When Halston set out to create the flowing, vivid red “American Beauty Rose” gown, he didn’t make his assistant do the grunt work. He did it himself.

Halston, who is considered one of the top American designers, started with 16 gigantic silk organza circles. He then layered the silk to make eight circles, pulled them apart at the radii and pieced them together in four quadrants that fall effortlessly around the body. The sweetheart-shaped bust features layers of silk that look like rose petals.

Halston's "American Beauty Rose" gown, which has become the emblem of the current Museum at FIT exhibit. Photo: Amy Brittain

This gown sits on a raised circular platform as the star of “American Beauty: Aesthetics and Innovation in Fashion,” a new exhibit that opened in early November at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology in Chelsea. Although the end product alone would warrant prominent display in an exhibit, curator Patricia Mears chose the dress based on its hands-on, intensive design rather than its style.

“She sort of became our emblem,” Mears said. “It’s the perfect name for a perfect dress. People don’t realize the economy that went into this and the very precise, almost minimal patterns that Halston has used.”

The dress is among 90 that Mears used to illustrate the relationship between hands-on dress craftsmanship and the ideals of beauty in America. Simply put, Mears thinks hardworking, creative craftsmen, such as Halston, designed clothing that had a tremendous impact on the trends that Americans think are beautiful. Mears’ belief is a departure from a common idea that U.S. fashion is simply a collection of borrowed concepts from abroad.

Defending the American fashion industry is nothing new for Mears.

She once offered to introduce a Dutch designer to several New York fashion designers, but he delivered a cold, curt response.

“You don’t have any good designers in America,” he told her.

Mears bit her tongue at the moment but not for the long haul. Instead, she went to work to prove the Dutchman wrong.

Valerie Steele, fashion historian and director of the Museum at FIT, supported her colleague’s educational mission.

“The idea in Europe is very widespread that American fashion is just derivative and it’s just casual,” Steele said. “I think this exhibition definitively disproves that.”

A stroll through the exhibit’s dresses conjures images of red carpets and lavish ballroom dances. But Mears hopes the exhibit also shows that craftsmanship, rather than style, is essential in the history of U.S. dressmaking.  She wants the casual viewer to understand the intensive manpower and countless hours required for handcrafting a beautiful piece. The show puts an emphasis on the technical creation, such as the manipulation of geometric shapes used to create a flowing dress.

“Some of the most famous images of fashion have come out of the United States,” said Mears, referring to old Hollywood glamour, blue jeans and sportswear. “The proliferation of good-quality, ready-to-wear is an American invention. But we have not done a good job of showing the world that we have true designers.”

The exhibit at the Museum at FIT features 90 pieces from America's best hands-on designers. Photo: Amy Brittain

Mears organized the dresses, which date back to the 1930s, by themes in construction and function. There’s a section for little black dresses and classic American sportswear, along with dresses grouped by geometric patterns: including circles, squares, rectangles and parallelograms. Rectangles are by far the most common shape for constructing a piece, given the shape’s ability to flatter and elongate the body’s natural lines. Squares aren’t so flattering, which is why the shape is used sparingly among designers.

Despite American Beauty Rose’s prominence in the exhibit, it is not the most expensive or labor-intensive dress that Mears displayed. That honor goes to Ralph Rucci’s “Suspension” Infanta gown, a black duchesse satin 2006 creation with olive silk embroidery. Mears estimates the dress took several hundred hours to create and would cost more than $100,000 to buy.

Next to Rucci’s dresses are the historical Charles James gowns. Created in the 1950s, his gowns required the most delicate care in preparation for the exhibit, according to senior conservator Ann Coppinger. The dresses can easily stand up by themselves, strengthened by a complex structure of curves, angles and volume that would make it nearly impossible for the wearer to sit down. Steele labeled James’ dresses as her favorites within the exhibit.

Claire McCardell's 1957 romper. Photo: Amy Brittain

On the other end of the price and complexity spectrum, Mears identified a Claire McCardell 1957 romper as the most functional piece in the exhibit. The black and white plaid cotton romper, cinched at the waist with a red elastic belt featuring gold-colored metal hooks, likely cost $5 at the time of its creation.

It’s unclear if the skeptical Dutchman will make a trip to the exhibit, which runs through April 2010.  But even if he doesn’t show his face and view the “American Beauty Rose” dress, Mears and Steele think he has heard the message.

“I hope that with all of our shows that people start thinking more about the subject,” Steele said. “This will get them to question, ‘What’s American about American fashion?’

Snake pin, unknown designer. Photo: John Bigelow Taylor

Madeleine Albright can give as good as she gets. Take the incident in 1994, when she criticized Saddam Hussein’s policies, and was called an “unparalleled serpent” in the Iraqi press. The former Secretary of State responded by arriving at her next meeting with Iraqi officials with a serpent on her shoulder: an 18-karat gold snake coiled around a branch, a diamond dripping off the end of its tongue, pinned on her lapel. From that moment on, Albright used her brooches to convey her mood, as an extension of her diplomacy.

