Bill Blass: Som-nambulant

The classic American designer is six feet under. Or at least two of their leading number are, which is one reason that labels like Halston and Bill Blass are having such a hard time reanimating. Yesterday it was Peter Som's turn to breathe life into what had at one time been a big-league brand: Bill Blass. Blass died in 2002, and in the six years since four designers have braved the challenge. The first was fired after his debut collection; the second lasted slightly longer and the third lasted two seasons longer than the second. Now there is a fourth. Peter Som, who has an eponymous label, worked in the Blass design room before branching out on his own. Som designs polite frocks and slightly matronly separates for the type of young lady who legitimately gets married in white. On occasion, a look will be so demure that it seems like a reaction to the present cheapness of youth culture.

American fashion has taken a smackdown since the 1980s. Formerly marked by a good taste that was handed down from mother to daughter, it is now a battleground of generational opposition. Daughters no longer wish to look like their mothers; they want to wear expensively deconstructed apparel with odd, often fetish-like decoration. Or they buy frothy couture that looks like a child's idea of a grown-up's dress. In this latter they pose coyly, with their toes turned in and their shoulders hunched against adulthood.

It works the other way as well; a recent spate of tulle brought out the little ballerina in fifty-somethings.

The designers fired by the Blass label received a manifesto that stressed the importance of designing for the younger generation, including Young Hollywood. That, it was emphasized, is where the money and the all-important branding opportunities are. We have become a culture that lives by flashbulb and strobe; there is no underestimating the instantaneous sales boomerang of well-placed paparazzi photographs.

Som walked into this modern conundrum with the experience of his prior work at the label, and then he sleepwalked through his first collection.

The problem is that Som was asked not just to bring fresh relevancy to a label, but to spearhead--along with Marco Zanini at Halston-- an American fashion renaissance. For whatever reason, this burden rests with the designers of the master-class brands. In an ideal world, these younger designers would become not only heirs but arbiters.

The world is not ideal and the task is not simple: Honor thy father while making him hip. It's a tall order and one that is so far driving a further wedge between the generations. The clothes Som designed for Blass were supposed to satisfy the needs of both child and parent and perhaps the odd grandmother thrown in between.

It's no wonder Som reached into the grave and reiterated some of the less important classic Blass. Marco Zanini played safe--too safe-- while acting as a medium at Halston, and Som tiptoed towards Blass holding the pretty-party dance card. In either case, there was the well-publicized demand for vigorous fiscal return.

Zanini's Halston collection was deliberately imitative and retro; Som for Blass was imitative and not new. Those designs he chose as his guide simply looked unfresh, referring to an era that had as two of its main features social inaccessibility and a certain powdered vanity. His job was to style this past into something presently approachable.

He did something right, although exactly what might be missed in the critical drubbing. Perhaps drubbing is the wrong word, it implies that someone is invested. Yawning might be the better choice. Still, there is a small segment of society that does not want its fashion separated from its ego, and that is where Som's collection succeeded. These are the anti-modernists, and yes, many of them are young conservative Republicans. For the rest, who put their own idiosyncrasies before societal expectations, Som's show was full of bourgeois uniforms.

Let's assume that the definition of "fashion" must include recency. Not random alteration without momentum, but recency. If this is the case, then Som's designs are not "fashion"; they fall into a netherworld of middle-class values in which the presumption of taste is probably the most critical element. They are past-tense class markers when class markers are no longer fashionable themselves.

It's not the end of the world, but it's not the beginning of a new one, either.

Images: Style.com