
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 24, 1991                   TAG: 9103220468
SECTION: SPRING FASHION                    PAGE: E-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CATHY HORYN/ THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

SOME DESIGNERS GIVE FASHION THE SLIP

In an ongoing effort to take fashion to its minimalist extreme - a course that ultimately may lead to public nudity - designers are looking at slips with new-found lust. This undergarment has suffered in recent years, a casualty of pants and bodysuits, but now designers are hoping that it will be more popular if it's worn with no clothes at all.

Tenuously supported by spaghetti straps, the slip dress was hailed at the October runway shows in Europe and New York as the new springtime look.

John Galliano's versions were flimsy whiffs of chiffon, layered in triplicate and worn by sleepy-looking models. Martin Margiela's motives were no less transparent: sheer black maxi slips worn over broken-down blue jeans.

Given the design limitations of a slip, it was little wonder that so many of the runway abbreviations simply looked recycled from the lingerie department. Not even the odd intrusion of pink taffeta, tied gift-box style around the hips, or the last-minute rhinestone brooch could lift these sweet nothings from their fundamental nothingness.

The slip dress can be seen as a softer, less aggressive way of showing off the body. Fashion people define such scantiness as minimalism and praise it as modern; in fact, the slip dress has been around since the '20s. Back then, the sight of underarms and thinly veiled breasts was scandalous enough to warrant newspaper editorials.

"What is a modern girl?" asked the London Weekly Dispatch in 1925. To which Lady Walpole replied: "She is an inane, insane, Eton-cropped, useless, idle, mannish young woman who smokes doped cigarettes, uses bad language, wears practically no clothes, and is an abomination to her fellow creatures."

But freedom in dress was the real issue. The corset never had a prayer after Coco Chanel abolished it, except as a high-fashion fetish.

The current slip dress also is freedom in motion - the freedom to wear next to nothing or, for the truly disobedient, to buy one's latest party dress in the lingerie department.

by CNB