Living: The New Bad Boys of Fashion

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Sprouse's new collection has real butt-tickler skirts ("Everything is six inches above the knee or more") and dresses that seem to have been hit by a blitz of citrus bombs. There are four new Day-Glo colors, including furious fuchsia and lightning yellow. "We're going crazy testing all of them," says Sprouse, "but that's the best thing. My colors really glow."

There are thundering echoes of the swinging '60s in Sprouse's work—a lime-green sequined dress with a halter collar could have been filched from Twiggy's attic—but his clothes, as Buyer Jean Rosenberg of Henri Bendel in New York City points out, "are not '60s redos. Those clothes were skimpier and skinnier." Sprouse's lines tend to be a little more careful and deliberate, even sculpted, and a lot of his wizardry comes in combinations, like throwing a man-size coat over a mini. Says Pat Henderson of Bergdorf Goodman: "I've got one of his bright pink wool tank dresses, real short. You take off your coat and show that dress, anything could happen. Men think the clothes are incredibly sexy."

Fittingly enough, it was on the body of Blondie's Debbie Harry that Sprouse's fashion fantasies first assumed public form. One of two sons in an Air Force family, Sprouse had dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design and done some apprentice work with Halston before taking up the boho life in Manhattan nine years ago. He had been coloring huge black-and-white Xeroxes, when he became friendly with Harry and started to make her stage clothes. "Stephen put me into minis and high black boots," she says, "and it just went on from there."

Sprouse, quiet and deliberate, frets occasionally that "I wish I had more time off to work on other stuff, to keep practicing my guitar or do my art." When he sketches and fits, he listens to music—from vintage Rolling Stones to the short-circuited post-punk epiphanies of Public Image Ltd.—and he sees his work as an extension of the same creative impulse that set him to struggling with those Xeroxes back in the '70s. For Gaultier, on the other hand, fashion is a little more whimsical, a tap-source into personal fantasy. "I don't try to do art," he says. "I don't know how to do sculptures. All I propose are currents, what people want. It's not an intellectual approach but something that I feel."

When he was a teenager, living with his parents in a modest Paris suburb, he would read newspaper accounts of fashion shows. "They would say Cardin had presented 250 outfits, so I'd draw 350. Then I could say I did more than Cardin. After that I'd write my own articles about my collection, which were very positive." His grandmother—"my first fashion influence"—endured the brunt of his bolder experiments, which once included dyeing her gray hair purple. "She may," he laughs, "have been the first punk."