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The shop is stocked with Morrison's signature cowboy-style belts studded with Austrian crystals and cinched with rhinestone buckles, with a $6,000 black-leather neo-motorcycle jacket whose back and lapels are encrusted with rhinestones, and with baseball caps and catsuits that sprout faux rubies and emeralds the way a mossy forest floor sends up mushrooms.
If all of this leads you to think there's nothing here for the over-35, the attorney, the budget-conscious or the regal at heart, read on.
Morrison has elegantly updated the classic English schoolgirl's dress. He has left the oversized heavy-falling collar but dotted it with tiny silver studs and faux diamonds. The low-slung pleats are still there, the chaste long sleeves and the straight, waistless drop from the shoulders. But the see-through black chiffon he uses in combination with the jeweled collar both softens and satirizes the schoolmarmish effect, rendering the dress ultra-sexy and surprisingly sophisticated.
He has also managed to design some of the most face-flattering, major-statement earrings I've come across. Usually, oversized, jewel-encrusted earrings are, at best, attractive in themselves. The wearer's face, no matter how lovely, plays second fiddle to the baubles. Not so with Morrison's ruby chain, or the grass-green drop in a drop, or the pair of three coruscating globes dotted with multicolored stones. Magically, they light up the wearer.
The shop also carries Morrison's lower-priced line, Fraud. These items are still encrusted with jewels like polka dots, but the jewels are plastic instead of crystal and the fabrics are synthetic rather than natural. The look's there, though, for those who want their clothes and budget, too. Items from the Michael Morrison line generally run from $180 to $900; for Fraud the prices range from $60, say, for a cap, to $196 for a catsuit.
Morrison's razzle dazzle sounds straight out of Hollywood, and it is -- but not without the influences of the Outback and Great Britain. Morrison has been designing in Los Angeles for 10 years; his first -- and only other -- retail store is on Melrose Avenue. But the designer is from Australia, "from Northwest Victoria, an area where green citrus and grapes are grown, kind of like here, really, with huge old gum trees and wrap-around verandas and a style that is resurfacing for more relaxed ways."
As a kid, he says, he was fascinated by clothing, and at 12 he worked at "the hippie shop." It was called Paraphernalia, he remembers wryly, and was the only such store in town. When Morrison left Australia, he went to England and worked in the costume department of the Royal Ballet. Since the troupe toured for 36 to 38 weeks a year, it gave him a chance to see the world. But he also decided "if I had to work that hard, I wanted to do something for myself."
So in 1981, he arrived in New York, in SoHo to be specific, and started picking up strips and straps and the odd scrap of leather thrown out by the few remaining factories inhabiting the erstwhile manufacturing district. He began experimenting with belts. "The New York garment district inspired me," he says.
But Los Angeles attracted him, and he took up residence on the West Coast and "started peddling earrings store to store." From peddling to designing for performers is a long jump, but hard work and skill have propelled more than one designer over the hurdles. Today, Morrison can count among his clients actress Daryl Hannah, rapper LL Cool J, and singers Jody Watley, Liza Minnelli and Gloria Estefan.
"I'm a bit of a collagist," Morrison says. "I may pull a picture out of my head or sometimes I'll think of something silly. Like I'm listening to Nancy Sinatra sing These Boots Are Made for Walkin', and I'll think, 'What doesn't she have?' "
What the designer himself can't have enough of are belts. Which led me to wonder how anyone could be so inspired by what is essentially always the same, a strap and a buckle. Morrison looks bemused. "I like an odd strip of leather," he says with characteristic understatement.
If Morrison revels in designing belts, however, he keeps stretching his interests. His next collection will include more leather, more jackets. "You can throw a jacket over anything," he says.
And if his belts and vests are often bought by men, Morrison protests: "But I don't really make men's clothing. One day I may, but right now I'm still learning about women's clothes."
