But when the fashion media turned against “dress for success” a decade later, they directed their verbal assault solely on the women’s edition.

A former prep school English teacher, Molloy turned to the study of women’s business dressing in the mid-’70s for the money. Corporations like AT&T and U.S. Steel, under federal pressure to hire women, were funding research and seminars that made them look like good equal opportunity employers. Unlike the High Femininity merchants, who determined fashion trends based on “feelings,” Molloy actually surveyed hundreds of people in the work force. He even dispatched research assistants to spy on the dressing habits of corporate men and women and, in a four-year study, enlisted several hundred businesswomen to track changes in their dress and their career.

Based on his survey results, Molloy calculated that women who wore business suits were one and a half times more likely to feel they were being treated as executives—and a third less likely to have their authority challenged by men. Clothing that called attention to sexuality, on the other hand—women’s or men’s—lowered one’s status at the office. “Dressing to succeed in business and dressing to be sexually attractive are almost mutually exclusive.”

Molloy’s motives were primarily commercial, but his book had a political subtext, as a primer for people disadvantaged by class and sex. A child of the lower middle class himself, Molloy addressed similarly situated readers, the “American bootstrap types,” as he called them, “whose parents never went to college” and who were struggling to “overcome socioeconomic barriers when they choose their clothes.” The author was also an advocate for women’s rising expectations—and urged them to rely on their brains rather than their bodies to improve their station. “Many women,” he wrote, “still cling to the conscious or unconscious belief that the only feminine way of competing is to compete as a sex object and that following fashion trends is one of the best ways to win. It’s not.”

When Molloy’s book for women became a best-seller in the ’70s, publishers immediately rushed three knockoffs into print. Retailers began invoking Molloy’s name and even claiming, most times falsely, that the clothing guru had personally selected their line of women’s business wear. Newsweek declared dress-for-success a trend. And for the next three years, women’s magazines recycled scores of fashion stories that endorsed not only the suits but the ambitions they represented—with headlines like YOUR GET-AHEAD WARDROBE, POWER! and WHAT TO WEAR WHEN YOU’RE DOING THE TALKING. At first fashion makers welcomed dress-for-success, too. They issued new ads offering paeans to working women’s aspirations—with, of course, the caveat that women could realize these objectives only in a suit. Apparel manufacturers had visions of exploiting a new and untapped market. “The success of suits has made the fashion industry ecstatic,” Newsweek observed in 1979. They had good reason to feel that way: women’s suit sales had more than doubled that year.

But in their enthusiasm, fashion merchants overlooked the bottom line of Molloy’s book: dress-for-success could save women money and liberate them from fashion-victim status. Business suits weren’t subject to wild swings in fashion and women could get away (as men always have) with wearing the same suit for several days and just varying the blouse and accessories—more economical than buying a dress for every day of the week. Once women made the initial investment in a set of suits, they could even take a breather from shopping.

Between 1980 and 1987, annual sales of suits rose by almost 6 million units, while dresses declined by 29 million units. The $600 million gain in suit sales in these years was nice—but it couldn’t make up for the billions of dollars the fashion industry could have been getting in dress sales. Matters worsened when manufacturers raised their suit prices to make up for the shortfall—and women just started buying cheaper suits from foreign manufacturers. Between 1981 and 1986, imports of women’s suits nearly tripled.

“When this uniform is accepted by large numbers of businesswomen,” Molloy’s book predicted, “. . . it will be attacked ferociously.” The fashion industry, the clothing consultant warned, may even yank the suits off the racks: “They will see it as a threat to their domination over women. And they will be right.”

REQUIEM FOR THE LITTLE BOW TIE

In 1986, U.S. apparel manufacturers cut their annual production of women’s suits by 40 percent; the following year, production dropped by another 40 percent. Several large suit manufacturers shut down their women’s lines altogether. The sudden cutback wasn’t inspired by a lack of demand: in 1986, women’s purchases of suits and blazers jumped 5.3 percent. And this reduction wasn’t gender-blind. In the same two years, output of men’s suits stayed the same.

Soon, department stores phased out the executive-dressing wings that they had opened for professional women in the late 1970s. Marshall’s shut down its Careers department; Carson Pirie Scott closed its Corporate Level division for women; Neiman Marcus removed all coordinated women’s business suits from many of its stores. Paul Harris Stores switched from women’s career clothes to miniskirts (and promptly lost $5.6 million). And Alcott & Andrews, the store that billed itself as a female Brooks Brothers when it opened in 1984, began stocking ruffled dresses. When Molloy toured its New York store in 1987, he couldn’t find a single suit. (Two years later, Alcott & Andrews went bankrupt.)

Fashion writers buried the dress-for-success concept as eagerly as they had once praised it. “Bye-bye to the Little Bow Tie,” Mademoiselle eulogized in a 1987 article entitled “The Death of Dress for Success.” It was one of many such media obituaries, among them “The Death of the Dumb Blue Suit” and “A Uniform for Submission Is Finally Put to Rest.” As the latter headline (from the Chicago Tribune) suggests, these articles were now proposing that business suits, not unequal business status, posed the greatest threat to women’s opportunities. As a fashion consultant explained it in a Los Angeles Times feature on the same subject, “[The suit] shows you aren’t successful because you have no freedom of dress, and that means you don’t have power.” According to ’80s fashion theory, bondage lurked in the little bow tie—though not in the corset ties that were soon to follow.

All the anti-dress-for-success crusade needed to be complete was a villain. John Molloy was the obvious choice. The fashion press soon served him with a three-count indictment; he was charged with promoting “that dreadful little bow tie,” pushing “the boring navy blue suit,” and making women look like “imitation men.” When his book first came out, Molloy was so popular that newspapers fought to bid on his syndicated column, “Making It.” But with Molloy’s name on the fashion blacklist, newspapers canceled their orders. A major daily paper, which had initially approached Molloy about publishing the column, pulled out with this explanation: “The fashion people won’t allow it.”

The charges against Molloy were largely trumped up. In fact, Molloy’s book never mentioned the bow tie; it wasn’t even on the market when the book was published. His book did not champion navy suits; it recommended gray, which he believed conveyed more authority. And a whole section of the book was specifically devoted to advising women how not to dress like an “imitation man.” Dress for Success didn’t even endorse suits exclusively, as many magazine stories maintained; it suggested women diversify their professional wardrobe with blazers, tailored skirts, and dresses. The fashion press was attacking its own rigid version of dress-for-success, not Molloy’s. As Molloy himself points out, a shrewder garment industry might have capitalized on his formula. “My book recommended a wide variety of styles,” he says. “My prescription was not that narrow. It was the fashion industry that narrowed women’s choices. They became their own worst enemy.”

