Design duo taps into lifestyle trend

Monique Natalia, Contributor, Jakarta

Street fashion is mall fashion in this country, says fashion consultant Muara Bagdja.

Sometimes, though, the problem is telling if there are any age restrictions in who's wearing what in local malls. The "girl" in the tank-top turns out to be the mother of the two children that she has with her. A woman in her early 20s, her age gauged by her polished appearance, is actually a high school student.

It's often difficult to make a concrete definition of what's in at any time in fashion, but in Jakarta 2002 it's all about lifestyle.

The trendy label Urban Crew has been particularly successful at tapping into young people's lifestyles and giving them what they want to wear.

In the midst of all the evening gowns adorned with glittering beads and rhinestones, the two designers behind the label, Era M. Sukamto and Ichwan H. Thoha, have brought a fresh new look to the Indonesian fashion scene.

With their motto to "sell clothes with a lifestyle", these two style surfers, both 20-somethings, decided to crack the fashion scene with a mighty neon-colored ax.

Their first collection in 1997 was called White Album, and was filled with white-colored body hugging clothes. Their next show was dubbed Urban candy, and paraded candy-colored clothes that is all the rage in teen fashion today

Their notion of lifestyle is more visible in their next collection, Urban Cowboy, in 1998, way before celebrities like Madonna and MTV veejay Shanti and young Indonesians started wearing cowboy hats and cowboy styled shirts. They followed with Urban Hospital, a techno and techno pop influenced collection, which showed their sense of humor.

Jungle Babe was the name of their next collection in 1999.

"This is when we finally found our true identity and lifestyle. Then, we managed to prove that we can survive as a business and as a designer," said Era.

They said that this was the starting point that compelled them to broaden their target market to young professionals and college students instead of only teens.

Last year, when other designers were looking to the 1980s for inspiration, they went to the 1940s, creating stylish but hip interpretations of the World War Two aviator look of bomber jackets and aviation pins.

It was a clever segue to their latest collection, Urban Speed. This time the spotlight is on the glamorous lifestyle of mobile people, like stewards and stewardesses, pilots and racers.

"We are selling a lifestyle instead of only selling an item," Era said. "So, instead of selling only a T-shirt, we are selling a T-shirt with a lifestyle."

To the two graduates of La Salle in Singapore, the more important thing is not what to wear but how to wear it.

The two latest collections are targeted for young professionals who are mobile and constantly on the move, not the fashionable urban teens who they targeted previously.

"It's true that at the beginning our clothes seem like they are targeted to teenagers. It's mostly because our designs were in teen magazines like Gadis and the like," said Ichwan, formerly a fashion stylist for Hai, a teen magazine for male.

When they first started out in 1997 there were no magazines for the "in betweens", those who have outgrown their high school uniforms but are not ready yet to take on the role of parenthood. Now, with the existence of magazines such as A+, Female and Kosmopolitan, the design duo feels that it's time to move on, to widen their scope of customers.

Previously, their boutique and outlet at Pasaraya Blok M was filled with teenagers hunting for the latest fashion. Now they claim there is a new bunch of customers, crowding the garage-cum- shop-cum-workshop, who they dub "yuppies".

This group consists of young, sophisticated, trendy, expressive, mobile people with professions like radio DJ, graphic designers and fashion students.

However, they have not completely closed the door to teens.

"Their free and carefree sporty style is also a source of inspiration for us as we always try to make something that's young," Era added, smoothing out her purple knee length skirt from the Urban Speed collection.