Deja Vu

Burrows is a shy, preternaturally boyish man, of medium height with a distance runner's build. He keeps his hair cut short and always wears tinted schoolboy glasses. On a steamy day in June he was wearing Bermuda shorts and a plain V-neck T-shirt in olive drab, accessorized with a black leather fanny pack and black ankle boots. A week later, when he was to have his picture taken, he was wearing khaki trousers and a tropical print camp shirt with a stingy sprinkling of rhinestones. A photographer suggested he remove the ubiquitous fanny pack.

Burrows is not the sort of designer who owns a room. Even during the party days of the 1970s, he didn't make an entrance or travel solo. "We would go out en masse -- 30 people all dressed in my clothes. It was a very communal thing," Burrows says. "The boys and girls could wear the same thing and they would come and raid my closet."

Burrows stumbled into the fashion spotlight by accident. He grew up in Newark, N.J. Both his grandmothers were prolific seamstresses and they would "bring home fabrics to make clothes for Sunday." He began sewing, as so many people do, to dress a friend's doll when he was 8. Later, he would make clothes to wear out dancing.

He planned to be an art teacher. He was enrolled at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art when, in his second year, he walked past a fashion design class with its mannequins, bolts of fabric, sketches. He was hooked. In 1964 he transferred to New York's Fashion Institute of Technology.

By the late 1960s, he was selling his clothes at O boutique, a kind of fashion collective downtown. He bumped up against the Andy Warhol crowd, the free-love crowd, all the crowds. "There were no color barriers," Burrows says. "You liked somebody and that was it."

Eventually he was taken under the wing of the late Geraldine Stutz, owner of Henri Bendel. (The store is now owned by The Limited Brands.) She ensconced him in a boutique called "Stephen Burrows' World." He didn't look to other designers for inspiration; he didn't look to history. His clothes captured the ethos of that time in a way that no one else's did.

"I'm not sure people today can understand the gestalt of that period -- pre-STD, post-Pill. There was an incredible sense of liberation and freedom. It was an almost hedonistic sensibility," says Harold Koda, chief curator for the Costume Institute at the Met. "He captured an innocent expression of it.

"That's what he projects to me now," Koda says. "He's not cynical. He doesn't seem to have the calluses on his personality after being exposed to the fashion industry for so long."

Working with matte jersey -- a fabric that had been used almost exclusively for lingerie -- Burrows created a unique lettuce-edge hem, a finishing method in which a zigzag stitch is pulled taut until the fabric curls. The effect is a garment with a flirtatiously undulating hemline.

"Lettucing was a mistake," Burrows says. "But I liked the way it looked."

Burrows's choice of fabric distinguishes him as a hands-on designer.

"The material he selected is something you have to be engaged by. You have to handle the material. A lettuce hem, if you just sent it through the machine, it wouldn't do that," Koda says. "It requires the intervention of a person."