From now until January, Albright’s serpent pin and more than 200 others from her collection are on display at the Museum of Art and Design in midtown Manhattan. The pieces range from whimsical – a red sequin shoe – to meaningful.  She once wore a rhinestone bluebird with its head facing mournfully downward to denounce Cuban fighters who shot down a plane carrying civilians in 1996.

Sometimes her brooches were a sign of change. In a meeting in Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, she wore a pin by jeweler Gisela Geiger made from fragments of the Berlin Wall – little pieces of concrete, wrapped in silver wire.

Often her pins had a feminist bent; Albright was, after all, the first woman to hold the position of U.S. Secretary of State. One brooch shows a shattered glass ceiling, with smooth shards of glass broken beneath a gold bar. Another is a suffragette pin from the turn of the 20th century, with the green, white and violet colors of the women’s movement represented in rhinestones and fake pearls.

The pins, neatly presented behind glass cases on the second floor of the Columbus Circle museum, have one thing in common: they tell a story without Albright having to say a word.

“Former president George H. W. Bush had been known for saying ‘Read my lips,’” Albright writes in her new book, timed to coincide with the exhibition. “I began urging colleagues and reporters to ‘Read my pins.’”

“Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box” is out now in hardcover.  Read My Pins is at the Museum of Art and Design through January 31.

— Clare O’Connor

Devin Ratray and Jeremy Redleaf star in "Odd Jobs." Photo courtesy of Jeremy Redleaf

By Clare O’Connor

The main character in the web TV series “Odd Jobs” loses his job less than a minute into the show’s pilot episode. Nate, played by the show’s creator, Jeremy Redleaf, is laid off after his company loses money financing a dud Broadway show, “Diff’rent Strokes: The Musical.”

“Could’ve been an urban Annie,” laments Nate’s boss before firing him and half his team – but not before he asks that they leave the code to the office porn firewall. Nate will do anything to avoid moving back home with his parents, becoming the reluctant protégé of his lazy hustler of a roommate, Joe, who makes his rent money doing odd jobs posted on Craigslist.

“Odd Jobs” is a product of its times. Redleaf, 25, the show’s young creator and star, watched five of his high-flying friends get laid off in quick succession and found a dark humor in their desperation when some resorted to trolling Craigslist for hourly odd job work. From that, a web series was born – and, soon after, a business.

“These shell-shocked people around me had these great, cushy finance jobs,” said the New York-born Fordham grad over breakfast at a Murray Hill café. “I realized there was something funny about it – these guys who’d worked on Wall Street having to do someone’s laundry.”

Redleaf wrote the script and recruited a few of his acquaintances, many of them struggling actors grateful for the work. This wasn’t the first time Redleaf had tried his luck with Web TV. During the 2008 presidential election, he made a music video called “Juneau,” a satirical splicing of a song from the hit knocked-up-teen film “Juno” and the true story of vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter Bristol (sample lyric: “My mom says suck it up and wipe away the tears / I got a baby present from Jamie Lynn Spears”).

Redleaf shot “Odd Jobs” on his own dime here in New York. He then found the perfect way to turn the show into a viable business. He set up a job board similar to Craigslist on his Web site, OddJobNation.com, allowing employers to advertise for help with any odd jobs at all – and for the unemployed to find a day’s work. He makes money through a side business advertised on the site called Resumé Shirts, T-shirts printed with a customer’s job particulars and contact details. “You never know who’s standing behind you in the grocery story line,” he said.

Redleaf has seen his share of quirky odd job listings posted on the site since its inception, giving him endless fodder for the show. “There’s the woman who hired someone to tell her friend her husband was cheating on her,” he said. “Or, a well-known one: an ad agency in New York had fired a lot of its employees and they had a client in, so they hired actors to come in that one day. You can’t make some of this stuff up.”

As the odd jobs service caught on, so did the sitcom, and vice versa. Since the show’s December start, some cast members have seen their profiles grow – although Redleaf claims to bear no responsibility for their recent success. Nate’s hustler roommate, Joe, is played by actor Devin Ratray, whose best known role to date is that of Macaulay Culkin’s big brother Buzz in the 1990s film franchise “Home Alone.” Now, Ratray is set to appear in the upcoming Bruce Willis film “Surrogates.”

“People that I never thought would watch the show have told me how funny it is,” Ratray said over email on his way to shoot a new Warner Brothers’ series. “That’s the wild part about viral webisodes. Good shows catch on over the net, because it’s all word of mouth, or keyboard. There is no advertising or ratings pressure. No race for number one in a certain time slot. No television studio politics. This show is just a good formula with endless creative possibilities. But mostly, it’s because I’m awesome in it.”

In September, Redleaf presented “Odd Jobs” at the New York Television Festival, competing against many other independently produced web series. His work won him the chance to develop a project with Fox Television Studios’ digital arm, 15 Gigs. This month, Redleaf will shoot more episodes of “Odd Jobs” before his cast disperses to work on other projects all across the country.

