Messing about in boats this season also means having fun wearing new boatneck tops.
Those inexpensive fashion items -- T-shirts, sweaters and other pullover styles with wide, high necklines that are shaped like boats -- may be the single-best purchase for the spring-fashion season.They are found in every important fashion collection in London, Milan, Paris and New York.
They represent the collective urge of designers to recover and re-interpret what's best from this century before moving into the next.
Boatnecks -- also called bateau, for the small, flat-bottomed French rowboat -- were a style of the 1920s that reappeared big-time in the 1950s. Wearing a new boatneck top with a pair of capri pants brings the '50s crashing back into the '90s.
"The '50s are in focus again," says David Wolfe, creative director for the fashion forecasters, The Doneger Group in New York, "because fashion is on the brink of the millennium, and classics provide a secure safety net."
When customers and designers look at the millennium head on, he says, "It's like standing on the edge of a diving board. It really is scary. We know we're going to have to leap into the future and learn how to control our technology -- our computers and TVs and VCRs. But one of the few things we can control is how we look."
A little bit of the '50s in your closet is the equivalent of comfort food on your plate.
"The boatneck," says Wolfe, "really does define the '50s. It is a classy sportswear look, so influenced by Europe."
In the years after World War II, when Americans started to be affluent enough to travel to Europe, he says, they'd see boat-necks on the Riviera. And they'd bring them home.
Think of Audrey Hepburn in "Sabrina," wearing her boatneck top with three-quarter-length sleeves over black capris and ballet flats. Or refer to much more recent movies, such as "Pleasantville," "The Truman Show," "You've Got Mail" and "Blast from the Past," which only serve to reinforce the '50s, or '50s-vintage styles.
Boat necklines may not be the biggest fashion trend for fall '99. But, says Wolfe, who's just back from European shows, "The hottest trends are a swing back to the classic stuff -- sweaters with big cowls and big turtlenecks, which are the fall version of spring's boat necklines."
Dist. by Scripps Howard News Service.