SEATTLE — The last place you'd expect to find the corporate headquarters for Tommy Bahama, the beachy lifestyle brand, is here in the polar fleece capital of the world.
And yet, in a nondescript glass building just blocks from the Space Needle, 625 people are hard at work, designing the artifacts of an imagined tropical life that has entranced American consumers and made the company a $300-million-a-year business.
And it is here that Christian Francis Roth, once a rising Seventh Avenue star, is sifting through swatches of hibiscus print fabric in his quest to put some zing in Tommy Bahama's women's wear line, which now runs the bland gamut from unflattering, boxy camp shirts to balloonish drawstring pants.
"We're trying to be more fashion aware and to create an identity for the women's line that's as clear as the men's," said Lucio Dalla Gasperina, executive vice president of design and one of three partners who own the privately held company. "We didn't want a high-profile designer who would just go off and make it his own. We wanted someone who understands what we are about."
But Roth, 33, once had a very high profile. And in some ways, his uneven trajectory during the last dozen or so years has mirrored the evolution of American fashion.
In the late 1980s and early '90s, Roth dazzled the fashion world with such fantastical runway fare as trapeze dresses with trompe l'oeil crayons for sleeves, full skirts fashioned after Amish quilts, and blazers in newsprint and "scribble" patterns.
A protege of Dutch-born New York designer Koos van den Akker, Roth launched his own collection before he was out of his teens. In 1988, Lynn Manulis, an owner of the exclusive Martha boutiques, took a chance on the young designer, buying several of his pieces and putting them in the store's Park Avenue windows in New York. The clothes sold immediately, and it wasn't long before Roth's line was carried at Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman and I. Magnin, and his runway shows were hot tickets.
In 1990, at 20, Roth won the Perry Ellis Award for new talent from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Women's Wear Daily dubbed him the "Doogie Howser of fashion." And he was hailed as the next Franco Moschino for the childlike whimsy of his designs, which included wine corks and bottle caps for buttons and M&M packages for appliques.
