Looking For An Island In the Sun

Flying back from Paris last month, I had exhausted the movie options after two turns at "The Queen". Northwest Flight 49 was approaching Newfoundland with four hours yet to go to Detroit, when I came across the 1957 classic "An Island in the Sun". Several minutes into the movie, I remembered a vignette of a year ago, when Hamish Bowles was complaining at the Gaultier Ready-to-Wear show about the miserable winter weather that had dogged the 2006 fashion season. Specifically, he said he'd taken a break between Milan and Paris in order to catch some rays in St. Bart's. I began to wonder if it was really a case of the winter blues, or the fashion blues, that caused the Vogue editor to escape to the Caribbean.

The movie, "An Island in the Sun", stars a young, pre-Dynasty Joan Collins, but is most memorable for the elegant fashion worn by both men and women. It may have been the decadent days of colonial British rule, but Islanders certainly dressed to the nines. Women are featured in an endless array of late 50's couture gowns, while men are decked out according to the hour — sport's jackets for day, trim dark suits for cocktail hour, and oh my for evening, Spencers with cordons, medals, satin trimmed tuxedos, smoking jackets, French-cuffed shirts with gold studs.

By the time we approached Montréal, I had been completely seduced by the elegance of a lost time. Fashion today could not be more different. There is ongoing discussion among the powers that be about what to do with the season. Fashion Houses, whose primary aim in showing these days is to get free advertising, now present the normal summer and winter collections, but then add pre-collections, cruise collections, safari collections and interim collections to the calendar so that the buzz never quite dies. Buyers claim that customers don't want to wait six to eight months to get clothes they've already seen broadcast on fashion TV, or collections posted in entirety on certain fashion websites (those violating French Federation of Couture rules in doing so) and want quicker delivery. Journalists say they are overloaded with the season, and extensions. Manufacturers in Italy say they would like to take July and August off, as they've done for years, and can't be expected to fill orders on shorter notice. And then there's the French Federation, which says it will not adjust the Paris calendar for anyone, for any reason.

How times have changed. In the 50s, Christian Dior showed his spring line in the upper salons of the Avenue Montaigne headquarters, where clients could reach out and touch the folds of the satin in the gowns. Now, even the most famous French labels are owned by large Global corporations, increasingly deriving the lion's share of their profits from other commercial interests. For those Fashionista looking for an artistic edge, a whiff of that 50's elegance, you'd have to turn to a handful of small entrepreneurs, young independent designers, or labels that seem to be, more often than not, in financial difficulty.

Looking out the airplane window approaching the Canadian coast, you could make out an island or two — they look like glimmering diamonds in a dark, blue sea. And maybe that's where fashion is now, in the last throws of a commercial meltdown — consumers oversaturated, buyers perplexed, journalists exhausted. The solution may be as simple as finding an island in the sun.

- Timothy Hagy