If fashion is all about performance, then Chantal Thomass is a master player. Anyone familiar with the French designer instantly associates her with blunt-cut jet fringed hair, crimsonlips and a strict black and white wardrobe with an enticing bit of lingerie coyly on display. There may or may not be a corset in the mix, and a satin whip or feathered tickler might be tucked away somewhere in a tufted boudoir. The look is equal parts dominatrix and ''I can have it all'' workingwoman.
This season, designers swung from one end of the style spectrum to the other: Gaultier and Dior had sultry sexpots flashing underwear as outerwear, while Chanel and Jil Sander, among others, went back to nature with bucolic peasant garb and frocks with frayed edges. But for Thomass, this dichotomy is old hat. In fact, before the lingerie-baring shows she held from the 1970s until the mid-'90s, she was a bit of a flower child.
Thomass began her career in the '60s with the label Ter et Bantine, which specialized in long, colorful dresses suitable for a milkmaid -- or free-spirited starlets like Brigitte Bardot, who bought them by the dozen. ''I was only 19, and I had never studied fashion, so I just started doing some very romantic dresses,'' Thomass says. Soon she was showing alongside Kenzo's Jungle Jap and Dorothée Bis; then, in the late '70s, she put on her runway a bright red bra under a sheer shirt. ''People kept asking me, more and more, for lingerie,'' she recalls.
Thanks in part to Thomass, underpinnings became part of the seasonal fashion cycle. ''While Gaultier and Mugler used lingerie to construct a superwoman, Thomass proposed hyper-femininity, but in a realistic way,'' says Pamela Golbin, a curator at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris. ''Her work was always about empowerment, whether it was with romantic clothing or more overt underwear.'' Case in point: Over the years Thomass has collaborated with companies as diverse as Victoria's Secret and the Provençal fabric house Souleiado.
The current to and fro between sexiness and romance feels so natural precisely because designers like Thomass made it possible for women to wear a little blouse on the prairie without smothering their sexuality, and to flaunt their ''unmentionables'' without looking like Rachel Uchitel. Thomass sums it up simply: ''My work is for women, not men.'' Armand Limnander
PHOTOS: FEMININE WILES CHANTAL THOMASS IN 1971, DURING HER TER ET BANTINE PERIOD; 1. A SPRING RUNWAY LOOK FROM DIOR. 2. SPRING RUNWAY LOOKS FROM ROCHAS AND CHANEL. 3. THOMASS WITH MODELS, 2001. 4. A RUNWAY LOOK FROM THOMASS'S SPRING 1978 COLLECTION.(PHOTOGRAPH BY TOP: MANFRED SEELOW; BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: DON ASHBY (3); FRANÇOIS DARMIGNY.)
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