Swim wear man fashion

IF YOU ENCOUNTER A WHITE-HAIRED man in glasses who walks with the energy of someone half his age and claims to be the designer at a fashion house with revenues upwards of $350 million and also to be its CEO, owner, and founder, this man is either delusional or he is Max Azria.

At 53, Azria, a man of obvious extremes, Has forgone the dubious safety of Familiar ground to make his fortune producing Extraordinary clothes at extraordinarily reasonable prices. Since establishing BCBGMaxAzria in 1989, he has run the company in his usual exuberant and pixilated manner, one that suggests what you would get by crossing Zorba the Greek with a leprechaun.

Azria's life has a picture-book quality: There is the gracious home in Beverly Hills, the stunning wife who is also his design director, the six children from two marriages gathered around the Shabbat table whose relationship with him is such that his oldest daughter chose home schooling because she wanted to work full-time at his corporate headquarters in Vernon.

No wonder that Azria refers to himself as an optimist and retains the unfettered enthusiasms most people temper or abandon around the time that enthusing lands them in trouble. Azria stays out of trouble, which speaks to his gift, as a man, businessman, and designer, for navigating the precipice without tumbling over it.

AZRIA'S CLOTHES DO WHAT the best clothes do: They move, feel good; they incorporate trends but for the most part never go out of style. Like those of innovators such as Rick Owens and Yohji Yamamoto, Azria's designs manifest their creator's ideals and nature, whereas the output of designers who replicate what Cher wore in 1975 or rework the caftans of impoverished tribes into gowns for the wealthy manifests only their own impoverishment.

Azria's aesthetic took shape in Tunisia, where he was born, and in Paris, where his family moved when he was 12. Tunisia's sunbaked vistas would turn up in his palette, which lately favors dark brown, olive, and terra-cotta; Parisian sophistication would give him a taste for classic clothes with an edge.

As a boy Azria was intrigued by the rebelliousness personified by James Dean, and he has, by his own account, "always done things differently." As he matured and grew worldly he refreshed his views with sojourns to ten cities a year and remained what the Beats called a "free spirit," a term that connoted high praise until the cartoonist Jules Feiffer got ahold of it. These days his ideal city is Los Angeles, where he loves spending the day in white Prada pajamas and one of his countless pairs of Puma sneakers. What attracts him, in other words, is beauty and ease spiked with an element that is, as he puts it, "a little wild, a little crazy." These tastes, grafted onto his fall offerings, elevate to fashion otherwise merely pretty Chantilly lace dresses, silk chiffon tops, and pebble-grain leather jackets.

The initials "BCBG" stand for Azria's essentials: bon chic, bon genre, French slang for "good style, good attitude"--a motto that distinguishes him in a world that defines essentials as things to buy. Azria's essentials are a woman's state of being and mind, considerations less corporeal than metaphysical.

"Ninety-nine percent of the women are insecure," he says. "The insecurity is always the basis of dispute and bad feeling."

In this sense, a woman will be disappointed if she equates new clothes with a new, improved version of herself. "The outside won't look right," Azria often says, "if the inside isn't right."

It's a philosophy that has the potential to make Azria more welcome on Oprah than at fashion awards shows. It also separates him from the usual cast of characters who perceive fashion as a high-priced bandage that a woman can place over the wound that is herself. This proposition, however doomed and self-defeating, has the tacit support of an industry that communicates with the public by way of compliant magazines with their lists of "have to have," "gotta get," "what's in and what's out." It is no surprise that what is out at the moment are the peasant tops and turquoise jewelry that led gotta-get lists last season.

THE FIRST BCBG BOUTIQUE opened in Brentwood ten years ago, a harbinger of a greater plan that was, at best, quixotic and, at worst, a blueprint for bankruptcy The plan called for creating apparel cut from the fine fabrics so appealing to the sensualist in Azria that he would touch them to his face to test them. These clothes would have the high-end requisite of attention to detail but would not sell for the high-end tariffs that give price tags as many numerals as some license plates. They would be presented in beautifully designed shops, carried home in shopping bags of the highest quality, and sold by a staff who knew that chiffon was a fabric, as salespeople at certain pricey emporiums often did not. The plan's all too obvious challenges made no dent in the stubborn confidence of Azria, who, in his teens, imported American jeans to France, recur them, sold them back to retailers in the States, and became a millionaire by the time he was 20.

This plan suited Azria's fierce ambition and gentle being, for its egalitarianism mirrored his unobstructed worldview that did not allow for categorizing people by race, status, background, or age. "A woman is, first of all, ageless," he says, a statement you would be hard-pressed to hear from a plastic surgeon and one that is entirely credible coming from a man whose best friend is 25 years younger than he is and who so defies categorization himself that as his fame grew, he was fated to be depicted by fashion writers in dichotomous phrases like "dynamic Cheshire cat" and "chic mad scientist."

At the start Azria was derided by the fashion establishment, which did not share his conviction that on the perpetually spinning carousel that is capitalism the plan was a gold ring, or would be once he raised enough money to manufacture and ship his designs. This he did by stocking his Brentwood store with knit dresses, skirts, and a year later, stirrup pants so popular, he sold 100,000 pieces. With that he converted a young line into one that brings to his commodious dressing rooms women from 16 to 60: secretaries barely making the rent on studio apartments for whom Azria's $168 pants are a major splurge and lunching ladies whose closet space is measured in square yards and stuffed with clothes from designers from whom a pocket cannot be purchased for that amount.

During the 1990s, Azria established 156 boutiques in a dozen nations, some of them in China, Bahrain, and Kuwait, some on major shopping streets like Madison Avenue, Rodeo Drive, and the Boulevard Madeleine, some measuring 10,000 square feet and featuring music and a Max Cafe.

By 2002, BCBGMaxAzria had II divisions: Collection, Jeans, Dresses, Eveningwear, Handbags, Small Leather Goods, Belts, Eyewear, Swim, Footwear, and Fragrance. As the plan's flowing skirts and body-hugging sweaters turned up on Sex and the City and on the forms of Sharon Stone, Julia Roberts, and Debra Messing, the establishment's scorn turned to respect, and Azria erased the gap between what he wanted and what he had.

Not long ago he asked one of his employees, "Which is less expensive, a shirt from Kmart or from me?"

"Kmart," she replied.

"How much is a Kmart shirt?"

"Twenty-nine dollars."

"And my shirt?"

"A hundred and twenty."

"And how many times do you wear a Kmart shirt?"

"Twice."

"And my shirt?"

"Three years."

"So, the Kmart shirt costs fifteen dollars each time you wear it," said Azria. "My shirt costs a dollar."

Recounting this, Azria laughs the delighted laugh of a designer and an entrepreneur whose plan, in a troubled economy, is the quintessential idea whose time has come and validates his eccentric notion that in the yin and yang of life, you get more by taking less.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Los Angeles Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group