Fashion jewelry show trade

THE MOST INTERESTING DEsigners are people with nowhere to hide. They are women and men who utilize fabric and shape in ways that are the sartorial equivalent of fingerprints. Think of Martin Margiela, Nicolas Ghesquiere, Ann Demeulmeester. As fashion grows more repetitive and self-referential, these are individuals in the more exalted sense of that word and, as such, beacons of hope and inventiveness.

A beacon closer to home is Michelle Mason, a 30-year-old whose designs emerge from her own particular sense of femininity, in which loveliness and sensuality combine with that ladylike masculinity one thinks of in connection with Lauren Bacall. Mason is tall, willowy, manifestly chic, with an aspect both innocent and knowing. She is the ideal advertisement for herself, a master of the complexities her clothes address: how to be stylish without being trendy, how to forge a unique fashion identity without being outrageous.

Mason is a Los Angeles designer, a curious occupation in a fashion world that relegates our city to a glamorous backwater, the territorial version of a dumb blonde, an outpost lacking sufficient wit and imagination to create clothes even while turning out the Nicole Kidmans and Gwyneth Paltrows whose ability to look stunning plays no small role in selling clothes to a celebrity-obsessed public and, by extension, selling the garments' publicity-hungry designers.

Los Angeles has produced only one haute couture designer, Richard Tyler, partly bemuse fashion ambitions generally send those who harbor them off to Paris, New York, or Milan and because Los Angeles designers tend to be reputed less for the flesh they cover than for the flesh they reveal. The talented David Cardona, for example, creates beautifully flowing clothes that are, as he told the Los Angeles Times, "all about sex," a sales pitch that fails to recognize that sex without nuance is ultimately uninteresting. Cardona has costumed Cher and Janet Jackson, and to say that this comes as no surprise is not necessarily a compliment. Mason's clothes are another matter. Belly buttons occasionally peek out from her low-rise pants and skirts, but in general, her designs have that grave and graceful dignity one finds in Mason herself. Then again her work with black leather and ragged hems has an edginess that she does not possess. The strength of these clothes may be that she invests them with both who she is and who she isn't.

MICHELLE MASON'S STUDIO IN DOWNtown Los Angeles is a haven of quiet style set amid concrete and rusting cyclone fences. Its spare rooms are dominated by two cabinets that compose a massive armoire, bought on a visit to Beijing, and by a courtyard thick with bamboo. It is the decorating style of a woman who loves beauty but is suspicious of ornamentation, who designs and wears eye-catching boots and shoes but avoids makeup and jewelry.

Mason was born in Seoul and immigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of ten. She grew up in Tustin and Westminster. Her mother taught piano and worked as a seamstress. She would look at fabrics, touching them, imagining how they would feel. "I want a skirt in this," she would tell her mother, pointing out a piece of silk or soft wool, "with a little pleat."

She always loved to draw, and after two years at Cal State Long Beach she combined her interests by taking up fashion illustration. Her parents supported the goal, and for this she was grateful. "In a lot of Asian families," she says, "you had to be a lawyer or a doctor."

She found a job in the designer section of Nordstrom, where she could study good clothes; her fascination with workmanship drew her to Europeans. It struck her that Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler had exquisite detailing she did not find in pieces by, for example, Calvin Klein. The one American designer who interested her was Richard Tyler--who worked as Europeans did, using rich silk charmeuse linings and hand-finished buttonholes. When Tyler came to Nordstrom for a trunk show, she told him that she was about to attend Otis Parsons School of Art and Design and that when she graduated she hoped to work for him. As it happened, Tyler needed someone to illustrate for him right away, so at 21, she began an apprenticeship that taught her how things should be done.

Two years later she went to Europe, settling in London. There she studied clothes: the original detailing in pieces by Alexander McQueen, the conceptual garments of Hussein Chalayan. She supported herself as a house model, finding plentiful work except in instances when she was turned down with the phrase "we already have an Asian girl." Modeling for Chalayan, she wore dresses contrived of glow-in-the-dark fabrics and dresses sprayed with paint and then buried under ten feet of soil. She lived on "jacket potatoes"--the British term for baked potatoes--saving money for the day when she would need it to launch herself as a designer.

She returned to the States at 25 and started with shoes, because shoe lines are easier to get into stores. When she moved on to clothes, she sought to fuse the standards she learned from Tyler, the daring of the young British designers, and the steadfastness of Ann Demeulmeester, who refuses to compromise even as her business expands. At the same time, to avoid any direct influence of other designers, she stopped looking at clothes in stores and in fashion publications. This insistence on proceeding from inspiration alone gives Mason her vision and reveals her as a Southern Californian. "Until a few months ago," she says, "I didn't know the difference between Edwardian and Victorian."

Although Mason has celebrity clients, she does not court and does not give clothes away. These stances are pretty much unheard of in the current fashion environment, in which stars get armloads of clothes in exchange for publicity, and Oscar nominees receive flowers and gifts from designers positioning themselves as the answer to that terminally tacky but professionally useful Joan Rivers query, "Who are you wearing?"

MICHELLE MASON FINISHED her spring 2002 collection in August. She was feeling romantic, and many of the pieces suggest wedding attire. There is the ivory viscose-blend jacket with a portrait collar, a coordinated skirt, and an ivory silk chiffon blouse. There is the chocolate-and-nude silk chevron-print halter wrap dress and the blond viscose full-length wrap coat with matching cuffed trousers. Mason favors what she calls "somber clothes," and this collection is, for the most part, grounded in a palette of dusty mauves and coffees, taupes and sands. As ever, she uses the finest fabrics, the softest leathers, embellishing them with antique lace and Swarovski crystal brooches.

The collection was to be shown at her first show in New York, which was scheduled for September 12, 2001. It was canceled, of course, along with the rest of fashion week. Mason and her boyfriend, who is her business partner as well, left the city in a rented car, driving away from the deathly quiet.

Since then, Mason has discovered what we have all discovered: that one of the things attacked that day in September was the American sensibility. We can see this in clothing stores, where racks are heavy with stuff whose acquisition once seemed the great reward of industry and life and now seems beside the point. This is a bitter truth for everyone in the clothing industry, from designers to shop owners to button makers. Naturally, it stands to have greater impact on the poorest end of this intertwined human chain, on the ones who do not have lofts in TriBeCa and houses in the Hamptons and international corporate backing. The fashion industry is doing itself little good in this regard. Its output this season is huge but not hugely gifted. The tone it is taking is more stridently off, key than anything heard since Hubert Humphrey ran for president in the wake of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. exclaiming about "the politics of joy."

What are we to make of the November Vogue cover that has Britney Spears reclining on an American flag? Or of Vogue models holding little American flags while smiling too brightly? Then there is the call to arms by the magazine's editor, Anna Wintour, who assures us that we need fashion more than ever now to keep us in touch "with our dreamy, fanciful, self-pleasing natures." I don't know whom you have seen lately, but people I see are wearing black and have been jolted into recognition that our self-pleasing natures are something we better get over.