LACROIX: THE CLOWN WHO WOULD BE KING

With the suits cleared from the racks and Molloy deposed, the fashion industry moved to install Lacroix as “The King of Couture,” an exalted title in keeping with ’80s fashion obsessions about class. While Molloy spoke to the “American bootstrap types,” Lacroix addressed only the elite. He concerned himself with a class of people who didn’t have to dress for success. His female clientele, the ornamental ladies of American high society, had already acquired their upper-class status—through marriage or inheritance, not a weekly paycheck.

Lacroix’s preoccupation with the top rungs of the income ladder fit perfectly the upscaling sales policies of the decade’s retailers. In the fashion equivalent of television’s “quality demographics,” scores of retailers turned their backs on middle-class women and courted only the “better-business” customers, as they euphemistically labeled the rich. Instead of offering a range of clothing choices and competitive pricing, they began to serve only the tastes and incomes of the most affluent. Instead of serving the needs of the many working women, they sponsored black-tie balls and provided afternoon tea service and high-priced facials to the idle few. “We made a conscious decision as a store a few years back to deal primarily with better-quality, wealthy fashions,” explains Harold Nelson, general manager of Neiman Marcus’s Washington, D.C., store, where 90 percent of the fashions were in couture or high-priced designer categories by 1988. “Gradually, we’ve been removing the moderately priced merchandise.”

Lacroix’s fashion gaze was ideally suited to the era in an even more fundamental way. For inspiration, he looked only backward—“I love the past much more than the future”—and primarily to the wardrobes of the late Victorian and postwar eras. In 1982, while chief designer at the House of Patou, he had even tried, unsuccessfully, to reintroduce the bustle. (As Lacroix explains this effort later, “I must say, [the] bustle emphasizes the silhouette a way I like very much.”) For the next three years, his five subsequent retro-tinged fashion shows fell flat, too; as he would say later of this period, he “suffered from being considered the clown of couture.” Nonetheless, he clung to these more “feminine” styles that had preoccupied him since childhood when, he recalled later, he had pored admiringly over late Victorian fashion magazines of corseted women and dreamed of being the world’s next Dior, an aspiration he had announced at the family dinner table one day. When he finally made it as an adult, he would dramatize this fantasy. He timed the grand opening of the House of Lacroix to coincide with the House of Dior’s fortieth anniversary.

While the fashion press, of course, declares its “trends” long before they reach the consumer, in Lacroix’s case, the leading industry trade paper, Women’s Wear Daily, would take fashion forecasting to a new extreme. It declared Lacroix’s first “baby doll” line a hit two days before the designer even displayed it at the Paris show in July 1986. As it turned out, the female audience that day was less than impressed by the onslaught of “fantasy fashion” on the runway by Lacroix and fellow designers. As Women’s Wear Daily remarked, with more irritation than insight, reaction from the society women in attendance “seemed cool;” and even when one of the couturiers issued a “call to a less self-important way of dressing,” the front-row ladies “failed to heed” him. But the lackluster reception from the ladies didn’t discourage the magazine, which hailed Lacroix and High Femininity in another front-page rave the next day. FASHION GOES MAD, the magazine’s banner headline announced with self-induced brain fever. Lacroix has “restored woman’s right to outrageousness, fun and high spirits.”

But was Lacroix offering women “fun”—or just making fun of them? He dressed his runway models in dunce caps, clamped dogcollarlike disks around their necks, stuck cardboard cones on their breasts, positioned cabbage roses so they sprouted from their rear ends, and attached serving trays to their heads—the last touch suggesting its reverse, female heads on serving trays. Then he sent them down the runway to tunes with lyrics such as these: “Down by the station, Early in the morning, See the little pufferbellies, All in a row.” Women’s Wear Daily didn’t celebrate Lacroix’s High Femininity because it gave women the right to have “fun” but because it presented them as unspoiled young maidens, ready and willing to be ravished. John Fairchild, the magazine’s publisher and the industry’s legendary “Emperor of Fashion,” said what he really loved about the Lacroix gown was “how you can see it in the middle of lavender fields worn by happy little virgins who don’t want to be virgins.”

With Fairchild’s backing, Lacroix was assured total adulation from the rest of the fashion world. The following July, three months before the stock crash, he unveiled his first signature collection at a Paris show, to “rhythmic applause” from fashion writers and merchants. Afterward, retail executives stood in the aisles and worked the press into a lather with overwrought tributes. The president of Martha’s predicted, “It will change every woman’s wardrobe.” The senior vice president of Bloomingdale’s pronounced it “one of the most brilliant personal statements I’ve ever seen on the runway.” And Bergdorf Goodman’s president offered the most candid assessment to reporters: “He gave us what we were looking for.” Thus primed, the most influential fashion writers raced to spread the “news.” Hebe Dorsey of the International Herald Tribune charged to the nearest phone bank to advise her editors that this was a development warranting front-page coverage. The next day, the New York Times fashion writer Bernadine Morris nominated Lacroix to “fashion’s hall of fame,” declaring, “Like Christian Dior exactly forty years ago, he has revived a failing institution.”

The rest of the press quickly fell into line. Time and Newsweek produced enthusiastic trend stories. People celebrated Lacroix’s “high jinks” and the way he “jammed bustles up the backside.” And the mass media’s infatuation with Lacroix involved not only his hyperfeminine clothes but the cult of his masculine personality. Lacroix, who stocked his own wardrobe with Ralph Lauren lord-of-the-manor wear, was eager to market an all-brawn self-image: “Primitive people, sun and rough times,” he informed the press, “this is my real side.” Stories on Lacroix were packed with approving allusions to his manly penchant for cowboys and matadors. Time offered this tribute from a fashion commentator: “He looks like Brando; he is pantheroid, catlike. He is sexy in a way that is absolutely not effete.” His swagger, and the press’s enthusiasm for it, spoke to the real “crisis” fueling the backlash—not the concern that female professionalism and independence were defeminizing women but the fear that they were emasculating men. Worries about eclipsed manhood were particularly acute in the fashion world, where the perception of a widespread gay culture in the industry had collided in the ’80s with homophobia and rising anxieties about AIDS.

