A very long night; At Nina Ricci, Olivier Theyskens crafts evening dresses that swizzle around the body like swirled glass.

Byline: Sally Singer

On the night before he was to show his debut pre-fall collection for Nina Ricci to press and buyers in New York, Olivier Theyskens could be found in a West Side studio giving a final tweak to skinny twisted trousers, softly tailored wool jackets, voluminous ponchos of cashmere and rabbit, chartreuse and lemon cocktail sheaths, and maxi swirling evening dresses made from powdery silks and wafting chiffons, ostrich feathers, and iridescent paillettes. "I am not afraid of long," he said, while holding the hem of a gown to examine the pleats that had been inserted inside each curved seam. Then he added, "But it's not often that we have a long dress that's not old evening."

Theyskens, in his decade of designing, has always championed the lengthy and elegant; no young talent has done more to revive the corset, the bustle, the crinoline, and the Watteau back for his contemporaries than this 30-year-old from Brussels. As a mere 20-year-old working under his own name, he laced up Gothic numbers for Madonna before turning to ballroom dresses that made the skirts of New Look gowns seem deflated by comparison. Then, at Rochas, he dressed women to look like perfume decanters-sculpted, elongated, extraordinary. Now, at Nina Ricci, another brand famous for its perfumes, Theyskens is thinking of one bottle in particular: the L'Air du Temps signature flask, designed in 1948 by Jean Rebull in collaboration with Marc Lalique and Robert Ricci. "It was a very big piece of work for me. That dress has a movement on the sides. I was inspired by birds when they open their wings." But in his persistence with silken floor-length drama, the designer is a bit of a bird himself, flying against the prevailing wind. The future of the long dress is under threat.

There are a number of reasons to think so. As the haute couture collections shrink in numbers (of both designers and clients), the stronghold of major-occasion dressing is looking beleaguered; and as Karl Lagerfeld says, "A real evening dress is only beautiful if it's like couture." Then there's the demographic problem: The masters of this kind of work are older, rather than younger, designers. In the case of Valentino, there are rumors of imminent retirement-which, if true, would deprive the world of a range of dresses that are, in his words, "only about making a woman look and feel beautiful." The younger generation reveres him and his ilk ("What makes a Valentino so amazing," says Laura Mulleavy of Ro-

darte, "is that it is a classic gown, cut in a perfect way on the hip and the chest, and yet so elegant and completely beautifully made"), but the latter's world of palazzi and princesses can seem a long way away. "Being a young designer," says Thakoon Panichgul, "I have limitations of what customers come to me for. Customers go to Valentino or Oscar de la Renta for long dresses. It's a specific customer and specific occasions." Of course, the red carpet has become the site of grandeur to which even the youngest designers can gain access, but it remains the case that Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, and Chanel continue to rule here, too: "Hollywood seems to want older and older designers," says Vera Wang. True; but then there's what you might call the Reese Witherspoon phenomenon.

On the very night that Theyskens was polishing his Ricci pre-collection, Witherspoon was walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes. She wore Theyskens's first big dress for Nina Ricci-except that it was a small dress. To be precise, it was a strapless, curvaceous number, in the fierce yellow of a Munch sky, that skidded to a ...