Let’s see Calvin Klein do that.
Last week the 83-year-old Harvard-educated upstart did something that seared even him–he showed his first collection for women at the New York ready-to-wear shows. It was a trial-by-flashbulbs even for someone whose boy-next-door good looks and intelligence have made him a fashion-press fare, and whose sexually charged body-conscious men’s clothes have garnered him a loyal coterie, particularly among gym-obsessed gay men. “I feel like I’m throwing myself to the sharks,” Bartlett said before the show. Stakes are higher in the womenswear market, and for every menswear designer who has successfully leapt across gender lines–Ralph Lauren,Giorgio Armani–scores have failed miserably.
Bartlett may be one to make it, though. After years on a shoestring budget, he is now backed by the prestigious Italian manufacturer Genny Holding Spa. Genny hopes to turn Bartlett’s $1 million American business into $20 million in worldwide sales over the next three years. Judging from reaction to the show, it could happen. The New York Times called it a “soaring triumph.” And Polly Allen Mellen of Allure magazine said afterward: “A star is born.”
Certainly the clothes Bartlett showed last week-fitted leather shirts, cashmere Shaker-knit sweaters, lean Chesterfield coats-are more luxurious than anything he’s ever done for men. Priced from $100 for a knit top to $2,000 for a leather coat, the women’s collection is a juxtaposition of his edgy menswear tailoring with what Bartlett calls “really sexy, Jessica Rabbit, tight hot stuff.” Designing for men, he says, “is about subtlety. But women want fantasy. And I don’t want to follow someone else’s lead.” He never has. Raised in Cincinnati–his father is CEO of Multimedia Corp.–Bartlett became obsessed with clothes in his teens, but went off to study sociology instead. “When! went to Harvard, I’d change outfits five times a day, but no one else seemed to care about fashion as much as I did,” he remembers. Instead of grad school, he went to New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, then landed jobs with WilliWear and Ronaldus Shamask.
In January 1992 the designer launched his own label, and a couple of seasons later he inspired the much-ballyhooed Hush Puppies revival by recoloring them and showing them with his most avant-garde menswear. In 1994 Bartlett took on a behemoth called Barneys, complaining to The New York Times that the influential retailer had been slow to pay him. It cost him its business and almost his own.
The partnership with Genny brings Bartlett financial security and a new level of respect in the industry. Even with firm backing, he worries about the challenge of dressing women. For example: “When the menswear comes in, I spend three days trying it on, and what feels good I show,” he says. That’ll be tough with womenswear; as Bartlett says, “I’m not a size 8 anymore.”
