About Steve :: Writer :: Fashion

An American Original

 New York Times
September 18, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Section 6; Part 2, Page 78, Column 1; Men's Fashions of The Times Magazine
AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL
By Christa Worthington; Christa Worthington is a freelance writer based in London.

 

    
   
In the brilliant sunlight of the French Riviera, Steve Martin, the comedian-turned-movie-star, hides under a baseball cap, behind his ''go away'' shades. Although he has been shooting a comedy, ''Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,'' along the Mediterranean for six weeks, his complexion has remained trademark pale.

It is typical of Martin not to give in to his surroundings. Even as he benignly sips iced tea at a Nice cafe and seriously discusses style - a subject he warms to - his presence could stop traffic on the Promenade des Anglais.

''Everybody has a style even if they don't think about it,'' Martin asserts. Although he describes his own manner of dress - lots of black - as ''style by default,'' his real image is more savvy.

He hates to shop, and does not make clothes a priority, but he is a fashion natural. His garments, like his humor, become a second skin. He knows the power of insouciance - the quality that makes him an American original.

''The best fashion is the subtle sell of sex,'' he maintains. ''To me, it's always the shop girl or the waitress who is much more sexy than any fashion model dolled up. Girls and, I assume, guys, in their natural state, are much more beautiful and sexy than when they are presenting themselves in some formal sort of way.'' Fashion appeals most, he finds, ''when you don't look at the clothes first, but at the person, when the whole package is impressive, not just somebody's nice coat. It also depends on how seriously it is taken. If it's taken too seriously, it's not interesting.''

Martin, who is 43, came of age sartorially in Orange County, Calif., in the early 1960's. ''I believe your style is set when you're a sophomore in high school,'' he says. ''Sometimes I look at myself and say, 'Gee, this is exactly what I wore then' - cotton pants, a shirt and rubber-soled shoes.''

Also seminal was the influence of the Kingston Trio: crew cuts, blazers and ballads such as ''Tom Dooley.''

''The James Dean look was too radical for our part of town, although it was the most seductive style,'' Martin explains. ''No one we knew dared do it except the pachucos - the Mexicans. I wore conservative Ivy League suits and ties, the button-down look.'' Something of the clean-cut F.B.I. agent has clung to him ever since.

Martin, however, will not allow any old photographs or footage from his college years to be published, because as soon as the hippie influence arrived, ''We were all victims of the ugliest hairstyle there ever was - the long-haired, straggly look. I sort of envy today's youth,'' he adds, ''because they are growing up in a good, stylish period: medium-length hair, regular-looking clothes that are cut well, the classic kind of look.''

Martin has emerged from his own formative period claiming to be ''the last to know'' about fashion. In fact, he is so esthetically aware that he disowns his fashion sense in case, like the demonic feet of his ''happy feet'' comic act, it does something to embarrass him. He dresses defensively, wearing black ''much too much,'' he says, ''because that way, everything matches.'' He is drawn to the most assured of designers, Giorgio Armani, Matsuda and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons, whose skillful cut and dramatic understatement help preclude mistakes in dress.

''The great thing about being in the arts is that if I look bad or make a poor choice, it's just crazy old Steve - not a terrible faux pas or daring weirdness to be reckoned with,'' he says.

Martin, however, knows what he is doing. ''He knows exactly what he wants, what he likes,'' states his personal costumer of the past eight years, Dennis Schoonderwoerd. ''He's not trendy, but he's very current. He doesn't dress to be noticed, but because he likes certain fabrics and the way things fit.''

Martin cultivates understatement in other areas of his life as well. He lives in a Los Angeles house that looks like an art gallery - white-walled and ascetic, with the Hockneys, Nolands and Klines of his 20th-century painting collection as strategic decor. It is an appropriate sanctuary for a man who has made sartorial ''don'ts'' his stock in trade. Martin turned the leisure suit into the laughingstock of the 70's, and he hones in on the ridiculous like radar.

''I always loved the idea of the worst example,'' he says of his comic development of those polyester nightmares, the womanizing Festrunk brothers, whom he and Dan Ackroyd played on NBC's ''Saturday Night Live.''

''I just did a scene in 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' with Michael Caine [his co-star], where I play this comic half-wit,'' says Martin. ''We wanted really ridiculous-looking clothes for the scene, so we went to the most high- fashion stores in New York to try to find some. I love those stores,'' he says in earnest, ''but every one of them always has that one rack of unwearable stuff.You know, things with extra belt loops and weird zippers with flaps over them.''

Martin adds, however, that the ridiculous can sometimes be cool. He calls the ''big suit'' worn by David Byrne of the Talking Heads in the concert film ''Stop Making Sense'' ''the best example of serious theatrical clothing'' of late. ''It had such an impact on people and was an artistic statement, too.'' Martin himself wore a slightly oversize tuxedo by Matsuda (and rubber-soled suede shoes) to accept Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club's award as 1988 Man of the Year.

What Martin can't abide is the overdressed. ''It's so hard to accept people who are overdressed as anyone you'd want to talk to,'' he says. ''They're all down there in Cap d'Antibes: the Palm Beach look, the complete hairdo, and it's 10 A.M. and you know they've gotten up at 7 to get this thing together.''

Martin's interest in style goes beyond fashion. Personal style intrigues him as the gateway to charisma, something he has worked hard to achieve in his professional career. The magnetism he gives off in performance is cultivated, he says, ''through writing.'' Since the 1987 movie ''Roxanne,'' an adaptation of Edmond Rostand's ''Cyrano de Bergerac'' and his first solo film script, he has been writing steadily. ''Nothing is ready to go yet,'' he says. ''With me, things have to cook.''

As an actor, Martin is excited by ''Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,'' to be released in December, because it gets ''the hardest kind of laugh.'' Written by Dale Launer and directed by Frank Oz, it's a ''Some Like It Hot'' breed of comedy, set in the present, piled high with house-of-cards high jinks.

''It's like the best writing of the 40's and 50's,'' says Martin. ''The plot engineers itself. You relish a scene. The situation is so set up, so ripe that it can explode. It's not the episodic moving along from joke to joke, which is what 'The Jerk' was.''

Of his daring stage debut in Samuel Beckett's ''Waiting for Godot,'' directed by Mike Nichols and scheduled to open in New York in November, he says, ''We'll have to see if two comedians can pull it off.'' (He co-stars with Robin Williams.) But whatever doubts he harbors, Martin says he has gained a ''big dose of confidence'' since ''Roxanne.'' Ostensibly, his life has undergone a refinement, including his marriage two years ago to the British actress Victoria Tennant, who grew up in the rarefied orbit of her father, Cecil Tennant, agent to Laurence Olivier.

''My wife is way more sophisticated than I am,'' he says. ''She speaks three languages. She knows Europe.

''I do things now that I wouldn't have done before,'' he adds, ''like popping over to Switzerland for an art show. I would have been completely at sea going alone. I came to Europe before, but I never understood it,'' he says, and orders his third iced tea from the white-aproned waiter. Again, there is more to Martin than he lets on: Despite his portrayal of himself as culturally inept, his French is perfectly functional.


 		    
 
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