Becoming Jane.(Jane Fonda)

Byline: editor:Sally Singer

This season, fashion has a thing for Fonda--and the look she made famous in Klute. Lynn Yaeger looks back.

The clothes I wore in Klute were what I was wearing in my real life at that time. I did wear a lot of really high boots and short skirts--they reflected where I was at!" Jane Fonda says as we share a sofa in her suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, a pile of 40-year-old publicity stills between us. We're rifling through the photos for inspiration, so Fonda can riff on what she wore back in the day and why. She pauses to examine a Klute pic in which she's sporting a prototypical hippie handbag--a long-lost ancestor, perhaps, of that Balenciaga fringy carryall so ubiquitous these days--and a wide, low-slung, brass-buckled belt. "That was my own belt, my own bag! My daughter has the belt now."

Fonda seems a little surprised when I tell her that many of the fashions that turned up on recent runways and in presentations--those jaunty jacquard minis at Missoni; the maxi-vests at Chanel; striped turtlenecks belted over peasant skirts signed Dolce & Gabbana; Marco Zanini's midi skirts launching a reconstituted Halston; Stuart Vevers for Loewe's patent trenches--offer what could be described as a tribute to her character in Klute. In the film, for which she received the 1971 Academy Award for Best Actress, Fonda plays tormented young prostitute Bree Daniels, at once steadfast and soulful, confident and terrified, in a dazzling, shifting array of taut over-the-knee boots, skirts mini to midi to maxi, tight stretchy sweaters that leave little to the imagination, and on one memorable occasion, a long, Halstonesque sequined dress, snug as a mermaid's skin, that unzips to reveal pure, unadulterated Jane.

And then, of course, there was that iconic shaggy bob, the layered coif that was as much a part of the Klute aesthetic as tight tops and ankle-grazing vests. "Let me tell you about the Klute hair!" Fonda says, explaining how it represented a psychic break for her. She had just endured filming Barbarella, where she was trussed into a metal corset and strapped to mechanical contraptions and sported a vast waterfall of tresses, and had recently ended her marriage to Roger Vadim, the notoriously difficult Frenchman who directed that movie.

"I had left my life in France, and I wanted a total change from the huge blonde hair. I went to Paul McGregor, who cut Vadim's hair, and said, 'Do something!' And he gave me that haircut." She pauses. "That new hair--I didn't need rollers or to dye it--both led me to and reflected a new life."

It was not a new life for Fonda alone, though she may have been the poster girl for a particular brand of early-seventies cool. In the space of a few short years, millions of women, not just movie stars but nurses and stenographers, students and housewives, had chucked their panty girdles and bullet bras and adopted the slouchily sexy look of Bree Daniels. Her ensembles and Fonda's clothes in life blended seamlessly. "I wore a lot of Indian shirts, big glasses. I bought a lot of foulards, antique things on Kings Road in London, where the Rolling Stones first bought their clothes." Still, Fonda insists she knows little about fashion, claiming that she arrived late to the sartorial party of the sixties and seventies. "I started wearing tie-dye, minis, and high boots about five years after everyone else. For a long time there was always some remnant of the fifties--makeup that looked like it was from Tall Story [Fonda's first movie, 1960]--because that's how I had been comfortable. I'm derivative, never a trendsetter," Fonda swears, though she admits that she was entranced by the legendary stylishness of Anita Pallenberg, with whom she worked in Barbarella, "and that rubs off."