Word: chavez
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Juan workshop, Designer Gonzalo Chavez, 36, a native New Yorker who calls himself Mr. Terp, has been painstakingly assembling pop-top rings into glittering dresses, vests, stoles, belts, miniskirts and maxiskirts-all resembling the mailed armor worn by warriors of the Middle Ages to ward off sword blows. Collecting the rings from rubbish heaps behind San Juan bars, Chavez files down their rough edges' and crochets them together with silver thread. It is a slow process. When he began making the pop-tops last spring, it took Chavez a day to complete a 600-ring vest 20 inches long...
Considering Chavez's labors, the price of pop-tops is remarkably low. A 600-ring vest costs $60, a 1,000-ring stole goes for $100 and a 2,800-ring maxicoat sells for $350. The most recent creation, a picture hat with a raffia band, can be adjusted into shapes that range from a cowboy stetson to a Garbo cloche, and costs $50. At those prices, the pop-tops have become the sensation among Puerto Rico's livelier...
...first pop-top garments were almost as stiff as their medieval counterparts. But Chavez has made them much more supple. "They fit like a second skin," he claims. "As you wear them, they change shape a little and mold themselves to the contours of the body." Rings differ too. Budweiser's rings are light and flexible, Miller High Life's are "soft," and Pepsi's provide a heavier, stiffer garment...
...Although Chavez does not recommend it, some of his customers have risked pinches or scratches by wearing pop-tops over their bare skin. "The first topless chick to try a vest," he says, "caught her right nipple in a ring. I think it looked groovy, but I can recognize the snags...
Over the weekend, Chavez won a contract with the biggest grower in the valley, Inter-Harvest Inc., which is connected with the giant United Fruit. Worried that a boycott of United Fruit bananas might replace the celebrated grape boycott, Inter-Harvest agreed to wages well above the Teamsters demands and gave field hands a voice in the use of pesticides and union jurisdiction over foremen. While U.F.W.O.C. leaders called the contract "a shot in the arm," the Inter-Harvest contract angered the remaining growers, some of whom were letting acres of vegetables rot. Yet the Salinas Valley vegetable growers lost...