With Lacroix coronated couture’s king, rival designers competed fiercely to ascend the throne. From Emanuel Ungaro to Karl Lagerfeld, they caked on even more layers of frills and pumped up skirts with still bigger bustles. If High Femininity was supposed to accent womanly curves, its frenetic baroque excrescences succeeded only in obscuring the female figure. It was hard to see body shape at all through the thicket of flounces and floral sprays. Dress-for-success’s shoulder pads were insignificant appendages compared with the foot-high satin roses Ungaro tacked to evening-gown shoulders. While a few dozen rich American women had bought Lacroix’s gowns from his 1987 Luxe collection, the designer was anxious to make his mark in the broader, real-world market of ready-to-wear clothes. His last effort while still at Patou in 1984 had failed miserably, after his designs proved to be too expensive for sale. This time, he approached the market strategically. First, in the spring of 1988, he put the clothes “on tour” at a select three stores, Martha’s, Bergdorf Goodman, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Then, that fall, having tantalized women with this fashion tease, he would ship ready-to-wear clothes across the country.

In May 1988, big ads appeared in the Washington Post, courtesy of Saks Fifth Avenue, welcoming the Lacroix traveling show to town—and advising women to hurry down and place their special orders before the rush.

“I GUESS THEY DON’T LIKE LOOKING SUPERFLUOUS”

The day the Lacroix dresses arrive at Saks, five men in dark suits hover around the designer salon, supervising four elderly saleswomen who are easing the gowns from their garment bags, blue-veined hands trembling slightly as they lift the heavy crinoline-encrusted costumes to the racks. “Careful now, careful!” one of the suited men coaches whenever a hem threatens to touch the floor. A bell-shaped purple skirt is slipped out of its wrapper—$630. It comes with a top, $755.

About noon, a delivery man drops off a video of a Lacroix fashion show, to be installed for shoppers’ viewing pleasure. The saleswomen gather around the TV set to watch the models teeter down the runway to the song the designer has selected for the occasion—“My Way.” One of the models is covered, head to toe, in giant roses and bows. “It’s ridiculous,” mutters salesclerk Mimi Gott, who is wearing a gray tweed suit. “Our customers are older people. They aren’t going to buy this stuff.”

About one P.M., Pandora Gogos arrives at the salon, on the arm of her daughter Georgia. They are going to “a black-tie dinner,” and Gogos, who is “around seventy,” can find nothing in the stores to wear. “I’ve been shopping here since they opened up in the 1950s,” she complains, lowering her aching back into a chair. “Even in the fifties, I don’t think they were crazy like this. I’ve gone all over town—Saks, Garfinckel’s—and I can’t find a dinner dress. There was one at Garfinckel’s, a four-thousand-dollar jacket with a skirt up to here”—she reaches her hands to her throat—“nine thousand dollars!”

Soon after, a Mrs. Barkin, a middle-aged woman, arrives at the designer salon to return a frilly dress concocted by one of Lacroix’s imitators. It is studded with huge flowers and a back bustle. “I just couldn’t wear it,” she says apologetically. Salesclerk Venke Loehe, who is wearing a simple Diane Von Furstenberg wraparound, gives her a sympathetic nod. “It’s the return to the fifties,” Loehe says. “A lot of our clothes now are like that. . . . But the classic look is still what’s selling best.” Mrs. Barkin decides on an exchange—she has a cocktail party to attend—and starts rummaging through the racks. She settles reluctantly on a dress with a pouf skirt; it’s the only evening outfit she can find with a lower hem. “I don’t know how I’ll ever sit down in this,” she worries.

Back by the Lacroix racks, the only items that seem to be drawing interest are a plain overcoat and a tailored jacket. Mostly, women don’t even stop to look; by midafternoon, the salon has had fewer than a dozen visitors. The men in suits are wondering what happened to all the customers. “All that embellishment, the ruffles, lace and frills,” says a frustrated Lawrence Wilsman, Saks’s buyer of European designer imports, “women don’t seem to want that much. They seem to want quieter, more realistic things. They want clothes to be taken seriously in. I guess they don’t like looking superfluous.”

•    •    •

THAT FALL, Lacroix’s full ready-to-wear collection arrived at Saks. A month later, markdown tags dangled from the sleeves. Department stores from Nordstrom to Dayton Hudson dropped Lacroix’s clothes after one season. “We needed to see a bit more that American women could relate to,” explained a Nordstrom spokesperson. And when Women’s Wear Daily surveyed department stores, the Lacroix label ranked as one of the worst sellers. By 1989, Lacroix’s design house was reporting a $9.3 million loss.

FLOUNCING INTO WORK

Maybe Lacroix’s poufs hadn’t won over the high-end shoppers who frequent designer salons, but apparel makers and retailers were still hoping to woo the average female shopper with the habiliments of High Femininity. To this end, Bullock’s converted 60 percent of its women’s apparel to a “1950s look” by spring 1987. And even more progressive designers like Donna Karan began parroting the couturier’s retro edicts. “There has been a shift in saying to a woman, ‘It’s okay to show your derriere,’” she told the New York Times. “I questioned it at first. But women’s bodies are in better shape.”

For High Femininity to succeed in the ready-to-wear market, working women had to accept the look—and wear it to the office. The apparel makers could design all the evening gowns they pleased; it wouldn’t change the fact that the vast majority of women’s clothing purchases were for work wear. In 1987, for example, more than 70 percent of the skirts purchased were for professional wardrobes. Pushing baby-doll fashions to working women was also going to be a trickier maneuver than marketing to socialites. Not only did the designers have to convince women that frills were appropriate on the job, the persuasion had to be subtler; high-handed commands wouldn’t work on the less fashion-conscious working women. The designers and merchants had to present the new look as the career woman’s “choice.”

“This thing is not about designers dictating,” Calvin Klein proclaimed as he issued another round of miniskirts. “We’re taking our cues from what women want. They’re ready.” “Older women want to look sexy now on the job,” the head of Componix, a Los Angeles apparel maker, insisted. “They want men to look at them like they’re women. Notice my legs first, not my appraisals.” One by one, the dressing authorities got behind this new fashion line. “Gals like to show their legs,” designer Bill Blass asserted. “Girls want to be girls again,” designer Dik Brandsma intoned. The lone dissenting voice came from veteran designer John Weitz, who said it was Women’s Wear Daily, not women, clamoring for girlish frocks. “Women change not at all, just journalism,” he said, dismissing High Femininity as “a temporary derailment, based on widespread insecurity. Eventually it will go away and women will look like strong decisive human beings instead of Popsicles.” But then, Weitz could afford to be honest; he made his money designing men’s clothes.

Taking their cue from the designers, retailers unfurled the same “choice” sales pitch—and draped it in seemingly feminist arguments, phrases, and imagery. These constrictive and uncomfortable clothes were actually a sign of women’s advancement. As a publicist for Alcott & Andrews explained it, “Our woman has evolved to the point where she can really wear anything to the office that proclaims her femininity.” Bloomingdale’s, which dubbed its latest dress department for women “Bloomingdale’s NOW,” proposed that women try “advancing at work with new credentials”—by buying the department’s skimpy chemises and wearing them to the office. Like the designers, retailers claimed to speak for women, sometimes literally. “Saks understands,” a mythical career woman murmured in the store’s ad copy. “They give me the options. . . . Showing me that ‘going soft’ doesn’t have to mean losing your edge.” What was she pictured wearing to work? Shorts.

