Living: The New Bad Boys of Fashion

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Two kindred spirits make bright clothes with rock brio

Crazy? Well, of course, crazy. " 'Natch-ral-ly' crazy," like the hero of the old song who invites derisive snorts because "I'm just a bad boy/All dressed up in fancy clothes."

Go ahead and laugh then: at the open-toed sneakers with the six-inch platforms and the skirts for men; at the silvery ensembles that look like space suits for space cases and the heavy sweaters with turtlenecks and bare backs. You might wonder whether the clothes are a deliberate joke, or if, when wearing them, one becomes a punch line. But a word of caution. Don't laugh so hard that you miss either the talent behind these clothes or the spirit with which they are made, the ebullience, the cunning shunning of convention that exalts fashion even as it seems to mangle it. And consider a revision to the classic Rolling Stones refrain: "It's only rock 'n' roll, but I can wear it."

There are several things that the French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier and Stephen Sprouse, an American, have in common besides an unreserved transatlantic admiration for each other's work. They are young: Gaultier is 32, Sprouse 31. They have, separately, taken fashion off into fresh territory. Gaultier has seized and made salable the dithering extravagances of London street fashion. Hot colors over black? Short skirts? Check out Sprouse for all that. He was hiking up hemlines and pouring Day-Glo over the fashion palette while women were still trying to figure out what the Japanese craze was all about.

Together, Sprouse and Gaultier have become the designers of the moment. The tour boats that cruise down the Seine past Gaultier's Paris apartment, flooding his living room with light, may actually contain rivals doing some industrial spying. Sprouse minis and Gaultier jackets have a very short life on the racks. Their clothes sell out both in pace-setting boutiques and in department stores like Macy's. Not since the Britain of the '60s have rock sensibility and fashion been so close-knit. "The raw energy behind rock 'n' roll inspires me," says Sprouse. "Rock has got everything: art and music and fashion." Gaultier, who likes it that the French press has described him as a "fashion disc jockey," says that "rock was above all a rebellion against the Establishment. My aim is freedom and openness."

His aim is still true, judging from the congenially berserk glad rags for men and women that he showed in Paris last week. Extremely deft, marketable clothing was mixed in with deliberately parodistic fantasies. There were gauzy see-through gossamers over checked bikini briefs for men; hiya-big-boy bathing suits for women that transform breasts into medium-range ballistic missiles; and sarongs for everyone. But there were also roomy, temperate suits for both sexes, and a selection of loungewear and splendor-in-the-grass sunsuits that managed to be forthrightly sexy without turning coy. It was shrewd and prototypical Gaultier; in short: clothes for yucks and clothes for bucks.