Content area
Full Text
At 5, Robin Piccone was already taking chances. On the sly, she lopped off the bottom of her parents' living room curtains to make a jumpsuit.
While her mother was understanding about the curtains and her first pass at design, Piccone couldn't get into the suit, she recalled, "because I had sewn up the armholes."
The 27-year-old designer tells the story while sitting in a ramshackle building with peeling paint inside, the name of a linoleum company outside. "This place is a zoo," she said of her studio. "But it's an improvement over our old garage."
Both the helter-skelter studio in Venice and the makeshift business cards (an old number is scratched out, a new one penned in) signal that Piccone Apparel Corp., with $7-million gross sales predicted this year, has grown beyond her wildest dreams.
In less than two years, Piccone, designer of sexy, sizzling swimsuits and sportswear made out of neon-bright neoprene, has become the leader of a fashion revolution. Real success began when she linked with Body Glove, becoming one of the first designers to have a licensing agreement with the 35-year-old Hermosa Beach manufacturer of wet suits.
With her name on everything she designs, Piccone is in the limelight as the innovator who gave utilitarian neoprene (a synthetic rubber synonymous with wet suits, scuba diving and surfing) a fashion veneer. Her clean, graphic sports-related looks have covered the trendiest bodies coast-to-coast and the pages of Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Time and Newsweek. Her fans say that not since Norma Kamali has anyone done so much with so little fabric.
In addition to a signature one-piece rubber suit with a big zipper up the front, she has created neoprene bikinis, miniskirts, bustiers, car coats, even a "girdle" with a long tulle skirt attached, which was in demand for nightclubs and proms.
Piccone confesses she never thought the rubber swimsuits would sell: "We did them because we thought they would attract a lot of attention."
But sell they did, along with Lycra suits trimmed in neoprene, all-Lycra suits and some...