New York Fashion Week: Triumph of Working Girl at Bill Blass

When imagining what the 1970s revivals we're seeing this season at Halston, Bill Blass, etc... would look like, the first thing that sprung to mind was glamour. Studio 54, Liza, you know the drill. But there was another big fashion element of the decade that I forgot until I saw it coming down the Bill Blass runway. The first career clothes for women. When American women began to flood the workplace, early attempts at career dressing consisted of scaled-down men's suits, accessorized with a bow instead of a necktie. For all the ridicule that ensued, the quest for wearable work clothes continues. Plenty of designers, usually men, offer the sort of office worker fantasy ensemble -- tight pencil skirt, low-cut blouse, stilettos. Going back to revive the legacy of the great designers of the 1970s is also a chance to rewrite career dressing. Peter Som's collection for Bill Blass did this perfectly. Little herringbone jackets with luxurious wool trousers, loose-fitting pleated skirts matched with cotton blouses and a fox vest (why not?), and beautifully constructed black and white jaquard dresses all could have walked straight from the runway into the board room. Of course, it will have to go through the retailers first. For evening he went for all-out glamour. There were concerns when Som took up the post that it would be hard for him to differentiate it from his own collection. After seeing both shows, I think the opposite is true. His conservative instincts can be tunneled towards the very commercial Blass collection and his wilder side can find expression in his own label. Photos by Brent Murray ...