Born and Worn in the U.S.A.

First order of business is a little reassurance.

American fashion design has been tied up in knots of inferiority for years now. The home team struggles gamely to uphold the classic couture tradition, but, despite the cheerleading of merchandisers and the national fashion press, swank is not what the U.S.A. does best. There is no national knack for it. Fancy dress, American-style, veers between the grandiloquent tack of Nolan Miller's Dynasty duds and the glum glitz of the Seventh Avenue couturiers. If hell, as Sartre suggested, is other people, they will be dressed by Oscar de la Renta.

No need to feel outclassed, though. American designers created a style wholly their own: easy, natural, more egalitarian than high fashion, inspired by work clothes and play clothes. Americans, it might be said, brought the weekend wardrobe into the workday. It was all an extension of what English Designer Katharine Hamnett, who works high-style wonders on lowborn fabric, calls "the whole denim philosophy." Truly revolutionary. And all-American.

Well, not really. Try, as the commercials say, this simple test. Quick: name the single most uniquely American garment. Jeans, of course. Get ready for a little bad news. It seems that Levi's, the original denim pants, were not completely American. Itinerant Merchant Levi Strauss showed up in the California goldfields in 1850 carrying a roll of tent canvas to peddle. Pants were what the prospectors really needed, however, something strong enough to hold up in the diggings. Strauss found a tailor to turn his tent canvas into trousers and ordered more cloth from his brothers in New York. To fill Levi's order, the boys turned to their original fabric source: France.

It gets worse. The word denim comes from the French, de Nimes (of Nimes), and even jeans comes from the French for Genoa, the Italian city where a similar twill weave was produced. Such news is tough on the old native pride --like finding out Paul Revere was an illegal alien, but the folks across the sea have been very good about not rubbing it in. In fact, most designers wax rhapsodic about the way American sportswear--for which jeans remain the perfect symbol--has limbered up fashion all over the world. "American designers have brought forward a much more contemporary side to fashion," says Christian Lacroix, whose collections for Jean Patou have made him the hottest couturier in Paris. "The clothes have comfort, quality, practicality, neatness, elegance." Giorgio Armani, who did for men's clothes what Chanel did for women's, could not have reshaped and relaxed the male silhouette without the influence of American sportswear. "Italy had no real part in this tradition," he points out. "All the sportswear influences had to come from abroad." Just like Mr. Strauss's fabric.