The fashion press pitched in, too, as the same publications that had urged working women to wear suits if they wanted to be taken seriously now began running headlines like DRESSING CUTE EN ROUTE and THE NEW SUCCESS LOOKS: YOUNG AND EASY.Savvy told working women that “power dressing” in the ’80s meant only “flower power”—stud your waist with $150 faux camellias, the magazine advised readers, “if you’re intent on making a CEO statement.” Women could actually get ahead faster if they showed up for work in crinoline petticoats; DRESSING DOWN FOR SUCCESS, the Los Angeles Times’s fashion editors called it. The fashion press also resorted to pseudofeminist arguments to push prepubescent dressing: women should don party-doll frills, they argued, as an emblem of grown-up liberation—as a sort of feminist victory sash. Grasping for any angle, the fashion writers even tried invoking the Harvard-Yale marriage study. “A man shortage? What man shortage?” Mademoiselle crowed in its editorial for poufs and minis. “You’ll be dated up till next July if you turn up in any of these ultrahot numbers.”

But no matter what argument the fashion promoters tried, women weren’t buying. A 1988 New York Times/CBS News poll found only a quarter of adult women said they had worn a skirt above the knee even once in the past year. Some women were becoming as vocal in their resistance as the anti-Dior protesters a generation earlier. “I will wear the new short skirts when men wear rompers to the office,” declared columnist Kathleen Fury in Working Woman. Nina Totenberg, legal affairs reporter for National Public Radio, exhorted female listeners from the airwaves, “Hold the line. Don’t buy. And the mini will die.”

The retailers, saddled with millions of dollars of untouched miniskirts, were ready to surrender. The miniskirt has thrown the women’s apparel market into “confusion,” worried a spokesperson for Liz Claiborne Inc., “and we don’t see any indication that it is going to pass soon.” But the high-fashion designers—who make their money more through licensing their names than through actual dress sales—could afford to continue the campaign. So when retail buyers flocked to market to inspect the designers’ upcoming fall fashions for 1988, they found—much to their amazement—yet another round of ruffled and rib-crunching styles.

“I THINK it’s really a trend,” Yvette Crosby, fashion director of California Mart, is telling everyone at the 1988 Market Week in Los Angeles, as she hands out copies of this season’s “Trend Report.” “It’s a more romantic and Victorian look, and I really believe it’s right for this season,” says Crosby. She wears a suit.

The writers and buyers are crowding into the mart’s auditorium for the morning show, entitled “Thirty Something.” The program notes advise that these clothes are designed “for contemporary working women”—a necessary reminder, it happens. As the models revolve in up to five tiers of frills, huge bows bursting from hips and shoulders, it’s easy to forget that this is nine-to-five wear. To evoke a proper career mood, one designer has armed his models with briefcases. The gaunt young women trip down the runway in stiletto heels, hands snug in dainty white gloves. Their briefcases swing like Easter baskets, feather light; they are, after all, empty.

At last, the models retire backstage and the fashion buyers are herded to the buying services’ suites upstairs. In the Bob Mallard showroom, the mart’s largest buying service, manufacturing representatives scurry hopefully into place. Mallard, who joined the business in the 1950s as a garment manufacturer in the East Bronx, surveys the proceedings with grim resignation; he has the leathery, bruised face of a fighter who’s been in the ring awhile.

“Last year, the miniskirt was a disaster,” he says. “Froufrou was no big hit either. Women still want suits. That’s still the biggest seller.” But he knows his observations will fall on deaf ears back at the design houses. “The average designer goes to the library and looks at pictures in a picture book. Maybe he worries about whether the dress is going to look good on the mannequin in the store window. That’s it. I don’t think he ever bothers to talk to a woman about it. The woman, she’s the last to know.”

In the glass booths on either side of the long showroom corridor, Mallard’s manufacturing reps are doing their best to pitch the “new-romance” fashions to doubtful buyers. Teri Jon’s rep, Ruth McLoughlin, pulls one dress after another off the racks and holds it up to buyers Jody Krogh and Carol Jameson of the Portland-based Jameson Ltd. “Short didn’t sell last year,” Krogh keeps saying. “No, no, don’t judge by what’s on the hanger,” McLoughlin answers, a little peevishly. “We can ship it long. Now how about this?” She holds up a dress with a plunging front, cinched waist and crinolines. “I don’t know,” Jameson says. “Women will love it,” says McLoughlin. She is wearing a suit.

“This is my best reorder,” says Joe Castle, a fast-talking Cattiva salesman across the hall. He waggles a ruffle-decked gown before a buyer with a blank order form. “It makes a great M.O.B. [mother of the bride] gown,” Castle wheedles. Sounding a bit like a Newsweek trend story, Castle tries this last argument: “Everyone’s looking for M.O.B.’s. More and more people are getting married.”

•    •    •

AT THE fashion shows held in summer 1988 for the coming fall season, designers made a few compromises—adding pantsuits and longer skirts to their collections—but these additions often featured a puerile or retaliatory underside. Jean-Paul Gaultier showed pants and blazers—but they were skin-tight Lycra leotards and schoolgirl uniforms. Pierre Cardin produced capelike wraps that fit so tightly even the New York Times fashion page found it “fairly alarming because the models wearing them cannot move their arms.” Romeo Gigli dropped his hemlines but the skirts were so tight the models could only hobble down the runway. One of his models was doubly encumbered; he had tied her up in velvet ropes, straitjacket-style.

A year later, even the compromises were gone—as designers dressed up their women again in even shorter miniskirts, bone-crushing corsets, push-up cleavage and billows of transparent chiffon. The Lacroix brand of “humor” returned to the runways: models wore costumes modeled after clown suits, “court jester” jackets, molded “breastplates,” and pinstripe suits with one arm and shoulder ripped to shreds. By 1990, Valentino was pushing “baby dolls,” Gianni Versace was featuring “skirts that barely clear the buttocks,” and the Lacroix collection was offering jumpsuits with “gold-encrusted” corsets.

If the apparel makers could not get women to wear poufs, they would try dictating another humbling mode of fashion. The point was not so much the content of the style as its enforcement. There was a reason why their designs continued to regress into female infantilism, even in the face of a flood of market reports on aging female consumers: minimizing the female form might be one way for designers to maximize their own authority over it. The woman who walks in tiny steps clutching a teddy bear—as so many did on the late ’80s runways—is a child who follows instructions. The woman who steps down the aisle to George Michael’s “Father Figure”—the most popular runway song in 1988—is a daughter who minds her elders. Modern American women “won’t do as they are told anymore,” the couturier had complained to Molloy. But just maybe they would—if only they could be persuaded to think of themselves as daddy’s little girls.

