Anyone She Wants to Be

Assuming that the purpose of fashion is to allow women to express their individual personalities, the U.S. -designed collections of fall and winter clothes, shown in Manhattan last week, are just about the best ever. Never before has the American woman been presented with quite so much imagination and diversity. So wide is her range of choice that she can be practically anything or anyone she wants to be.

For weekends in the country, Donald Brooks will turn her into a swaggering Robin Hood with leather leggings and jaunty plumed hats by Milliner Archie Eason, worn perhaps with a short, checked polo coat and matching shorts, or with a pony-skin raincoat. If she would rather be Tom Sawyer, Chester Weinberg has just the thing: avocado green velvet overalls that come to midcalf, and are topped by a lace-trimmed blouse. With George Stavropoulos, she can play the Greek goddess in classical floor-length gowns trailing yards of filmy chiffon.

Touchdowns & Astronauts. Oscar de la Renta believes in girl Cossacks -- a long beige coat bordered with fur and tied with a belt, to be worn over a minidress and shorts with thigh-high leather boots. Pauline Trigere offers the medieval look with hooded neckpieces that come off to reveal deep V necklines in close-fitting, floor-length gowns with long sleeves. For lady football fans, there are Geoffrey Beene"touchdown" dresses -- long, sequined sacks in purple with yellow shoulder patches or arm stripes and big numerals on the front, just like overextended football jerseys. Rudi Gernreich is pushing a combination of what he calls the "Renaissance page quality" and the astronaut look, mixing his capes with Layne Nielsen's visored helmets, or putting together a long corduroy coachman's coat with vest, pants and satin ascot shirt ("It's a combination of George Sand and Cher").

Hemlines? Since the midcalf Maxi skirts began showing up in Paris earlier this spring, the question has been whether or not skirts would take a big plunge this fall. Rest easy, men: skirts are still flying high. "There's no controversy about skirt lengths as long as they're twelve inches above the knee," wags Gernreich. Actually, he will ship them five inches longer than that--which is a good idea, since a skirt much shorter is no skirt at all. And, to be on the safe side, Rudi recommends double skirts--a longer underskirt for ordinary streetwear, which can be slipped off in more casual surroundings, leaving the mini-mini.

Buccaneer Boots. To be sure, there were some Maxis. Weinberg did a couple in velvet, but he also showed many skirts that came three inches to five inches above the knee. Jacques Tiffeau offered up some Maxis, or "midis," as he calls them, but he, too, paraded a number of minis, some dramatically teamed with floor-length "Minuit" coats. Most designers seemed to side with Trigere: "I don't believe in the midi, or sweeping New York dirt into your apartment." Thus, in most collections, though skirts are floor length for evening, they fall somewhere above the knee for daytime, and are almost always to be worn with over-the-knee boots in soft glove leather or stretch vinyl. Come winter, those boots will offer women a promise even more welcome than the thrill of feeling like a buccaneer: an end to polar kneecap.

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