Been There, Seen That, Done That

By JAY COCKS

The shirts sound off with letters dense as coal and inches high. They are oversized Ts, big enough to sleep two stevedores comfortably and colored like signal flags. Wearable broadsides: CHOOSE LIFE. HEROIN FREE ZONE. PRESERVE THE RAIN FORESTS. EDUCATION NOT MISSILES.

Such shirts are the most noted creation of British Designer Katharine Hamnett, who showed up at a 1984 London fashion-biz reception to shake hands with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sporting a T that had something rather pointed to say about the presence of Pershing missiles in Europe. "I didn't realize the effect wearing that T shirt would have on my reputation," the designer insists. The incident, well covered in the press, did make her a bit notorious, which was a novelty. She had, after all, already spent some time being one of the best designers in England.

Hamnett, 39, has a deft hand for funk, and her clothes for men and women look lived-in even when they are freshly pressed, like something hung on a wooden peg behind the back door. She works largely and most successfully in utilitarian fabrics: cotton drill, lining silk and, for the coming season, leather that seems to have been ridden over by a motorcycle gang on a rainy Sunday. Her lines are loose and simple, the detailing fine and witty and heavy on the pockets. The clothes are not remakes of hardy perennials like parkas and biker jackets, but revisions of them. Even her dressier duds have the aged-in feeling of favored sportswear. Maybe better than anyone else just now, Hamnett captures the roughed-up elegance of the everyday. Everything she makes is a little playful, like her swimsuits, and as homey as a pair of jeans. And her denims, indeed, tempt the wearer to apostasy: they just could be better than Levi's.

Hamnett's influence is strong all over the fashion range, from the well- crafted intricacies of Marithe and Francois Girbaud to the heavy assimilations of Go Silk, a new American line that seems to have been entirely inspired by Hamnett's deft work with lining fabric. "I was called 'possibly the most copied designer working today' in the Observer," Hamnett reflects, managing to sound proud and a touch rueful at the same time. Her clothes are available all around the U.S., but the fullest range can be found at the designer's showcase store on London's Brompton Road. Originally an automobile garage, the shop has enough floor space to comfortably accommodate menswear, women's clothes and a Roman chariot race. "There could be more clothes in it," frets Danish-born Fashion Entrepreneur Peder Bertelsen, who backs Hamnett's retail enterprises on the designer's home turf. "Katharine's very exciting to work with," he adds. "She shouts at me and calls me names I can't find in the English dictionary."

It is likely that Hamnett picked up some of her more exotic expletives during a girlhood that was spent around the military. Her father was a British air attache, and she and her family shuttled between European air bases and embassies, where she played at being "mademoiselle on the reception line dying to go home and loosen her corselet." Everything got loosened up at St. | Martin's School of Art. Hamnett married, disastrously. With a friend, she had started her first fashion company in 1969, but it went bust, in the wake of a bitter divorce, in 1975. "I eventually lost everything," she says. To support herself and her older son Sam, now ten, she free-lanced for some small sportswear labels inItaly, and she kept on making clothes to sell from her London home. Finally, in 1979, she was able to start her own company with a loan of $750. Last year the business racked up close to $15 million in sales.

Such success brings a little creature comfort for Hamnett, Sam and young William (born in 1981), like the getaway cottage the family keeps in Majorca. It also permits the designer an occasional indulgence (her North London office, walled round with papier-mache rock, looks like Plato's cave built from a prefab kit) and a healthy dose of esthetic restiveness. "I try to be creative and earn money at it," she says. "But it's like being a painter and having a gun pointed at you. I envy Marcel Duchamp for just stopping. Though he had a rich wife." Hamnett's Buddhism keeps her on course ("I'm not into chanting, though I will occasionally when I want a parking space, which is naughty"), and her own vitality keeps her on the move. "Been there, seen that, done that" is the way she reviews old notions en route to fresh inspiration. The "most copied designer working today" is not about to go into details of her new women's clothes, which were to be shown during the London collections on March 14, but she does say, "The feeling in the collection is old jewelry, the real thing . . . I'm making educated clothes."

She is also still making waves. Concerned about pressing issues of public health, she says, "We're thinking of having Katharine Hamnett condoms, like peppermints, in the shops." She is also making boxer shorts with special condom pockets, while Bertelsen, wary of a "campaign about AIDS," worries about her "going too far." That, of course, is the compass point at which Hamnett is perpetually fixed. She has, indeed, come up with a new T shirt for these dire days (frankie says use condoms), but confesses that she did have to compromise a bit. "I wanted to do the pope says use condoms," she says. "But it is libelous."

With reporting by Liz Nickson/London