The Hot-Selling Locker Room Look

By Georgia Harbison

Kamali's "sweatsuits" embody both the funky and the practical

No one has ever seen her jog. She has no time for tennis. And she certainly does not play baseball, soccer, basketball or any of the other sweaty sports that absorb millions of Americans. "Watching people on the street is my thing," says Clothes Designer Norma Kamali.

As a result of that tranquil pleasure, Kamali, 36, a petite, reclusive native New Yorker of Basque-Lebanese descent, finds herself at the center of a fashion revolution. It had its small beginnings last year on one of the trails of Manhattan. "I noticed one day that joggers weren't wearing gray any more," Kamali recalls, "and I thought, hey, what happened to sweatshirts? So I bought some sweatshirt material and began cutting and sewing."

Last spring, Kamali's sweat cloths, transformed into 35 items from miniskirts to harem pants, arrived in U.S. stores. She had taken that dull, cotton fleece, a staple of Army-Navy stores, and turned it into a line of casual haute couture outfits that could be worn to offices or parties.

None of the items sold for more than $80, and no store could keep Kamalis in supply long enough to satisfy her votaries. In one day, New York's Saks Fifth Avenue sold out its entire stock. A few blocks away, Bloomingdale's was forced to close down its separate Kamali shop this summer because her clothes went so fast the manufacturer could not keep up with reorders; hoping that the cutters and stitchers will speed things up, however, Bloomie's will open an expanded version of that shop this month. Last spring, Kamali had to lock the doors of her own New York boutique for an entire day when customers, getting wind of a fresh shipment of sweats, noisily stormed her portals. In the Chicago area, Kamali fans maintain an informal hot line on where her clothes can be found. "Kamali is going beyond anyone's imagination," says Sidney Kimmel, chairman of Jones Apparel Group, which makes her sport sweat line. "When we started getting reorders from Midwest counties not known to jump on a fad, we saw she was a universal trend." Adds Jeff Gersten, co-owner of Chicago's Sugar Magnolia boutique: "Just as there are Bruce Springsteen heads, there now are Kamali heads."

A combination of 1960s Carnaby Street funk and the locker room, the Kamali sweat look has captured the whimsical and practical sides of the American woman's fancy. "Her clothes have a little wit and a little dare," explains Vogue Editor Grace Mirabella.. But they have their drawbacks too. The exaggerated silhouette and overgrown pants and tops are not for the timid. Moreover, while sweat material is not delicate, it must get special care so it will not shrink or droop.

Whatever the perils of shrink or droop, they show no effect on sales. Manufacturer Kimmel figured he would do about $2 million this year in retail business. But Kamali already has grossed more than $10 million in the U.S. and eight other countries. Next year, sales could soar to $24 million. Variety may be one of the answers. No longer just humble gray, the sweats now come in stripes and seven colors. There are short cheerleader-type rah-rah dresses and skirts, harem pants, saucy knickers, long bomber jackets, and oversized sweatshirts to be worn over tights as minidresses or as tunics with pants. For fall Kamali has added bright, bold, billowing flannel jumpsuits and--shades of 7 Love Lucy--Fred Mertz pants with shoulder straps and Ethel Mertz wrap dresses.

Her new dressy holiday line, due in the stores this month, again uses sweat material, this time black-with-gold lurex laced through it. Nearly all her tops have giant removable shoulder pads.

Kal Ruttenstein, fashion director at Bloomingdale's, observes: "Norma Kamali took an obvious American idiom and made it sophisticated fashion. The woman who used to wear a suit and blouse now wears her sweats." And Bergdorf Goodman's Executive Vice President Dawn Mello proclaims: "Norma is queen of the sweatshirt. It's like when jeans started. Norma is the new Levi Strauss."

A dozen years ago, the 5-ft. 4-in., 107-Ib. Kamali began designing her couture line of alluring, often kooky clothes, among them wild, feathered jackets. Today she lets her fantasy run free on extravagant gowns constructed of genuine Tiffany glass beads ($5,000), bomber jackets made of python skins ($2,500), jumpsuits tailored from gold lame ($850). A body-conscious coterie of customers, the sexy avant-garde of fashion, are fanatic followers of Kamali. Raquel Welch is having Kamali design her costumes for her upcoming picture The Swindle, and Disco Goddess Donna Summer wore Kamali on her last tour. Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross are regular customers in Kamali's Beverly Hills Neiman-Marcus boutique.

Scavullo in 1976 chose one of Kamali's bikinis for a Cosmopolitan cover, and since that time she has been known for her sensuous swimsuits. Like a mother hen, she keeps a tight watch on her swim line and handpicks the seamstresses who sew her provocative suits. Says Kamali: "Swimwear is about the most difficult thing to do. It's for an individual's body, and you're responsible for everything, including the cellulite."

Ironically, Kamali once looked with contempt at her present trade. "I thought being a designer was the most superficial goal anyone could have," she says. "It's not like finding a cure for cancer, or being an artist." A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1964, Norma Ar-raez's real goal was to be a painter. But not a starving one. So instead she started out as a fashion illustrator. Wanderlust struck in 1966, however, and she joined an airline as a reservations clerk. On trips abroad, she always stopped in London to pick up far-out fashions, and in 1968 she and Mohammed Houssein Kamali, her Persian-student husband of one year, opened a New York shop of imported clothes.

When London's kooky clothes ran low, Kamali began making her own. Years ahead of the fashion pack, Kamali designed hot pants in 1969, the first in the U.S. "I can make something to wear out of anything," is her motto, and true to it, in 1974 Kamali took a nylon parachute, rip cords and all, and produced the first fashionable jumpsuits. A couple of years later, Kamali, owner of a sleeping bag, realized she would no longer have time to go camping, once her favorite pastime. So she cut up the bag, fashioned a fiber-filled coat and thus was born the precursor of the down clothing rage. Right now, she is working on a new inexpensive line for young children.

Kamali's work methods are unique.

Unlike other designers who create from sketches, Kamali drapes a fabric over her own body to see how it falls. She then begins cutting and sewing with the fabric still on her. It is from this master sample that patterns are made. This curious system may well stem from her teen-age days, when she would stitch herself into tight pants, then extricate herself with a seam ripper.

Divorced nine years ago and still single, Kamali rarely goes to parties or socializes, and spends most of her time in the basement workroom of her midtown Manhattan store. She lives next door to her shop with a miniature dachshund, Ernie, in a small, one-bedroom converted marble showroom. Though the name of her shop--OMO, for On My Own--has a militant ring, Kamali is not an ardent feminist. (The first business she shared with her husband was called Kamali, and to break clean with the past she settled on the name OMO for her sleek, new, triple-level boutique.) She rarely travels, often works until midnight and has not taken a day off in months. "I know I'm intense," she says, "but I express humor in my clothes. I'm even trying to find a Mel Brooks to spend the rest of my life with."

A maverick among designers, Kamali refuses to do fashion shows, feeling they stroke designers' egos more than they benefit customers. Often Kamali waits anonymously on customers. In that role, she gets honest feedback on her clothes: "You know instantaneously if you're right on target or if you're not with what people need and want." Kamali believes she has heard the message: she's going to keep on sweating. --By Georgia Harbison

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