FEMININITY, UNDERCOVER

“Some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger. . . .” The music came up at the MK Club in New York, and the buyers and fashion writers, who had been downing drinks from the open bar for more than an hour, quieted as rose-colored lights drenched the stage. Six models in satin panties and lace teddies drifted dreamily into view and took turns swooning on the main stage prop—a Victorian couch. The enervated ladies—“Sophia,” “Desiree,” “Amapola”—languorously stroked their tresses with antique silver hairbrushes, stopping occasionally to lift limp hands to their brows, as if even this bit of grooming overtaxed their delicate constitutions.

The press release described the event as Bob Mackie’s “premiere collection” of fantasy lingerie. In fact, the Hollywood costume designer (author of Dressing for Glamour) had introduced a nearly identical line ten years before. It failed then in a matter of weeks—but the women of the late ’80s, Mackie believed, were different. “I see it changing,” Mackie asserts. “Women want to wear very feminine lingerie now.”

Mackie got this impression not from women but from the late-’80s lingerie industry, which claimed to be in the midst of an “Intimate Apparel Explosion.” As usual, this was a marketing slogan, not a social trend. Frustrated by slackening sales, the Intimate Apparel Council—an all-male board of lingerie makers—established a special public relations committee in 1987. Its mission: Stir up “excitement.”

The committee immediately issued a press release proclaiming that “cleavage is back” and that the average woman’s bust had suddenly swelled from 34B to 36C. “Bustiers, corsets, camisoles, knickers, and petticoats,” the press kits declared, are now not only “accepted” by women but actually represent “a fashion statement.” A $10,000 focus-group study gathered information for the committee about the preferences of manufacturers and retail buyers. No female consumers were surveyed. “It’s not that we aren’t interested in them,” Karen Bromley, the committee’s spokesperson, explains. “There’s just limited dollars.”

In anticipation of the Intimate Apparel Explosion, manufacturers boosted the production of undergarments to its highest level in a dozen years. In 1987, the same year the fashion industry slashed its output of women’s suits, it doubled production of garter belts. Again, it was the “better-business” shopper that the fashion marketers were after; in one year, the industry nearly tripled its shipments of luxury lingerie. Du Pont, the largest maker of foundation fabrics, simultaneously began a nationwide “education program,” which included “training videos” in stores, fitting room posters and special “training” tags on the clothes to teach women the virtues of underwire bras and girdles (or “body shapers,” as they now called them—garments that allow women “a sense of control”). Once again, a fashion regression was billed as a feminist breakthrough. “Women have come a long way since the 1960s,” Du Pont’s sales literature exulted. “They now care about what they wear under clothes.”

The fashion press, as usual, was accommodating. “Bra sales are booming,” the New York Daily News claimed. Its evidence: the Intimate Apparel Council’s press release. Enlisting one fake backlash trend to promote another, the New York Times claimed that women were rushing out to buy $375 bustiers to use “for cocooning.” Life dedicated its June 1989 cover to a hundredth-anniversary salute, “Hurrah for the Bra,” and insisted, likewise without data, that women were eagerly investing in designer brassieres and corsets. In an interview later, the article’s author, Claudia Dowling, admits that she herself doesn’t fit the trend; when asked, she can’t even recall what brand bra she wears: “Your basic Warner whatever, I guess,” she says.

Hollywood also hastened to the aid of the intimate-apparel industry, with garter belts in Bull Durham, push-up bras in Dangerous Liaisons, and merry-widow regalia galore in Working Girl. TV did its bit, too, as characters from The Young and the Restless to Dynasty jumped into bustiers, and even the women of thirtysomething inspected teddies in one shopping episode.

The fashion press marketed the Intimate Apparel Explosion as a symbol of modern women’s new sexual freedom. “The ‘Sexy’ Revolution Ignites Intimate Apparel,” Body Fashions announced in its October 1987 cover story. But the magazine was right to put quotes around “sexy.” The cover model was encased in a full-body girdle, and the lingerie inside was mostly of Victorian vintage. Late-’80s lingerie celebrated the repression, not the flowering, of female sexuality. The ideal Victorian lady it had originally been designed for, after all, wasn’t supposed to have any libido.

A few years before the Intimate Apparel Explosion, the pop singer Madonna gained notoriety by wearing a black bustier as a shirt. In her rebellious send-up of prim notions of feminine propriety, she paraded her sexuality and transformed “intimate apparel” into an explicit ironic statement. This was not, however, the sort of “sexy revolution” that the fashion designers had in mind. “That Madonna look was vulgar,” Bob Mackie sniffs. “It was overly sexually expressive. The slits and the clothes cut up and pulled all around; you couldn’t tell the sluts from the schoolgirls.” The lingerie that he advocated had “a more ladylike feminine attitude.”

Late Victorian apparel merchants were the first to mass-market “feminine” lingerie, turning corsets into a “tight-lacing” fetish and weighing women down in thirty pounds of bustles and petticoats. It worked for them; by the turn of the century, they had ushered in “the great epoch of underwear.” Lingerie publicists of the ’80s offered various sociological reasons for the Victorian underwear revival, from “the return of marriage” to “fear of AIDS”—though they never did explain how garter belts ward off infection. But the real reason for the Victorian renaissance was strictly business. “Whenever the romantic Victorian mood is in, we are going to do better,” explains Peter Velardi, chairman of the lingerie giant Vanity Fair and a member of the Intimate Apparel Council’s executive committee.

In this decade’s underwear campaign, the intimate-apparel industry owed its heaviest promotional debt to the Limited, the fashion retailer that turned a California lingerie boutique named Victoria’s Secret into a national chain with 346 shops in five years. “I don’t want to sound arrogant,” Howard Gross, president of Victoria’s Secret, says, “but . . . we caused the Intimate Apparel Explosion. We started it and a lot of people wanted to copy it.”

The designers of the Victoria’s Secret shop, a Disneyland version of a 19th-century lady’s dressing room, packed each outlet with “antique” armoires and sepia photos of brides and mothers. Their blueprint was quickly copied by other retailers: May’s “Amanda’s Closet,” Marshall Field’s “Amelia’s Boutique,” Belk’s “Marianne’s Boutique,” and Bullock’s “Le Boudoir.” Even Frederick’s of Hollywood reverted to Victoriana, replacing fright wigs with lace chemises, repainting its walls in ladylike pinks and mauves and banning frontal nudity from its catalogs. “You can put our catalog on your coffee table now,” George Townson, president of Frederick’s, says proudly.

