He put up bunting. He played Loretta Lynn and Elvis. And his models stepped onto the platform, hair in plaited updos, faces and limbs covered with freckles, looking like unspoiled girls at a country fair sometime in the mid-sixties. An unusual vision for a shy man who grew up in a fishing village in the inaccessible north of Denmark, but with its gawky charm, idealized perspective, and idolization of unlikely heroines, it is the world of Peter Jensen.
The collection, it transpired, was the designer's mash note to Sissy Spacek in movies from Coal Miner's Daughter to Carrie to Badlands. His Sissy girls wore checked cotton smocks, Girl Scout uniforms, red denim overall dresses, and gawky little knits sequined with farmyard motifs. For prom, they'd worked dutifully on their home dressmaking patterns and came out wearing simple white frocks lovingly embellished with plastic beads.
Innocent yet gently spoofy, Jensen's love for deliberately unsexy clothes runs directly counter to the prevailing culture of reality TV and celebrity overkill. He has a growing fan base that admires his clean, innocent, and Scandinavian sensibility that, as it turns out, includes Spacek herself, who sent Jensen a thrilled e-mail. "I got a real kick out of hearing the news about the Sissy collection," she told him. "All I can imagine are little, cotton, country shirtwaist dresses, from all areas of the American South." Exactly right. And just to make this a happy ending, she's asked him to make her a dress.