As for Redleaf’s laid-off friends who inspired the show, three of the five who were fired have since found new jobs. The other two left New York and moved in with their parents.

“It’s exactly what my character was afraid of,” said Redleaf. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re doing odd jobs at home.”

Jane Hunt playing the violin at the US Open. Photo courtesy of Jane Hunt

By Clare O’Connor

It’s drizzling on the first Friday of Fashion Week, New York’s annual celebration of clothes and their designers. Jane Hunt arrives mid-afternoon by minibus for a high-end couture fashion show at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. She’s damp and tired, having commuted an hour door-to-door from the US Open tennis tournament in Queens.

Hunt isn’t a model, although she is strikingly pretty—blond, with aquiline features and a tiny frame. She’s not a tennis player either, although she’s spent much of this, the second week of September, at Arthur Ashe Stadium. She’s a classically trained violinist, but these days she spends far more time on catwalks or at sports matches than she does on the stage at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center. This evening, after hours spent performing as a courtside musician for the United States Tennis Association, she’ll play her violin as models sashay past her at Chilean gown designer Ruben Campos’ show.

For Hunt, surviving as a classical musician means being willing to go where the money is. She has played concerts on cruise ships as far afield as Mexico, Antarctica and Greece. She has performed as a warm-up act for film star Nicole Kidman at a Glamour Magazine event honoring military spouses. She regularly crosses time zones and rarely sees her boyfriend, with whom she shares a midtown apartment. She has abandoned what many classical musicians see as the ideal career path: Juilliard, auditions, composing, teaching, orchestras, Philharmonic.

Hunt, 26, does have Juilliard training; she spent her summers at the renowned Manhattan conservatory while at music college in her hometown of Manchester, England. But she realizes that to make any money with her violin, she must be savvy. Rather than resign herself to a precarious and often financially risky life of constant auditions for orchestras, she has taken a modern, populist approach to classical performance: marketing, networking, publicizing.

Even graduates from one of the most elite, technical, traditional schools on earth – Juilliard – have had to face up to the recession, taking jobs that they’d have sniffed at in decades past. Carrie Feiner from the class of 1981 has noticed more and more classically trained musicians following Jane Hunt’s lead, and forgoing the traditional performance path for event work. Feiner herself was a piano major at Juilliard but now works as a concert manager, promoting classical pianist Sara Beuchner and arranging her tour schedule. Feiner sees marketing as paramount, even for talented performers like Beuchner, who has been profiled in the New York Times.

“Being in the music field is not all about practicing anymore, it is about selling yourself,” Feiner said in an email interview from her Westchester home. “I think most Juilliard grads want jobs with orchestras. Unfortunately there are not that many openings, and I am afraid that many of them will be very disappointed. It is important to market yourself – get on the phones.”

Jane Hunt has her own website, ViolinVenus.com. She carries around little plastic cards for talent bookers, journalists and new fans, with codes offering free downloads of her music. This year, she formed a company called Venus Artists – a sort of collective, as she describes it, of young classical musicians pooling their resources for marketing purposes. “It’s more difficult when you’re starting off to get out there,” she said, sitting on the rooftop of her Amsterdam Avenue building after a rare day off. “We come up with ways to reach people and we go to conferences. It’s been quite lucrative, actually, in the gigs that we’ve pulled in.”

Even corporate party gigs, where classically-trained musicians provide background noise for money, have dried up, according to Clara Park, a Juilliard piano graduate from the class of 1997, now a senior director at classical music publicists Jay K. Hoffman & Associates. “I can tell you that even jobs in the weddings have dried up from what I understand,” she said. “People are now hoping to get their wedding or cocktail music from their own iPods. It’s free.”

Park’s old Juilliard classmates are doing what they can to pay the bills – everything from playing in the background on Beyonce’s tour to moonlighting for Broadway shows. Broadway orchestra gigs are very competitive, she says, but not at all prestigious.

Park wonders whether the onus of preparing classical musicians for today’s economy lies with the conservatories. “Do we train the next generation of musicians and performers to understand what it is that they’ll be facing?” she asked. “Job markets, interview questions, how to put a resume together? Or do we blatantly ignore that and forge ahead with our ‘classical’ training?”

For Juilliard’s part, the school acknowledges the difficulty its graduates will face when they leave the relative safety of their concrete Lincoln Center compound and enter the working world. Last week, the conservatory held a workshop on resume-building with their in-house PR guru, long-time communications head Janet Kessin. Her tips included the importance of building a website and advice on how to “convey your image as a performing artist”.

Jane Hunt is busy building her own public image this week. She’s at a conference in Virginia, where she is pitching her violin show to talent bookers. She’s just been sent some photographs by The United States Tennis Association, showing her magnified image broadcast on the oversized screen of the Arthur Ashe Stadium jumbotron, playing her violin for thousands of tennis fans.