"But Gordon, I Want It All"

By Martha Duffy

Times are shaky in the fashion world. Business is flat, department stores an endangered species, customers bored. Amid the unending cycle of sales and the unmapped racks that cram discount outlets, the industry is looking hard for what it calls direction. Anything goes now -- minis, dirndls, see-throughs, slouches -- but none of it is going very far. So the time seems right for a young designer with a couple of bright ideas and a lot of insouciant charm. California-born Gordon Henderson, for instance.

Henderson is young (32), handsome, black, with boldness and brights to burn. Surrounded by his newly hired employees, making way for the workmen who are adding a floor to his Seventh Avenue headquarters, he has that born-yesterday look. Henderson has been in business on his own for less than a year, but he has already won the Council of Fashion Designers of America's award for best new talent. What captivated the jaded professional eyes was the fresh colors of his simple, breezy separates. Burnished goldenrod, glowing coppery brown, deep plum, a palette of greens that goes from pale apple to ripe olive -- his hues seem drawn from the earth itself.

Sound simple? It isn't. Sensitivity to color subtleties and a sophisticated flair for mixing them are fairly rare even among the French-couture royalty. Knowing how to conjure a rainbow on a commercial budget is an invaluable skill. Henderson puts an environmental spin on his aesthetic sense, and while he is a leader, he is not alone in this. Ever the magpie, fashion has caught on to ecology. "Le look vegetal" is popular in Paris, where earth colors and materials like fake hemp and mock plant stems are making news. In Henderson's case, the affinity to natural colors probably predates environmental zeal. "I like fruit tones, wood, stones," he says. "I keep beautiful rocks around, and I dry flowers to see which shades will emerge."

The wonder is that he can avoid cheap, garish dyes in an inexpensive line. In his current collection, prices run from $75 to $300 apiece, and he is about to launch a cheaper one called But Gordon. He got the idea for his label from the human traffic that courses through his office. "But Gordon, I want something new," he mimics. "But Gordon, can't you deliver sooner? But Gordon, I want it all." He sees the But Gordon line as his own Gap store, a place where the clothes are so cheap "I feel I can go in there and just buy." If the July launch is successful, But Gordon could make $20 million over the next three years (the regular line is expected to do $12 million in two). Henderson has been fascinated by fashion since his boyhood in the San Joaquin Valley. His mother, a psychologist, bought Vogue patterns, and young Gordon provided emphatic, unsolicited opinions. Very short as a high school sophomore (he is now 5 ft. 11 in.), he took a tough adult-education course in ! tailoring in order, as he says, "to get out of the boys' department." After a halfhearted pass at premed studies at the University of California at Davis, he moved East to attend Parsons School of Design, the classic prep school for Seventh Avenue.

Henderson picked up his trade as an assistant to Calvin Klein. "I learned everything there," he says. "He gives you consistency, and he's so clean and precise it's almost ridiculous. He can take a good idea and go on with it forever." Klein's influence shows. Henderson's nifty, sporty outfits are never fussy. But they aren't Calvin rip-offs either, partly because Henderson has avoided the beige-and-black neutral shades that dominate sportswear.

Like many another artisan in search of inspiration, Henderson studies old movies. His last "bride" -- traditionally the final outfit in a fashion show -- wore white silk pajamas. "I wanted her to be like Audrey Hepburn or Doris Day when they were stuck in the apartment. They looked so fantastic." Now he is rummaging his way through the '50s, which, from the viewpoint of someone born in 1957, is an era of sexy, whimsical dressing. For fall he plans to draw on "all my favorite old clothes -- trench coats, pajamas, pea coats, letter sweaters. My bride will be a prom queen, maybe in a big, reversible skirt." To get himself in the mood, he runs around Greenwich Village, where he has bought a brownstone, in his father's old camel-hair topcoat.

So will his new duds look like thrift-shop entries? Of course not. Henderson's facility lies in translation, turning mid-century nostalgia into '90s gear. And he will be prowling Manhattan in search of his next muse. Or maybe exploring his personal Shangri-La, which he pinpoints as "somewhere between Carmel and Big Sur. I'd fly in. There'd be a little sports car, a couple of horses. I could see that." As he well may -- sooner than later.