February 8, 2005
An Outcry of Political Dissent, Scrawled in Ruffles
By CATHY HORYN

little contempt for luxury is not such a bad thing. How people dress in an age of superabundance and superficiality, how they spend their money, how they are influenced by wealth, how they attempt to distance themselves from people whose style is not theirs but whose desire for the same human bric-a-brac makes them no less precious to luxury companies: this is a subject that should be of intimate interest to a fashion designer.

Bryan Bradley, the designer of Tuleh, works in an office on Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood where almost overnight the rents went from supporting people on the way down to those on the way up. His clients are rich young socialites, and on Sunday night, with their husbands and children and their pals from the magazines, they formed one of the loudest booster clubs in the Bryant Park tents, nearly equal to the friends and family section at Oscar de la Renta’s show yesterday.

I don’t know what they saw, but I know what I saw: a collection so furious and deliberate in its outrage at the banality of luxury that it verged on the suicidal. Mr. Bradley is the only American designer I know of who has attempted to ask how a civilized people can dress for a party when the news on the front page of the morning paper is so dreadful, and to insist, even in an inarticulate way, that American fashion can have more content than another nicely worked travel theme.

Mr. Bradley is no political rebel. I think he essentially wants to make clothes that please women and keep his ship from sinking. But after last season’s hard-headed collection and now this one, with its flagrant use of camouflage and almost ornery blend of ruffled silk chiffon and low-slung cargo pants, he seems to be itching for a good fight.

You can turn your secret decoder ring on his camouflage jackets and khaki twill coats and draw any conclusion you want, but the reality is America has been engaged in a divisive war and at the same time feels an urgency to protect itself from a terrorist attack. In a subtle way, with his camouflage (which after all is a protective material) Mr. Bradley has acknowledged that reality without trivializing it.