WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31, 2010

Patti Smith’s eye for fashion

Fashionistas embrace Patti Smith as a kindred spirit, surly defiance when he photographed her in a floor-length Dior evening dress that was which may come as a surprise to many of her fans steamily laced up the sides. “There’s a chicness about her,” he said. By RUTH LA FERLA “She had the authority to pull it off.” NY Times News Service, NEW YORK She can swan like a high-strung society diva. And she was glimpsed during New ecks craned for a glimpse of York Fashion Week at a Chado Ralph Rucci Patti Smith as she settled at her show, mingling with uptown stalwarts like customary corner table at Da Amy Fine Collins and Martha Stewart. Last NSilvano in Greenwich Village, a month, in a concert at Milk Studios, she favorite afternoon haunt, earlier this month. dedicated her final song, Because of the The wonder was that the patrons, silver Night, to Alexander McQueen, who took his haired and sleekly buffed, could pick her own life last month. “I just wanted to send out at all. Smith was understated, even some positive energy into his continuing self-effacing in her mannish jacket, boater travels,” she explained. shirt and beat-up jeans. Watching her sip Yet her wayward appearance has drawn hot water and lemon, you could easily have scorn and, on occasion, hostility. She writes mistaken her for one of any number of in Just Kids of giving birth at 19, only to be androgynous downtown hipsters adopting sneered at by hospital nurses, who called skinny jeans and boyfriend coats as a low- her “Dracula’s daughter.” Stung years later key urban armor. at being dismissively described by one of Was she trying to merge with the Andy Warhol’s gatekeepers as a ringer for scenery? Smith shrugged, noncommittal. Joan Baez, she sheared off her shoulder- “My style says ‘Look at me, don’t look at length waves, as she writes, “machete-ing me,’” she said, a hint of testiness ruffling my way out of the folk era.” her easy composure. “It’s, ‘I don’t care what Punk-rock icon Patti Smith cultivated a fashion eye Reactions to that peremptory gesture you think.’” as a child by studying movies and photographs of impressed her. “Though I was still the So it was surprising to learn that movie stars and models. photo: EPA same person,” she recalls in the book, her roomy gray jacket, with cuffs that “my social status was suddenly elevated. unfasten at the wrist, was designed by Christophe Decarnin of Balmain and Limi My Keith Richards haircut was a real Ann Demeulemeester, a high priestess of Yamamoto of Limi Feu, for whom Smith discourse magnet. I miraculously turned Parisian vanguard chic. Her jeans were has been a kind of spiritual muse. “The androgynous overnight.” Ralph Lauren, prized by Smith for their racy capacity to accept anything that happens to Nighttime excursions to Max’s Kansas lines. Her boots, a gift from Johnny Depp, her,” Yamamoto said recently, is a source of City, a societal mixing bowl for artists, who wore them as the Mad Hatter in Alice constant inspiration. actors and slumming politicians, found her, in Wonderland, were the perfect fit, Smith Smith has filled out over the years, she writes, dressing “like an extra preparing exulted, “like when the magic cobbler made no longer the lanky consort of Robert for a shot in a French New Wave film.” your shoes.” Mapplethorpe, the taboo-smashing She sifted, accordingly, through her She has a rarefied feel for that kind of photographer she memorializes in Just Kids skimpy repertory of striped boating shirts evocative detail — no stray seam escaping (Ecco/HarperCollins), her lyrical tale of and red kerchiefs “like Yves Montand in her scrutiny. That might stun her fans, who coming of age in Manhattan. She is youthful Wages of Fear, or the long black sweater, think of Smith as a gnarly rocker, thrashing just the same, fresher and more alluring black tights, white socks and Capezios, and howling soulfully on stage. But style- than she appeared in recent photos, her that were my take on Audrey Hepburn in world insiders embrace her as a kindred turnout more artfully calibrated than her Funny Face.” spirit whose discerning eye and sensitive stage persona would suggest. She gathers references with a magpie fashion antennas might be the envy of a Her abiding passions are reflected in her eye; they serve in the book as mnemonic veteran stylist. Smith’s look, after all, is style, a thoughtful pastiche modeled on her triggers, taking her back to the gritty nothing if not rehearsed. cultural heroes. At any time, it may owe a carnival that was St Marks Place in the early “She is very aware of her style and debt to the Harris tweed jackets she spied 1970s, the cramped, art-strewn quarters she she controls it,” said Demeulemeester, a on a couple at the Metropolitan Museum, to shared with Mapplethorpe at the Chelsea longtime friend and fashion collaborator. Veruschka, the 1960s runway Amazon, or Hotel, and the coveted round table in the (Smith favors the designer’s mannish white to vintage Keith Richards and John Lennon. back room at Max’s, once home to Andy shirts, inspired by the one she wore on She combed shops for months in search Warhol and his entourage. the cover of her debut album, Horses.) of the striped linen trousers that evoked In those days she took to giving fanciful “It’s about being conscious of who you Lennon because, she said, “something in names to her outfits. There was her Song are and using all the strength you have to those pants spoke to me of myself.” of the South get-up: straw hat, Br’er Rabbit communicate that.” She likes to knot her white shirts at the jacket, work boots and pegged pants; the Back in the public