A Cut Above

Designer Francisco Costa Goes From 'the Middle of Nowhere in Brazil' to the Height of Fashion

When discussing the fashion industry, the topics of conversation typically ping-pong between the commercial aspects of the garment trade, the celebrity-glamour mill and the fast-changing trends of each season. In a culture that is more comfortable dismissing Seventh Avenue as merely a reservoir for the wacky and the esoteric, the inventive quality of the designs themselves is often overlooked.

But Friday afternoon, fashion design -- in its quiet and purest form -- was celebrated in the most prestigious of locations: the White House. First lady Michelle Obama honored the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards winners at a luncheon of crab cakes and heirloom tomatoes in the East Room. The awards, now in their 10th year, acknowledge design in the broadest terms, underscoring excellence in fields including graphics, landscape artistry and architecture. Fashion is included in that wide embrace.

The winners this year included Bill Moggridge, who created the first laptop computer; Amory Lovins, a green-energy guru; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; SHoP Architects; the New York Times graphics department; Perceptive Pixel, which focuses on interactive technology; Tsao & McKown Architects; HOOD landscape design; Boym Partners, which develops a wide range of everyday products from lighting to kitchen gadgets; and Reynold Levy, president of the Lincoln Center. And representing the fashion industry was Calvin Klein womenswear designer Francisco Costa.

Costa arrived in Washington on Thursday evening, in time for a Cooper-Hewitt cocktail party atop the W Washington, with its views of the city's monuments. But before his first beer, the slight, low-key minimalist was tucked into a corner of the hotel's acid-trip lobby bar; he was dressed in a white shirt and khakis -- the picture of Calvin Klein restraint. And Costa was having a little trouble putting into words what it was like to win, to be invited to lunch at the White House and to be mentioned in the same breath as the person who invented the world's first laptop. "I think this is major. It's incomprehensible," he said. "I come from the middle of nowhere in Brazil. It's . . . amazing."

"I look at fashion and I feel like it's such a different category," he said. "Those people are really making changes in the way we live. . . . I look at the field of architecture. It takes longer and it lasts forever.

"I just created some dresses."

But the point of the Cooper-Hewitt awards, and of the White House's support of them, was to make clear that artistic expression comes in a multitude of ways, is informed by math and science, and can be at its most profound when it is modest and intimate. As one of the other winners, Calvin Tsao, noted, fashion is the most personal and basic kind architecture. It is the reassuring shelter that we carry with us everywhere we go.

Of the big three names in contemporary American fashion, Ralph Lauren focused on creating a fantasy of old money and storybook Americana. He is the great illusionist. Donna Karan has, at her core, been intent on solving women's aesthetic dilemmas: how to feel sexy while remaining discreet, how to balance wide hips with narrow shoulders, how to look both feminine and powerful. Calvin Klein -- not the sex-obsessed jeans and underwear Klein, but the utterly spare designer of chic women's ready-to-wear -- always focused on line and fabric, the simplest, most minimalist aspects of style. This is a label that rarely had a use for a hue brighter than gray. It shunned frippery such as ruffles and lace. Even buttons were too ostentatious.

Costa began designing the women's collection in 2004, after Klein's retirement. He had a rocky start, with runway samples that were poorly constructed and several collections in which indulgent experimentation ran afoul of the realities of a woman's body and, for that matter, her life, Costa has settled into a sensibility that always aims to meld artistic daring with wearability.

His spring 2009 collection epitomized what the Cooper-Hewitt awards celebrate. It was a design exercise that brought together a host of disciplines such as architecture and sculpture; and yet, it still considered the day-to-day requirements of the woman who might ultimately wear these clothes. The collection was based on cubes and right angles. Costa, in essence, put square clothes on a round person and managed to make her look sensual.

The dresses and jackets were all sharp angles and intractable lines; there were no curves in this collection. He wanted the clothes to have volume that could be sustained without any underlying structure, without crinolines, boning or panniers, for instance. And he wanted the clothes to collapse into a neat predetermined series of folds so a woman could pack them into a suitcase and have them emerge hours later unscathed.

"It was trial and error, a lot more than usual because it involved mathematics and geometry," Costa said. "That collection was very challenging."