The Limited bought Victoria’s Secret in 1982 from its originator, Roy Raymond, who opened the first shop in a suburban mall in Palo Alto, California. A Stanford MBA and former marketing man for the Vicks company—where he developed such unsuccessful hygiene products as a post-defecation foam to dab on toilet paper—Raymond wanted to create a store that would cater to his gender. “Part of the game was to make it more comfortable to men,” he says. “I aimed it, I guess, at myself.” But Raymond didn’t want his female customers to think a man was running the store; that might put them off. So he was careful to include in the store’s catalogs a personal letter to subscribers from “Victoria,” the store’s putative owner, who revealed her personal preferences in lingerie and urged readers to visit “my boutique.” If customers called to inquire after Ms. Victoria’s whereabouts, the salesclerks were instructed to say she was “traveling in Europe.” As for the media, Raymond’s wife handled all TV appearances.

Raymond settled on a Victorian theme both because he was renovating his own Victorian home in San Francisco at the time and because it seemed like “a romantic happy time.” He explains: “It’s that Ralph Lauren image . . . that people were happier then. I don’t know if that is really true. It’s just the image in my mind, I guess created by all the media things I’ve seen. But it’s real.”

Maybe the Victorian era wasn’t the best of times for the female population, he acknowledges, but he came up with a marketing strategy to deal with that problem: women are now “liberated” enough to choose corsets to please themselves, not their men. “We had this whole pitch,” he recalls, “that the woman bought this very romantic and sexy lingerie to feel good about herself, and the effect it had on a man was secondary. It allowed us to sell these garments without seeming sexist.” But was it true? He shrugs. “It was just the philosophy we used. The media picked it up and called it a ‘trend,’ but I don’t know. I’ve never seen any statistics.”

When the Limited took over Victoria’s Secret, the new chief continued the theme. Career women want to wear bustiers in the boardroom, Howard Gross says, so they can feel confident that, underneath it all, they are still anatomically correct. “Women get a little pip, a little perk out of it,” he explains. “It’s like, ‘Here I am at this very serious business meeting and they really don’t know that I’m wearing a garter belt!’” Gross didn’t have any statistics to support this theory, either: “The company does no consumer or market research, absolutely none! I just don’t believe in it.” Instead of asking everyday women what they wanted in underwear, Gross conducted in-house brainstorming sessions where top company managers sat around a table and revealed their “romantic fantasies.” Some of them, Gross admits, were actually “not so romantic”—like the male executive who imagined, “I’m in bed with eighteen women.”

•    •    •

ON A late afternoon in the summer of 1988, row after row of silk teddies hang, untouched, at the original Victoria’s Secret shop in Palo Alto’s Stanford Shopping Center. The shelves are stuffed with floral-scented teddy bears in tiny wedding gowns. At $18 to $34 each, these cuddly brides aren’t exactly big sellers; dust has collected on their veils. But over at the bargains table, where basic cotton underwear is on sale, “four for $16,” it looks like a cyclone has touched down.

“Oh God, the panty table is a mess,” groans head “proprietress” Becky Johnson. As she straightens up for what she says must be the tenth time that day, two women walk in the door and charge the bargain panty table. “The prices on these panties are wonderful,” Bonnie Pearlman says, holding up a basic brief to her friend. “But will they shrink?” she wonders, pulling the elastic back and forth. Asked if they are here for the Victorian lingerie, they both shake their heads. Pearl-man says, “I look for what fits well.” Suzanne Ellis, another customer, surveys the racks of gossamer teddies and rolls her eyes. “I’ve had a few of these things given to me,” she says. “It was like, ‘Uh, gee, thanks.’ I mean, I really don’t need to sit on snaps all day.” She holds up her purchase for the day: the four-for-$16 cotton panties. Even proprietress Becky Johnson says she buys “good ol’ basic bras and panties” here. So who’s buying the frilly Victorian stuff? Johnson: “Men.”

While men represent 30 to 40 percent of the shoppers at Victoria’s Secret stores, they account for nearly half the dollar volume, company managers estimate. “Men are great,” sighs one of the salesclerks at the Stanford store. “They’ll spend anything.”

One such specimen wanders into the shop just then. Jim Draeger, a thirty-five-year-old attorney, bypasses the basic panty table and heads directly for the bustier racks. “I’ve been coming here since 1980,” he says, scrutinizing a silky bodice. “This type of clothes enhances a woman’s sexuality. The laciness of it, the peek-a-boo quality of it. My only regret is that a lot of the stuff you see in the catalog you can’t buy in the store.” He settles on a tastefully dainty G-string.

•    •    •

THE INTIMATE Apparel Explosion of 1987 never happened. That year, women’s annual purchases of teddies actually fell 31 percent. Women bought 40 million fewer panties than a year earlier, and 9 million fewer bras. Sales of all chemises, slips, and teddies fell $4 million in two years.

“Part of the professionalism of women may be that underwear is becoming to them like jockey shorts for guys,” says John Tugman, vice president and general manager of soft goods for MRCA, which tracks consumption patterns in 11,500 households. “It’s becoming more and more of a functional item, not a sex item. Practical comfort is what they care about.”

If lingerie makers had leapt on this real trend, they might have made some real money. This business strategy occurred to one company, Jockey International, the nation’s oldest manufacturer of premium men’s underwear. In 1982, Jockey’s new president stood up at a high-level marketing meeting and made a modest proposal: what if the company started selling women’s underwear, with the same comfort and quality as the men’s? After all, he pointed out, for years the company had received reams of letters from women asking them to do just that.

As Jockey president Howard Cooley recalls, grizzled company veterans responded with horror; he would turn Jockey into “a woman’s company,” they sputtered. Executives in the company’s ad agency were equally aghast: “You are going to destroy your masculine image,” one of them told Cooley. And when the Jockey president ran his proposal by retailers, every single one opposed it. Women won’t buy underwear without lace, they told him, and they certainly won’t buy panties with the “male” Jockey label on the waistband.

Cooley decided to try it anyway. In preparation, the company’s market research department took another novel step—it actually solicited women’s advice. Jockey’s researchers invited scores of women to try on hundreds of panties and say which they liked the best. The results: women want underwear that won’t ride up, won’t fall apart in the wash, and actually is the size promised on the label.

In 1983, the company introduced “Jockey for Her”—with an advertising campaign featuring real women who actually wore and liked the underwear, women from a range of professions, ages, and body types. They included a grandmother, an airline pilot, and a beautician who was even a little stocky. The brand became an instant success; within five years, it was the most popular brand of women’s underwear in the nation, with an extraordinary 40 percent share of the market.

