The education of Tunji Dada

Part 3

by Ellen Barry

If Boston hasn't supplied Dada with the fashion springboard he needs, it's not for lack of attention; long after he has left, this city will remember that one pair of pants. Over the years, he's ventured into the vintage clothing cut-and-paste work known as recoup, he's designed costumes for Boston Ballet, and he's worked in asymmetrical, tailored leather jackets. But . . . those pants. It was 1992, and they had a certain, um, rear openness. Some people said they were amusing, some people said they were appalling, and some people couldn't say very much at all, they were so shocked.

"I remember at one of the shows at the Roxy, he showed those pants with the rear end hanging out," says Marilyn Riseman, who ran a Newbury Street boutique, Apogee, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. "He was much too way out. I don't think most Boston people look like that except the freaks that go out -- I don't even know where they go out, except to the disco."

Riseman concluded -- and other observers agreed -- that Dada's runway designs (e.g., skirts for men, sleeves without wrist openings) were interesting but unwearable in a city whose most successful designers stick closer to the taste of television anchorwomen. Local fashion fixtures like Alfred Fiandaca and David Josef made their names dressing Kennedy women and Kitty Dukakis, but Dada's celebrity business would have to wait for the cast of Rent -- one of whose members approached him and said, "Make me anything." But Rent, as we know, left Boston.

The "unwearable" criticism has driven Dada crazy for six and a half years, but it's also brought him a fair amount of big-fish-in-small-pond buzz, as his Mass Art mentor Sondra Grace points out. "He was criticized, but he was also talked about," she says. "In New York, you don't even get criticized." That much is true; along with his classmate Nong Tumsutipong, who recently moved to New York herself, Dada has become a favorite case in point for those people who make it their business to promote Boston as a fashion proving ground. "He is a good example of someone coming from outside the spectrum who is making a mark completely on his own," says the designer Jay Calderin, who moved here from New York in 1989 and founded Boston's fledgling Fashion Week.

But he adds that Dada "suffered from being defined as so outside the mainstream," and Dada agrees. In general, he says, Boston lacks the population of glamour kids who push fashion forward.

"There are always some people you expect to be catalysts for fashion. But for there to be a catalyst, there have to be events to attend," he says. "When you leave a club at 2 a.m., there has to be somewhere to go."

Thus, New York. Designers measure their success in national influence, and for that they need fashion forecasts, fashion shows, and, above all, fashion people. Even in New York, there is a relatively small number of people whose physical presence is necessary for a designer -- since, as Dada points out, "you can't invite the population in to see your clothes." Besides which, designers say, nothing ever really happens through normal channels. You get noticed because someone else's clothes don't show up for a shoot, and the stylist remembers your name, and you're home when they call.

Or else you aren't, and you accept work in the argyle division of Armani Sock. Alfred Fiandaca, who has been showing his collections on New York's Seventh Avenue for 16 years, has observed a vast number of young designers and come to the conclusion that even talented people fail like crazy.

"New York is a big city, and you can get chewed up very easily," he says. "Nothing is more common than people with talent. You know, and I know, a gazillion people with talent."

Into this jungle emerges Tunji Dada. He hopes to capitalize on his status as a new face, but he's not encouraged by the what's-the-punchline looks he gets in New York when he uses the words "Boston" and "designer" in the same sentence.

"It's like they don't even expect anything to come from outside of New York," he says. "What they don't remember is that any designer in New York is from somewhere else."

Which may be true, in the sense that no one is exactly born to the catwalk. But most haven't come as far as Tunji Dada.

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Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.