Fashion

The American woman will not slouch toward the millennium. Dressed by the best and most celebrated American designers, she will glide into the 21st century on a river of soft cashmere and suede. Here is '90s style, in the hands of the aristocrats of American design: the turtleneck is the new jacket, aubergine is the next black, and no-frills pants and slim long skirts replace the mini.

Not long ago, a women's fashion magazine featured this advice on wardrobe building: Divide your closet into categories like work, weekend and sports, dating and special occasions, and allocate a portion of your clothing budget to each section. The lesson here, illustrated with a pie chart, is that the woman who spends too much on stuff appropriate for making entrances at black-tie events won't be generally well-dressed, because that activity occupies only a sliver of her life.

Oh, to be present at a fashion moment, to witness talent not yet discovered by the masses. The buzz had crossed the Atlantic, identifying 27-year-old British designer Alexander McQueen as the new Gaultier, or perhaps the next Galliano, a gifted iconoclast who could as easily be creating art as fashion.

"You can't very well walk out of your house like you're wearing fashion," says designer Isaac Mizrahi. "You have to throw it off, and the only way to do it is to make a conscious mistake." In other words, to be cool nowadays is to pair stripes with checks. Bright florals with plaids. Crazy color combos. And be slightly tousled to boot. "If you go to the hairdresser for a new hairdo, before you go out you want to sleep on it," Mizrahi says. "You have to mess it up."

The temperature hovered near freezing here last week as more than 10 days of 60 fall fashion presentations began. But even if spring had sprung, there would have been a chill in the air around Bryant Park, where two large tents serve as style headquarters. Fashion Week, as the round of shows for buyers and the press is called, was beset by internecine squabbles and class warfare. At the heart of the conflicts is the question of what a fashion show is and who should stage one.

For 20 years Max Azria made blue jeans in Paris for his own chain of clothing stores. But it wasn't blue jeans that landed Azria, now head of the design house BCBG, on a runway here. Rather, it was greenbacks and guts. On the second day of Fashion Week, the stocky designer found himself at the head of a catwalk with a dozen models at his side and the fashion cognoscenti politely applauding at his feet.

It could have gotten ugly. It certainly did in Milan, Paris and New York earlier this spring when some of the most hated abominations from fashion's past slimed down the runways. Anticipating similar retro-atrocities, store buyers and press trooped to downtown Los Angeles last weekend to view the last in a series of fall '96 collections. Thankfully, though, the worst of the petroleum-based fashion revival seems to be over.

The announcement last week that the Anne Klein collection would cease production after delivery of its spring shipments spawned gloomy speculation that the desire for American designer clothes has dried up, withered by a parched economy and the disinterest of fashion- weary consumers.

It's tea time at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach, and the dining room is filled to capacity with little girls dressed in frilly dresses of taffeta, velvet and lace. Valentina Van Dyke, 7, and her sister Catherine, 8, of Newport Beach sit primly at one table, clad in identical dresses with billowy red plaid skirts and black velvet bodices. Their mother, Gina, has taken the girls to the club's Fairy Tale Tea so they can "get dressed up and act polite."

Sheriff's detectives seized hundreds of thousands of counterfeit designer clothing labels Wednesday at a Montebello self-storage facility, authorities said. Among the labels were such designer names as Gucci, Nike, Fila, Tommy Hilfiger and Gianni Versace. An anonymous informant told detectives about a Walnut Park garment factory where the labels were being sewn on clothing, said Sgt. Jim LeBlanc.