Jockey for Her inspired imitations from several large men’s underwear manufacturers. But by and large, the women’s intimate-apparel companies ignored the company’s success, and headed even further in the opposite direction. Instead of comfortable briefs that don’t ride up, the industry introduced this practical new undergarment—G-string—style “thongs.” And on the rare occasion when women did get a chance to talk to lingerie makers, the companies simply disregarded their comments. Maidenform’s ad agency, Levine Huntley Schmidt & Beaver, spent months interviewing focus groups of women about lingerie. “The women complained that no one understood their needs,” creative director Jay Taub says. “They wanted to be treated like real people.” But in the new Maidenform ad campaign that resulted, the only “real people” featured were male celebrities and the only “needs” the men addressed were their own. As Omar Sharif explained in one typical ad, he liked lingerie because it “tells me how she feels about me.”

GUESS AND THE YEAR OF THE REAR

For the most part, fashion makers’ efforts to regain control of the independent female consumer were veiled, tucked behind a flattering and hushed awe for that newly feminine lady of fashion. But this adoration was reserved for women who played by the backlash’s rules, accepting casting as meek girls or virtuous Victorian ladies. For less malleable women, another fashion message began to surface—featuring the threat of discipline.

The beaten, bound, or body-bagged woman became a staple of late-’80s fashion ads and editorial photo layouts. In the windows of major department stores, female mannequins were suddenly being displayed as the battered conquests of leather-clad men and as corpses stuffed in trash cans. In Vogue, a fashion layout entitled “Hidden Delights” featured one model in a blindfold being pulled along by her corset ties, another woman with trussed legs, and still another with her arms and nude torso restrained in straps. Other mainsteam fashion magazines offered fashion spreads with women in straitjackets, yanked by the neck with choke collars, and packed, nude, into a plastic trash bag. Fashion ads in the same vein proliferated: a woman lying on an ironing board while a man applied an iron to her crotch (Esprit); a woman in a strait-jacket (Seruchi); a woman dangling by her legs, chicken-style, from a man’s fist (Cotler’s—“For the Right Stance,” the ad read); a woman knocked to the floor, her shirt ripped open (Foxy Lady); and a woman in a coffin (Michael Mann).

The girl with her rear end turned to the camera, as if ready for a spanking, was a particular favorite—just as it had been a century earlier, in late Victorian cartoons and popular art. By the late ’80s, backside ads were so prevalent that they attracted editorial comment; one columnist even wondered if 1987 should be called “The Year of the Rear.” In dozens of fashion ads, from Gitano dresses to Famolare shoes to Driver jeans, the female butt was center stage. In a Jordache Basics ad, a young woman faced a graffiti-covered wall, her hands up against the concrete and her derriere in the air. The man in the picture planted a proprietary hand on her leg. The ad copy read, “He lets me be the one thing I have to be, me.”

In the summer of 1987 in dozens of national magazines, American readers met yet another backside, this one attached to a girl in a bodysuit, crouched before an older man’s trousered legs. Her gaze focused reverentially on his fly. On the following pages, this same male figure loomed over other cowering girls, his lips curled in a condescending sneer. The ads’ creator: Guess jeans.

Six years earlier, with the economy slipping into recession and the jeans market in its worst decline on record, Marseilles entrepreneur Georges Marciano had arrived in Bloomingdale’s with a stack of skintight, stone-washed jeans. According to company lore, the buyer laughed at him and said, “Nobody will wear these. They’re uncomfortable and they look used.” They were also $60, nearly double the price of an average pair of jeans. But soon Guess would make, in the words of Women’s Wear Daily, “one of the biggest splashes in denim history.”

Georges and his brothers, Armand, Maurice, and Paul, were chain store merchants who set up shop in Los Angeles with an investment of only $101,000 and repackaged themselves as high-class jeans “designers;” their elite pants would be sold only in upscale shops, they decided. Soon after they went into business, their small investment was yielding $250 million in annual revenues.

While Lacroix and his High Femininity succeeded only in littering the remainder racks with bubble skirts and poufs, Guess found a way to use the backlash to sell clothes. Jeans, unlike party gowns, are affordable mass-market products, even at their overpriced extremes. And jeans are mostly bought by teenage girls, who are more vulnerable to fashion dictates than either the society women Lacroix initially targeted or the working women the industry hoped to sell on Lacroix’s ideas.

Guess jeans weren’t all that different from other designer jeans that flooded the ’80s market—except for the company’s advertising. The Marciano brothers promoted their pants with a $10 million annual campaign that never showed the product. The ads marketed instead what the company called “The Guess Mystique”: grainy shots of an American West peopled with tall cowboys on horseback and timorous women in wheat fields; a small-town ’50s America where the men cruise dusty country roads and girls wait passively at the diner, sipping milk shakes and swinging bobby-socked feet. The Guess ads generated media and public disapproval because some of the shots featured “raunchy” sexuality; they lacked “taste.” But in homing in on the question of sexual prurience, the company’s critics missed the point; they overlooked the company’s sexual politics.

•    •    •

“YOU SHOULD hear the things people say about the ads; it’s hysterical,” says Lisa Hickey, Paul Marciano’s personal assistant. The thin young woman in a pouf skirt leads the way into the front office of Guess’s Los Angeles headquarters, a barbed-wire compound surrounded by a ghetto. “What they don’t understand is that Paul is very romantic. He looks at these things as love stories.” Hickey, a journalism major, says she had been planning to get a master’s degree, but Paul Marciano talked her out of it. “Paul said, ‘Oh Lisa, you don’t want to do that.’ He doesn’t like it when we go to school.”

Paul saunters into the office just then, casual in a striped T-shirt, cotton pants, and slippers. Although the four brothers run the company as a team, Paul’s post is the most crucial; he’s in charge of advertising. Paul settles into a chair and dispatches Hickey to round up the portfolios of the company’s past ad campaigns. “When I came here, I fell in love with the American West,” the thirty-six-year-old Marciano says. “I set the ads in the West because you will not see any change there. That seduced me tremendously.” Most appealing to him about this region is its women, who he believes remain untouched by feminist influence. In the American West, as Guess’s coffee table photobook on Texas observes, “Women are treated with great respect, but it is assumed they know their place, which is supportive, and their function, which is often decorative.”

