Word: looking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...jungle out there. On the Via Veneto, across 57th Street or up Michigan Avenue, animals that look strangely like women are prancing in herds, and spots swim before the eyes. The designs the women are wearing are not the real thing, of course, but thick faux furs and diaphanous fabric in sexy, primitive patterns. And the customers cannot seem to get enough of them: they're snapping up zebra-stripe blazers, panther-print pumps, fake tiger coats, imitation ocelot boleros and giraffe pants. Says a spokesman for Paris' Dorothee Bis: "It's the theme of the year...
...look has clawed its way to the top for reasons topical and technological. For one thing, a decade ago fake-fur coats were lumpy modacrylic numbers that clever designers dismissed as "mama coats," garments that conservative women bought to keep out the cold. Now refined techniques allow realistic animal patterns to be printed on more vibrant and active fabrics, such as Lycra, stretch velour and even sheer silk mousseline...
Still, some clothiers are pussyfooting around the trend. In what may be a new high (or low) in fashion irony, Milan's Gianfranco Ferre is selling a real rabbit fur jacket for about $2,700. But it has been printed to look like leopard. It's hard for some of these cats to change their spots...
Downstairs, on the funny line, is Cliff's other brother-in-law Lester, a sleek TV producer (played by Alan Alda in a gloriously fashioned comic performance). He offers Cliff a sinecure: filming a documentary that will make Lester look like a philosopher-king among the pompous nitwits who produce prime-time TV. Cliff agrees, but because he tries to turn Lester's story into a truthful expose, the project collapses. Along the way he loses the woman he loves (Mia Farrow), as well as a serious film to which he had been profoundly committed...
...Place for Us completes an emotional symmetry that began with Eleni. It also offers a look at Greek-American life as textured as any the general reader is likely to encounter. Gage writes with little separation between his intellect and his senses. There is no straining for effect; moments reveal their natural poetry. How, for example, does one know the time to pack up a family picnic and head for home? "When it was too dark to tell red wine from white." When Gage describes the bread tax that early immigrants levied to support their new churches, one can taste...