STYLE COMPASS PETER SOM  by Erika Heet

Teaser:
Peter Som is inspired by almost everything around him — art, furniture, big cities, cuisine, people — and is driven by his own instincts and “things that feel real.” He calls fashion the merging of creativity and commerce, and, while balancing both, has brought his own signature to the runway.

The Color Field:
With a Bryant Park debut almost a decade ago he likens to “entering the Emerald City,” and a Spring 2010 collection so bright and varied he says it looks like a box of candy, fashion designer Peter Som clearly sees in vivid, unadulterated color. In the spring, he envisions tangerine-orange strié and powder-blue pieces stippled with pink and purple, tempering it with ice-blue and antique-pink prêt-à-porter. In the fall, his hues run from azure to psychedelic lime green, hot pink and turquoise, served with blue-tipped fur and wrapped in — what else — a zebra-print coat.

Som knew he wanted to be a designer by the time he hit the fifth grade. While on a family trip to Paris, at the age of ten, he snatched an issue of French Vogue (ITALICS)from his older sister. Among the early ’80s standards like Yves Saint Laurent, Ralph Lauren, Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler, on those glossy pages he also discovered what he calls “the Japanese force of fashion that had started sweeping over us — it was like nothing I had ever seen. Issey Miyake and Mitsuhiro Matsuda infused fashion with that chic, four-square elegance, and I really responded to it.” He was so intrigued, he says, he kept that issue of French Vogue, which he still possesses today.

Som was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by architect parents, in an environment he describes as being heavily informed by Bauhaus and minimalist sensibilities. “Our whole house was made up of pieces from Knoll and Herman Miller — Eero Saarinen tables, Jean Royère chairs. We lived way up in the hills, and I would often sit in a Marcel Breuer chair and watch the fog roll over the hills, through the valley and up to the house.” After living among such sleek lines and poetic ethereality, when he went off to study art and art history at Connecticut College, he says he rebelled against his parents’ better judgment and “went totally country. I had seersucker couches, wicker baskets all around, muslin curtains and roman shades,” he says with a laugh. “But luckily, we all come back to our parents’ influence in one way or another.”

After graduating, Som went on to study design at Parsons and supplemented that with internships at Calvin Klein and Michael Kors. “At Calvin Klein I was able to see how the larger companies were run, and run well,” he says. “And at Michael Kors, who had a much smaller company than he does now, I learned the beauty of amazing fabrics, like a hammered satin or a double-faced cashmere with a touch of mink.” Post-Parsons, he landed an internship at Bill Blass. “I was the youngest person there, and sometimes I felt like a bull in a china shop — in an extremely rarefied world.” This rarefied world taught him important tools he still uses today. “Mr. Blass knew his customer inside and out,” Som says. “He lived their life. The most important thing I took away from him is the necessity to know your customer, to know how she lives and what she wants.”

By the time he got a spot at New York Fashion Week in the Bryant Park tents with his Spring 2001 collection, he was showing right alongside Blass, Oscar de la Renta and so many other heavy-hitting designers. “Looking back on it now, I was pretty gutsy, just jumping right in there. I had ambition and drive, and I knew I had to do my best to make my mark.” Despite the fact that he was still working out of his apartment and “it was just me and a couple of friends rolling the racks in — it’s not like I had this huge team behind me,” the feedback was strong. Award nominations and accolades followed, and the fashion magazines soon had a new somebody to add to their pages.

Hollywood darlings and femme fatales alike have grown to love Som. At a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala, affectionately known as the Met Ball, Som outfitted (and escorted) Maggie Gyllenhaal in a plum organza dress with a fitted bodice and a full skirt that shimmered in an iridescent glaze, with hints of aqua and hot pink for the trim. For another Met Ball, Som dressed Mandy Moore in a strapless, floor-length navy-blue silk faille gown that sported an incredible clutch-your-pearls-moment: pockets. “It was my version of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X,” he says. A Madame X with subtle, oh-so-liberated pouches that left her hands free of the expected lipstick clutch. And when Scarlett Johansson chose a white chiffon number trimmed with black lace and gray velvet from his fall 2006 collection for the New York premiere of Scoop, fashion blogs blew up all over town. “There was an incredible demand for it,” Som says, almost incredulously. “It was amazing the number of phone calls we got for that dress.”

His influences have varied over the years, and he names no woman in particular as his muse. “She is a combination of women I admire, and women in my life,” he will only divulge. “What they all have in common is a strength and femininity about them, and a true sense of self.” He is inspired by art, from the Renaissance painters he studied in college to contemporary artists (he cites Kehinde Wiley, Shinique Smith, Gary Simmons and Ajit Chauhan as favorites). His fashions also take hints from the places he loves: Paris, which he visits twice a year without fail to look at fabrics and with which he admits he has had a longstanding love affair; Barcelona, “a city sparkling on the water with the most amazing people and food;” and his hometown, San Francisco, where he used to drive around the impeccably tony, impossibly hilly Pacific Heights neighborhood to marvel at the Victorian and Queen Anne mansions, some of which are so high, he says, “you can look through the windows from the street and see forever.”

Som’s aesthetic seems part fantasy, part history, with vintage touches playing all manner of parts. Coats and jackets from the Fall 2009 collection refer to 1940s lines, complete with fur trim, but are executed in an unexpected royal blue Chinoiserie satin. One Spring 2010 look, the low-lying, high-waisted bikini bottom (a must for the stick-thin, and very obviously a privilege and not a right for everyone), looks straight out of a Slim Aarons photograph, and is paired with a wisp of a diaphanous, striped long-sleeve blouse that catapults the look out of the past and into the future. Som finds himself referencing the first half of the 20th century more than other periods, because he says it held “the most extreme variety of silhouettes reflecting the intense changes in the world at the time. It was the beginning of Chanel, Patou, Balmain, Dior, Balenciaga — the golden age of couture.” But he is not simply a devotee of the past, as he is quick to praise the ultimate benefit of modern fashion: variety. “Fashion is no longer a dictating society, as it used to be,” he notes. “It’s not like hems have to be a certain length or you’re out. Fashion is more of a democracy now.” Perhaps due to his egalitarian references, each Som collection ends up including at least one piece that indubitably leads every woman to say, “I want that.”

Not every collection is the result of perfect sketching, wildly snipping scissors sending velvet and cashmere flying and rising to a crescendo of one runway epiphany after the next. He gets designer’s block as severely as anyone else, and when he does, he pauses to take stock of what he has before him. “When that happens, I step back and do something else, like go outside for walk — the worst thing you can do is to keep drawing when things aren’t clicking. Creativity is a process. Sometimes you have to love what you do and hate what you do — that’s what makes you grow.”

When asked to choose five words to describe himself, he answers carefully: “Determined, funny, hungry — in all ways — impatient and…patient.” His patience, and lack thereof, continues to pay off with consistent, thoughtful collections, lauds and applause from critics and a steady line of A-listers enamored of his designs. Right now, he is inspired by “anything that feels innate, and getting down to the real nitty gritty. For instance, I just watched the movie Taking Woodstock and was inspired by that sense of breaking all the rules.” He’s currently sketching out his Fall 2010 collection, which he reports will build on that defiant streak, through “fun, elegance, eclecticism, and a woman who will be a little more rebellious — I’m just not sure how yet.” One thing is certain: Whatever he produces, it will surely be delivered with irreverent luminosity.