All Hems Breaking Loose!

The young designer and downtown socialite Catherine Holstein was surveying a rack of clothes in her publicity company’s showroom the other day, planning out looks for her first runway show, scheduled for Sept. 6 at the Bumble & Bumble salon in the meatpacking district. She was wearing a schoolmarmish pale-pink, midcalf-length wrap skirt from her new collection. “When I first started designing, everything I did was kind of short because I love wearing short things,” said Ms. Holstein, 24, a Parsons School of Design dropout. But she soon grew bored with short. “I brought my hemlines down. My main hemline now is below the knee, shin-length, more 1940s.”

She didn’t really care if everyone else did this, too—or not. “Last season, for instance, I did all color and everybody else did all black. It was really gothic, and I had no idea that that’s what was going to be in,” she said. “Oops!”

Welcome to Fashion Week 2008: a confused and crowded affair during which nobody really knows what’s up (or down). Hemline decrees have long been supplanted by fascination with the past (the 40’s and 70’s are sources of particular fascination). While we’re on the topic of nostalgia: as far back as 1976, American designer Geoffrey Beene told The Times: “I just think hemlines have ceased to be important as a measure of fashion.” Even so, woman stalked through much of the ’80s in power miniskirts, Christian Lacroix’s bubbly pouf signaling the last surge of excess before a recession. Ten years ago, a post-nuptial Carolyn Bessette Kennedy shyly greeted the paparazzi’s cameras in below-the-knee Prada, and a generation followed suit, or hem, even as the stock markets rose. And now? The mere notion of hemline seems … passé, the province of repressive, unimaginative fashion yesteryear rather than its personality-driven, anything-goes present. “Hemlines, I think, are things of the past, to be quite frank with you,” said Roopal Patel, the women’s fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman, in a phone interview. “For resort, Alber Elbaz was doing long skirts. But then he was also doing, you know, a mini-jumper. Hemlines nowadays, there’s something for everyone.”

Indeed, often within a single collection. After showing all long skirts in his resort collection, up-and-comer Chris Benz will show “short, medium and long” for spring 2009, he said, at his first runway show on Sept. 8, in an Off Broadway theater.

Designer Tia Cibani of Ports 1961 will also show varying lengths—within the same outfit. “I wanted to say something very, very short and something very, very maxi, and everything in between,” she said, explaining that she’ll be “layering them on top of each other, leaving the very long attitude but breaking it up, horizontal breaks.”

Rebecca Taylor and Lela Rose both said they were feeling short for spring. Yigal Azrouel said he’ll show asymmetrical hems. Dennis Basso e-mailed that “hemlines will be very much at the knee.”

In other words, brace yourselves not for hemline lightning to strike, but for a veritable hemline blizzard!

“I think the hemline debate hasn’t really been one for a long time,” said rising star Thakoon Panichgul, who last week dressed prospective first lady Michelle Obama in demure, knee-length red for her husband’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. “I think these days hemlines are dictated by the individuals who buy the pieces, and ultimately their sense of style.”

‘LENGTHS ALL OVER THE PLACE’

How did it happen that Manhattan fashion lost its dictatorial edge?

“There was a time when what Yves Saint Laurent showed on the runway was what would be copied by New York, what would be copied by everybody else in fashion, and those days are gone,” said Patrick McCarthy, editorial director of Women’s Wear Daily and W. “There are very few of those people left who can set one trend and say, ‘This is the way fashion’s going to be for the next six months.’”

Currently, the market is flooded with a dizzying army of new designers: a record 71 on the Fashion Week calendar, not to mention dozens more who show “off-calendar” at far-flung venues around the city.

“Since Project Runway went on the air, everybody who sews two pieces of fabric together thinks they’re a designer!” said Fern Mallis, senior vice president of IMG Fashion, which produces the whole shebang.

To reach an overstimulated press and retail contingent this week, designers are again resorting to things other than fashion, like celebrity-studded front rows, live musical performances and set-design theatrics, à la Marc Jacobs, who famously staged a surprise performance by Sonic Youth last season in a dinner-theater format. In such an overbooked, watered-down environment, it’s no wonder actual fashion innovation is nearly invisible to the naked eye. We have simply no idea what the hell we’ll be wearing next spring until Vogue or Elle interprets things for us months down the road, calling for snugger silhouettes or the nautical look, but no, not the exact skirt (we’d probably just wear pants under it anyway). In the meantime, we have a bonanza of media impressions driven by personal branding and occasionally shock value, as evidenced by the peculiar longevity of drag queen label Heatherette.