Born and Worn in the U.S.a.

By Jay Cocks.

First order of business is a little reassurance.

American fashion design has been tied up in knots of inferiority for years now. The home team struggles gamely to uphold the classic couture tradition, but, despite the cheerleading of merchandisers and the national fashion press, swank is not what the U.S.A. does best. There is no national knack for it. Fancy dress, American-style, veers between the grandiloquent tack of Nolan Miller's Dynasty duds and the glum glitz of the Seventh Avenue couturiers. If hell, as Sartre suggested, is other people, they will be dressed by Oscar de la Renta.

No need to feel outclassed, though. American designers created a style wholly their own: easy, natural, more egalitarian than high fashion, inspired by work clothes and play clothes. Americans, it might be said, brought the weekend wardrobe into the workday. It was all an extension of what English Designer Katharine Hamnett, who works high-style wonders on lowborn fabric, calls "the whole denim philosophy." Truly revolutionary. And all-American.

Well, not really. Try, as the commercials say, this simple test. Quick: name the single most uniquely American garment. Jeans, of course. Get ready for a little bad news. It seems that Levi's, the original denim pants, were not completely American. Itinerant Merchant Levi Strauss showed up in the California goldfields in 1850 carrying a roll of tent canvas to peddle. Pants were what the prospectors really needed, however, something strong enough to hold up in the diggings. Strauss found a tailor to turn his tent canvas into trousers and ordered more cloth from his brothers in New York. To fill Levi's order, the boys turned to their original fabric source: France.

It gets worse. The word denim comes from the French, de Nimes (of Nimes), and even jeans comes from the French for Genoa, the Italian city where a similar twill weave was produced. Such news is tough on the old native pride --like finding out Paul Revere was an illegal alien, but the folks across the sea have been very good about not rubbing it in. In fact, most designers wax rhapsodic about the way American sportswear--for which jeans remain the perfect symbol--has limbered up fashion all over the world. "American designers have brought forward a much more contemporary side to fashion," says Christian Lacroix, whose collections for Jean Patou have made him the hottest couturier in Paris. "The clothes have comfort, quality, practicality, neatness, elegance." Giorgio Armani, who did for men's clothes what Chanel did for women's, could not have reshaped and relaxed the male silhouette without the influence of American sportswear. "Italy had no real part in this tradition," he points out. "All the sportswear influences had to come from abroad." Just like Mr. Strauss's fabric.

Well, at least Levi thought of the pants. That kind of inspiration--part design epiphany, part blinding flash of mercantile opportunity--has been the foundation of American fashion ever since. It has helped to nurture both the largest fashion market and the biggest fashion businesses in the world. "It's a dreadful thing to say, I suppose," muses London's award-winning Betty Jackson, "but I do think that British designers are far more innovative and a bit more daring. But American designers are probably infinitely more wealthy than any of us, so they're probably doing it all right, and we're doing it all + wrong." Comments Hamnett: " The average size of an American fashion company must be about $90 million. That's very serious money, and serious money tends to be very cautious."

That caution breeds a conservatism about dress that can either turn classic or become restrictive. "The clothing is so rational," says Rei Kawakubo, whose designs for Comme des Garons are at once ravishing and cerebral. "Many Americans don't want to experiment with anything inconvenient." Calvin Klein, on the other hand, says flat out that "the modern woman is American. She's working; she's active. She's involved. She can't spend her life thinking just about clothes. Things have to be made easier for her."

This sportswear ideal of relaxed simplicity has spread from the low to the high end of American fashion, and its application can be rigorous. Donna Karan, Seventh Avenue's newest shining star, cites Klein and Ralph Lauren as major influences because "they've geared into a concept and carried it out from beginning to end. It's a signature." Karan's own hand is simple, strong and, in the best tradition of American design, distinctive without being demonstrative. "I believe strongly in simplicity, in uniforms," she says. "You don't need a plethora of clothes in your closet. They have to be integral pieces that work together so you never have to think about what you're wearing."

The working genius of American design has been a reshaping of populism, a refining of utilitarian purity into a kind of splendiferous native simplicity. Consider the sweatshirt, used first for gym uniforms. Just as Chanel had turned humble jersey into spectacular couture, the ebullient Norma Kamali used sweatshirting in 1981 to make rambunctious fashions for young women. Sweaters with the shape and ease of sweatshirts began to appear too, and the idea spread across the sea and up the fashion scale. Now there are ravishing Armani cashmeres shaped like something to wear for a volleyball tournament but that float over the body like a beach breeze.

Two of the greatest designers of this century were Americans--Claire McCardell and Charles James--but, truth be told, there is not a designer on the American scene now who can match Armani's bold finesse, never mind the inventiveness of Issey Miyake, the deluxe grace of Yves Saint Laurent or Karl Lagerfeld, the Zen funkiness of Yohji Yamamoto. The best American design tends to be generic, not designer labeled. It would be hard to find, for instance, a designer who has been influenced by Louis Dell'Olio, but it would be equally impossible to find an Italian leather blouson that is not derived in some way from the rumble-ready splendor of an American black leather motorcycle jacket. Paris' Claude Montana appears almost invariably in some combination of the same basic outfit: jeans, T shirt, a hooded sweatshirt and a nylon military jacket lined in phosphorescent orange. Montana may make some of the hottest duds on the runways, but he looks strictly made in the U.S.A.

If many of the more established designers around the world pick out Ralph Lauren as the designer they think of as "most American," that may be because Lauren has put his signature, and his galloping Polo logo, onto garments that had been in the national fashion vocabulary for years. From beach house to boardroom, pinstripe to roll collar to penny loafer, Lauren codified and merchandised America's dearest dreams of middle-class elegance, then brokered the fantasies back to the market that inspired them. This has nothing to do with design as practiced by Kawakubo or Miyake, but Lauren has seized on a national stereotype and sold it around the world as something classically American. "What I like about Ralph Lauren," says Lacroix, "is his traditional American side." When Lacroix works at his Patou atelier, he wears one of Lauren's denim jackets.

A true American traditionalist would look elsewhere for the real foundation of American fashion: at the wrap-around drama of some Bausch & Lomb Ray-Bans, at the democratic perfection of a simple Hanes T shirt. Ideas for American clothes are sketched, smoothed over and sold on Seventh Avenue, but the real inspiration comes from all over the country: from what teenagers wear to cruise Revere Beach outside Boston or the Galleria mall in the San Fernando Valley; from the work clothes of soldiers and astronauts; from the wardrobe tricks of rock stars and artists at gallery openings. Much of what is best in American fashion--and almost all of what has had an impact--is not identifiable by designer. It comes from attitude as much as from a closet, and no one, not even Ralph Lauren, has ever figured out how to sew a label onto spirit.

With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York, with other bureaus