Hard times reflected in scaled-back New York shows

NEW YORK — It's amazing how often in fashion that a moment from the past brings into focus what's happening in the present. Such was the case over the weekend at New York Fashion Week. Signs of the recession are everywhere here -- the missing faces in the front row, including Saks Fifth Avenue fashion director Michael Fink, who was laid off last month; the empty storefronts on Madison Avenue; the scaled-back shows.

But restriction can breed invention, which I saw when I visited an exhibit about Valentina at the Museum of the City of New York on Sunday ("Valentina: American Couture and the Cult of Celebrity" runs through May 17). That's also why the collections that have been the most restrained, versatile and minimalist -- from DKNY and Victoria Beckham, if you can believe it -- are what is resonating so far for fall.

A Ukrainian immigrant who came to New York in the 1920s with little more than the clothes on her back, the self-invented Valentina (born Valentina Sanina Schlee) may have been the first celebrity fashion designer, dressing socialites Millicent Rogers and Millicent Hearst, actresses Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo, and living among them.

At the height of her business in the 1940s, she had 2,000 clients who ordered her handmade clothes, the closest thing we had to haute couture in the U.S. Her clients may have been rich women, but her ideas trickled down, and store buyers described more accessible versions of her clothes as "a poor man's Valentina."

Valentina had to work with the fabric restrictions of wartime, and her style was rooted in functional minimalism, which looks so right for right now. Her "pleated trouser leg skirt," which had the illusion of fullness without the extra fabric, won a Fashion Critics' Award in 1942.

She incorporated elements of traditional peasant dressing into her finery, creating a system of modular dressing that involved chiffon aprons that could be layered over organza evening skirts, boleros that could be switched out and so on.

In a video in the exhibit, Valentina demonstrates her day-to-evening "convertible dress" to Edward R. Murrow, pulling the collar down around her shoulders, peeling back a full top skirt and tying it into a bustle, and revealing a sleek pencil underskirt.

It's that kind of invention that fashion needs more of. Perhaps the recession will force the issue.

Dress for success