eye, if indeed she waist in homage to Ava Gardner. Her stringy “tennis player in mourning,” a black-on- ever left it, with a best-selling memoir men’s ties are a simultaneous nod to Frank black ensemble accessorized for evening and a series of concerts that promise to Sinatra and Bob Dylan. Like the beat-up with white Keds; and her Anna Karina in burnish her legend, Smith is the same deft biker jackets she hunted down long ago in “Bande a part”: dark sweater, plaid skirt, communicator — and, not less, the canny thrift shops on the Bowery, they are totems. black tights and flats. custodian of her own image. In conversation Smith, who dropped out of college at Never averse to role-playing, she was gracious, even genteel, giving no 20, cultivated a fashion eye by studying she reveled in those costumes: they sign of the trash-talking provocateur who movies like Funny Face, and photographs were meant, after all, to render her dropped explicit sexual references into of movie stars in Photoplay and of models unforgettable. Posing for a photograph for magazine profiles when she was at the in 1950s Sears catalogs. She encountered her friend Judy Linn, Smith lighted a Kool, height of her career, and peppered her high fashion at 7 when she chanced on a hoping, as she writes, that it would lend comments with expletives. cache of discarded Vogues and Harper’s her a bit of professional swagger. Yet from time to time, a certain flintiness Bazaars. “At home we couldn’t afford “I know I’m a fake smoker,” she confided took over. “The thing I’ve always liked them,” she said. to Linn, “but I’m not hurting anybody and about performing,” she said, storm clouds “I remember a lot of Penn photographs,” besides I gotta enhance my image.” gathering in her eyes, “is that I decide what she said. “His wife was so elegant,” she said, Yet she she’s no actress, Smith insists. “I I want to wear, whether I want to comb my referring to Lisa Fonssagrives. “I was very have neither the discipline nor the desire to hair. No one ever told me what to do, and moved by that.” turn into someone else.” no one tells me now.” At the time, fashion magazines “were Superstition and a kind of stubborn At 63, she has hung on to that resolve, such a window into the culture,” she added pragmatism guide her sartorial decisions. For sloughing off layers that strike her as wistfully. “There would be a spread on tours, she said: “I pack lighter than anyone inauthentic or alien to the character she Morocco, another on what to wear to a fox else in the band. I only bring what I can crafted in the 1970s, as the gangly diva of hunt. I studied those pages all through the wash in the sink.” And she wears the same downtown punk. 1960s. I became very knowledgeable.” garments over and over, “because for me “Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t She refined her expertise, combing a they become emblematic of a certain tour.” want,” Smith recalled. “I didn’t want to wear Salvation Army store in Camden, New She makes no secret of scanning jewelry red lipstick. When my mother would say, Jersey, near her home. The shop, a dumping and clothing for signs and portents. “To me ‘You should shave your legs,’ I would ask, ground for the castoffs of the rich, was filled these things are talismans,” she said, her ‘Why?’ I didn’t understand why we had to with high-end labels, some that made their fingers brushing the 200-year-old Ethiopian present a different picture of ourselves to way into her closet. cross that dangles at her throat. “This Clockwise from top: Patti Smith performs during the 2009 Jisan Valley the outside world.” In high school Smith thought nothing of cross is something I hold on to when I’m Rock Festival in Icheon, South Korea; the cover of Smith’s new book Just A star attraction at iconic events like wearing used Dior dresses or pink shantung singing.” Though she lost her husband, the Kids; Smith poses with a feather in Paris in 1969. Photos: Bloomberg and EPA the final night of CBGB, the fabled Bowery capri pants with a Kelly green raincoat in rock guitarist Fred Smith, in 1994, she still club where she performed as a girl, and at a honor of Audrey Hepburn. Smith waxed wears her wedding band — “one of my most string of public outings throughout the past nostalgic describing Hepburn in Funny precious possessions.” decade, she has cleaved to her signature Face. “She was the beatnik girl in the Admirers find her disheveled look style, an unlikely fusion of glamour and bookstore who wants to go to Paris. That alluring. Such observations seem to please grit. In her raffish T-shirts and boy coats, was me at the time.” her. Gaunt and bony as a girl, she was told in concert she is the anti Gaga, rejecting Nor did she mask her effusive by a fawning Salvador Dali, “You are like a gaudy, serial costume changes, refusing to romanticism. “People wouldn’t know this gothic crow.” bend with every shift in fashion’s wind. about me, but I adore ball gowns,” she Yet in the sunlight streaming from a That constancy has made Smith a said. “I love their cut, their architecture corner window, her features were soft, even trendsetter for several generations — how and the thought of the hands of so many seductive. Calculated sultriness has never many young girls emulate her look of seamstresses working on them.” factored into her fashion equation, however. pegged jeans, boyfriend jackets and white Steven Sebring, who followed Smith “I like to be comfortable,” she said shirts without ever realizing it? And her with a camera for his 2008 documentary, evenly. “Sex has never been my thing. I just style resonates with designers as diverse as Patti Smith: Dream of Life, caught her wanted to feel like myself.”