Timeless.(Norma Kamali)(Interview)

For two decades, Norma Kamali has been creating chic sweatshirt separates, body-conscious jersey dresses, and, of course, writes Lynn Yaeger, those singular swimsuits.

Along time ago, I attended a professional conference with a close friend. When it came time to dress up for the gala dinner, I chose a 1910 beaded silk dress that disintegrated halfway through the evening; my colleague donned a thigh-grazing, big-shouldered, striped Lurex Norma Kamali sweatshirt dress. (We looked like Fanny Brice meets Judy Jetson.) These many years later, funnily enough, you could still wear either of these twisted classics to a dinner party.

"Of course I still do the sweats!" Kamali, gamine-like in ballet flats and pigtails, laughs when I tell her this story over a shared olive-oil cupcake in her Wellness Cafe, a serene aerie in the Kamali flagship on West Fifty-sixth Street. "I love a great sweat piece with a gold beaded skirt," she says, thus unwittingly summoning up a look that combines my vintage passion with my friend's outre modernism.

Decades before women began routinely pulling jeans under cocktail dresses, Kamali, who has been in business since 1968, was endorsing such unorthodox combinations. Her diaper dresses and parachute skirts, goddess gowns and iconic sleeping-bag coats may be timeless, they may be classic, but there is also something about them that resonates with particular clarity at the moment. Who else might Yves Saint Laurent's Stefano Pilati have been channeling when he offered a collection replete with sweatshirt influences for spring 2008? What could look more contemporary than Kamali's boatnecks and ballet skirts, like a particularly American, easy-wearing version of Alaia? And doesn't that floaty bias frock remind you more than a little of Lanvin?

When my gaze falls upon a series of poly-chiffon slip dresses, Kamali points out that she calls them her swim gowns, inspired by the beloved vintage clothes she favored for years. "These are a little more modern. When my vintage dresses got holes in them, I used to toss them over bathing suits."

Let's talk about bathing suits, shall we, since this is the designer upon whom thousands, nay, millions, of women rely when they want to look like slightly saucy vestal virgins at the beach. These extraordinary garments have some secret ingredient that allows them to flatter everyone from callow sprites who have never heard of Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner to women on in years who have relied with almost pathological loyalty on Kamali to provide a little Old Hollywood glamour in those most challenging of settings: poolside or at the shore.

So what is the engineering feat behind these ruched masterpieces? ...