ON AND OFF THE AVENUE

Back from the East

This article, first published in The New Yorker, was written by Honor Moore, author of The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by her Granddaughter (Penguin).

March 22, 1999

For those who consider New York the fashion capital of the world, it may come as a surprise that there’s a stylish subculture of Manhattan women who buy their important clothes from a small Kansas City company that acquires most of its fabric in Japan. If Asiatica’s faithful rarely find themselves in Kansas, they don’t really have to: the company’s owners, Fifi White and Elizabeth Wilson, bring their exotic wares to New York City three times a year (they also visit San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Santa Fe, and Washington). This week and next (March 19-April 2), they are in residence at the Mark Hotel (25 E. 77th St.) with their spring collection; one may stop by for an open house, or make an appointment (744-4300 or 800-731-0831), to choose from the profusion of garments, scarves, and jewelry that festoon their suite. Most of the clothes are made from antique kimono cloth or from new fabric developed by Reiko Sudo, of Nuno (her designs were shown at MOMA’s recent exhibition of contemporary Japanese textiles). Although a small selection of the line is available year-round at Bergdorf Goodman, true Asiatica aficionados prefer to shop in the entertaining company of its proprietors.

Fifi White, who wears black spectacles that accent her inquisitive expression, opens the door to the suite. Behind a small desk sits Elizabeth Wilson, a tall brunette with large pale blue eyes who studied Chinese art history before moving to Kansas City in 1975. Wilson started Asiatica as a small emporium of Chinese and Japanese antiques. White, a collector of textiles, joined her soon after they produced their first shirt, in 1980. Before they knew it, their shared passion for textiles had become a partnership, with Wilson as the manager and White as the designer of what she calls “wearable and elegant Western clothes.” They now employ a staff of twenty, and they produce twenty-five hundred pieces a year.

“Our taste runs to the geometric and modern,” White says. On each yearly trip to Japan, they look at forty to fifty thousand kimonos and purchase a thousand to disassemble and launch into new life. “This is mihon,” White says, fingering a blue-and-white cotton shirt deftly pieced from two different fabrics ($1,095). Mihon is a sampler material composed of all the designs a kimono house offers in a season. “I like juxtapositions,” White says. And, indeed, because a kimono often doesn’t yield enough fabric to make and entire Western garment, many Asiatica designs are made from fragments of like color but different pattern. Foreseeing the end of the kimono supply as the Japanese abandon traditional dress, White and Wilson turned to Reiko Sudo. From such Nuno fabric creations as Hong Kong Pucker and Crinkle come clothes with pleated and gathered surfaces that suggest a post-modern Fortuny.

These innovations extend the Japanese tradition of textile virtuosity. Take the mandarin-style evening shirt of black silk damask with a peony weave ($1,095). At a distance, it’s the supplementary weft of red and gold—an abstract embroidery of berries and leaves—that catches the eye, not the barely visible blossoms that texture the fabric. You can wear it with black triple-crêpe pants ($495), the wider, slouchy “Arai” pants ($495-$695), or a long, narrow cloque skirt ($495). These accompaniments are made to order in charmeuses, twills, and other substantial silks whose opulent colors compliment or enhance the kimono fabric.

To wear Asiatica’s clothes is to enter what Fifi White calls “the infinite decorative imagination” of the Japanese. She lifts the edge of a shibori jacket made of a vibrant grass green ($1,295). Its pattern is a spill of creamy white circles so tiny you can hardly believe that each one was once tied for dyeing, or that, held up to the light, the fabric’s silky surface is inscribed with a wavy thicket of bamboo that brings to mind a riverbank on a languorous afternoon.