This one was called “Daniella Boone,” and it was based on my sort of romantic ideas about Daniel Boone. I remember as a kid all these Daniel Boone stories and his hat with the raccoon tail, I liked that wilderness aspect. It’s hard to spot those exact references here other than in some materiality, but that’s kind of where it started.
Those rainbows. I just love stripes, and it was always fun to get, to see how far I could push things. The knitter would tell me I can only use five colors, so I talked them into 12 [laughs]. That lifesaver dress on Veronica [look 67] is non-repeating colors, it looks a little bit like it’s repeating, but we shifted the tones. We were very intentional with the line placements too, like where to place the black so it’s flattering.
This was also the first season I got to work with Helen, this incredible dyer. She had these exquisite tie-dye t-shirts that were clothespinned to the basketball court on Houston Street. I was walking around one day and just screeched to a halt when I saw them and started talking to her. She just did shirts, but we started talking about what we could do together. We worked with her for decades! All that tie-dye velvet, that’s Helen. It’s something you just hadn’t seen before; that dress on Cindy Crawford is all hand-dyed velvet that we’d then send to India and have embroidered. The thing on Kate [Moss, look 74], same thing, dip-dyed to look like an iceberg.
The piece on Angelica [look 65], that was hand-knotted 24-karat gold bullion threaded with pearls. It was made as traditional fishing nets. So complicated. There’s also a beautiful velvet that Etro made for me that we had stamped in gold, so it was kind of crunchy [look 66]. You can see that hands made these for sure.
We never involved ourselves in animal products like leathers or furs, so we were constantly finding alternatives. So many buyers found it ridiculous that we weren’t using real leather. So I went to Springs Industries, who at the time were the people that had made all of Halston’s Ultrasuede, and I got them to bring it back out for us and they remade it for looks like Amber’s [Valletta, look 50]. Ultrasuede was very dead, it had tumbled through the Halston years into being like a cuss word by the time it ended up in JCPenney. But I really liked it, and it didn’t cause any harm. Same with the animal prints like Cindy’s coat [look 55]. Unfortunately, when we got it all back out of the archive for the retrospective [at RISD] a few years ago, almost everything made it, except for that stuff. All of those experimental vinyls were just… they turned into powder. This was at the beginning of these things and they were just not fine-tuned, but they looked great in the show and for the few years I guess anybody wore them afterwards.
That shiny shirt that Veronica [Webb, look 4] is wearing, that was a wild experimental fabric. It’s silk charmeuse, but we had it made with elastic so it’s actually springy like a swimsuit fabric. It was outrageously expensive fabric, but we sold so many. It was a miracle shirt for us. It’s a skin tight shirt, but I pulled a trick–I undercut the front so that the buttons would bow. It always looked like you were about to explode outta your shirt. They were so sexy, and the models loved them. We made many of those for the girls.
There’s also all the pompoms, and the fair isle. There’s also that six-wale corduroy, but we had it made with a Lycra backing, so it was super springy and we could do skin tight gowns in them. We always, always tried to find a way to take the normal thing and turn it into something else.
