hollywood rebels

A fresh new batch of starlets is refusing to play dress-up. Jonathan Van Meter confronts Hollywood's antifashion brigade.

... The alternative comic Janeane Garofalo has become the spiritual big sister of the anitfashion movelet, which, in many ways, is simply a continuation of grunge, a look that has always been with us, and always will. (Note: One of the reasons the grunge-as-high-fashion effort of a few years back sputtered and died on the vine is that those interested in slob chic are exactly the people who don't wear designer clothes.) Garofalo admitted in her 1997 HBO special: "I hate high fashion. I hate that we reward people for being genetic freaks. You hear the guys announcing the runway shows saying, 'A pretty face is your best asset this season.' And what? Ugly girls had a free ride last year?"

It's a little ironic that she and Joan Rivers would end up in a public pissing match over looks, since both comics traffic in a similar self-deprecating sense of humor. In case you missed it, Garofalo wore her trademark dressed-down look to the 1996 Emmy Awards, and Rivers, who has turned her E! fashion-critic-in-residence gig into a cottage industry, yelled, "Is this girl a pig, or what?" Garofalo went on record that the comment made her cry -- all the while maintaining a firm antifashion stance.

Rivers -- an old-fashioned girl whose tastes run toward the classic and formal -- defends herself: "At the Emmys, even the stagehands have to wear dinner jackets. She was the only slob in the place. And we made a comment about it. If you're going to be antifashion you should look like Audrey Hepburn. I don't care who you are, you still look better when you're pulled together."

Phillip Block, another celebrity stylist, says Rivers has missed the point. The dressing-down trend among young Hollywood is a reaction against "this nineties version of a fifties carbon-copy cutout" that has made fashion boring. "These girls are not Audrey Hepburn, they're not Grace Kelly. They're into new designers: Tuleh, Blumarine. It's all about vintage-looking clothes. They love things that are very special as opposed to something that's cut and fit." Lisa Keshtkar, who's Donna Karan's point person in Hollywood, says there's "Less ... I don't want to say loyalty among the new crop of actresses, but they're dressing the way they feel. They're a lot more experimental and a lot more influenced by street and media -- their individual style is just very different, and I think that's because they're exposed to more. It's not a conscious backlash against designers; I just think they want to mix it up."