Aside from the West, Marciano says, he has another soft spot—for ’50s America—and for the same reason: “I’m attracted to the femininity of the women in that era,” he says. “The femininity like you find in Vargas drawings. That’s what we want to bring back—everything that has been lost.” This isn’t just what he wants, Marciano is quick to add. “Women want to look the way they did in the 1950s,” he says. They feel cheated by liberation. “The majority aren’t getting married. . . . Their independence took over their private life, and their private life was tremendously damaged. They’ve passed thirty and they’re still not married and they feel like they haven’t accomplished what they wanted to as women.”

Hickey returns with the ad portfolios. Marciano opens one, the “Louisiana Campaign,” and leafs slowly through the black-and-white stills. “You see, each one is like a little theme film,” he says. The Louisiana campaign, for example, is based on one of his favorite American movies, Baby Doll—Elia Kazan’s 1956 tale of a thumb-sucking child bride who sleeps in a crib. Marciano provides the soundtrack as he flips the pages: “This one girl is spying on the other one, who’s with the man, and she’s feeling a little bit envious”—he points to a photo of a fearful young woman hiding behind a tree—“and now here she gets in a little bit of trouble with him”—the man grabs the woman’s jaw and twists it—“and here she’s feeling a little sad . . .”—an anguished girl hides her face in her hands, her hair in knots and her clothes tattered.

He drops the portfolio and picks up another: the notorious “Rome campaign” featuring the bodysuited butt. This one, he explains, is based on Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. “Some people objected to this campaign because he is so much older than her,” Marciano sighs, gesturing toward the leering gentleman. “I guess he looks like he’s in his fifties. But he could have just been the girl’s father.” Marciano doesn’t explain, then, why daughter is bouncing shirtless on dad’s knee.

Marciano says he is proud that his ads use real men—real cowboys, ranchers, truck drivers, and an actual matador. “My field is day-to-day street life,” he says. “I don’t want to create fake pictures.” Women, however, are another matter: “We always use models. It’s difficult to find real women who fit what we’re trying to say. Real women, they aren’t as cooperative as real men.” Marciano also favors relatively unknown models, with “no identity”: “This way, we can make the Guess girl exactly who we want her to be.”

To capture her identity on film, Marciano hired fashion photographer Wayne Maser, who had shot the fashion photos with a quasi-bondage theme in Vogue. Maser also participated in selling another artifact of the backlash; he designed the promotional posters for Fatal Attraction. The film’s director, Adrian Lyne, was a former colleague of Maser’s in commercial photography. In 1988, Maser completed the circle, turning the former adman’s movie back into advertising. Over four days that May, Maser shot the Guess version of Fatal Attraction in two white-picket-fence houses in Bedford, New York, the same homes Lyne had used for his set.

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“SO WHAT do you think of this coat?” Maser keeps asking, while his assistants unpack the camera equipment on the first day of the shoot. He is wearing a bulky overcoat with big shoulders. “Paul Smith . . . Fucking great coat.” The members of his crew agree that it is. Admiring allusions to Maser’s virility are rife. Unlike “those other photographers,” the members of his (all-male) photo crew keep reminding a visitor, Maser is “a man’s man” and “severely heterosexual.”

For the Fatal Attraction shoot, Maser has broken a Guess rule and hired a prominent model, Rosemary McGrotha. She was reluctant to work with Maser. “I had heard terrible things about him,” she says. She wasn’t the only one. “A lot of the big models won’t work for him,” Maser’s assistant photographer, Jeffrey Thurnher, says. “They reach for their ulcer medicine when his name is mentioned.” Thurnher explains why: “I’ve seen Wayne take a model who isn’t cooperating, just standing there not showing any emotion, and push her face against the wall. Or he’ll tell her, ‘Get undressed’—in front of him—and if she doesn’t, he’ll say, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ He plays with their minds.”

For the role of “the other woman” in this ad’s minimovie script, Maser has cast a twenty-five-year-old French model, a Nastassia Kinski look-alike with pouty lips. Claudia, who is so uncomfortable with the way this ad campaign is shaping up that she asks that her last name not be used, keeps her distance from the crew—sitting by herself during breaks reading Anna Karenina. “The only way I can do this,” she says, “is because I have other aspects to my life.” She paints, raises her two-year-old child, and works in a graphic design studio in Paris.

As the shoot progresses, Maser keeps scaling down the temptress’s age and occupation—much the way TV producer Aaron Spelling shrank the status of his angels in subsequent rewrites. “Let’s put Claudia in a waitress uniform,” Maser proposes. “No wait. Let’s make her an au pair. You know, the little au pair seducing the husband? Brilliant, huh? Fucking brilliant.” Everyone agrees it is, and Maser instructs Claudia to change into a French maid’s outfit. He orders the stylist to pin the skirt tighter. Then he positions Claudia in front of the kitchen stove, tells her to pretend she’s cooking breakfast, and instructs, “Arch your ass real good.”

“This is very cool,” Maser says, his Polaroid snapping. “We need this dress tighter . . . it’s got to look sexy.” Claudia complains, “It’s hurting me.” Maser ignores her and keeps shooting.

Around noon, a moving van pulls into the driveway. The couple who owns the house is in the midst of a divorce—and the wife had planned to pack her belongings today. Her estranged husband had scheduled the Guess photo shoot without telling her, so she is alarmed to find her home strewn with camera equipment, littered with empty beer cans, and overrun with strangers, some of whom are sprawled in her den, eating pizza and watching videos on her VCR. As she hurries through the kitchen and up the stairs, Maser’s eyes follow her. “Now there’s an angry career woman,” he mutters. “She’s probably a feminist.”

The angry feminists seem much on Maser’s mind; he returns to the subject later that evening. “The trouble with advertising today,” he says over a beer, “is everyone’s afraid to take a stand on women. Everything’s done to please the feminists because the feminists dominate these advertising positions. They’ve made women bland.” He envisions his photographs as a challenge to the feminist cabal. “My work is a reaction against feminist blandness,” he says. But, he wants to make clear, he isn’t trying to restrict women, just endorse their new options. “It’s a postfeminist period,” he explains. “Women can be women again. All my girls have a choice.”

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LATER, THE Marciano brothers would set aside the Fatal Attraction ads—not because they were too demeaning or violent to women or too hostile to feminist “blandness,” but because they were too sexually graphic for mainstream presentation. Portraits of humiliated or battered young women passed muster with the Marciano censors, but depictions of adultery might disturb the sanctity of the family. Instead, that season, Guess substituted an ad campaign with cowgirls sucking on their fingers. They gazed into the camera with startled and vulnerable doe eyes, Bambis before the hunters. It was the same message, really, as Maser’s Fatal Attraction campaign, just more discreetly delivered—and ultimately more effective. In the ’80s, fashion advertising often seemed to be one big woman-hunt. And by successfully camouflaging male anger, the Marciano brothers discovered, they could fire their best shots.