Hollywood's Well-Tylered Man

When Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington and Stephen Dorff want to get dressed to kill, they head straight for Richard Tyler's coolly cut, classic clothes. Here, the Australian-born. L.A.-based designer grades guys from Tom Cruise to Jim Carrey on their fashion finesse, skewers the dress-up circus of the Oscars, and spells out where lime-lit men should be heading now that the style of pretending to ignore style is over.

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Virtually from the moment Richard Tyler opened his West Coast boutique with his wife/business partner Lisa Trafficante hack in 1988, his strong, sleek, meticulously tailored clothes started lending their power statement to actresses with the legs, curves and celebrity to make Tyler the new darling in the designer-to-the-stars sweepstakes. The one star who did more than all the rest was Julia Roberts, who took to Tyler just as the world took to her and demonstrated that Tyler's masculinized feminine suits could, especially with their skirts made extra short, do more for sex appeal than the tightest Azzedine Alaia. Already heralded in the New York fashion world, Tyler gained a special Hollywood profile by having his clothes worn to photo ops everywhere, and by being present himself in Tinseltown, where stars could drop into his store for the special attention stars need. Though it was Tyler's women's couture that put him on the map, he had, from his earliest days back in Melbourne, Australia, where he began his career creating spandex-and-sequin outrages for Elton John, Alice Cooper and the Bee Gees, designed men's clothes as well. A couple of years ago he expanded his sphere of fashion influence with a menswear line that Hollywood picked up immediately. Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Jeff Golblum. Jimmy Smits and Paul Reiser all wear Tyler prominently. Many others who don't look like they're doing designer dress-up have Tyler pants, shirts or jackets on with the lower-key stuff they're wearing.

It's not that Tyler is the hottest designer in the world of celebrity fashion. There are other, more flamboyant designers who get bigger headlines, and vets like Armani and Hugo Boss are more pervasive. But Tyler has been in Los Angeles, close-up and personal, on a regular basis for years, watching the Hollywood men's fashion scene dig itself out of grunge and inch toward something more elegant, and he's had a personal stake in figuring out where things are heading. He's also had the required lifelong fixation on Holly-wood/cinema style that an informed view of the cur-rent state of fashion affairs depends on. As a respected mainstay now in the style repertoire of actors who actually have style. Tyler has an excellent vantage point from which to opine on the ups, downs and general direction of screen-guy fashion.

I catch up with Tyler in his modem Beverly Boulevard salon just before he's about to race to New York to prepare for the splashy showings of his fall line. Like Tyler's Manhattan showroom, the L.A. store's vibe is user-friendly, so long as the user is very deep-pocketed. Tyler's clothes are some of the most expensive in the very expensive high-end of the style spectrum, Tyler himself is nowhere near as imposing or intimidating as his pricey tags. Soft-spoken, sporting the mien and mane of a veteran rock musician, the 49-year- old designer greets me with a double-handed shake, toting glasses and a chilled bottle of very nice bubbly, looking effortlessly smart in a self-tailored plaid suit. Together we sit down to draw a bead on the sartorial state of contemporary screen gods, some of whom are Tylerized, some of whom are not.

Before I can even utter a name for starters, Tyler announces that he has a credo to impart. Fine, let's hear it. "My whole way of designing is classic-based clothing: English-cut, English fabrication," he announces. "If you see a vintage photo of Errol Flynn, say. the very sexy silhouette of his suit is absolutely now: broad-shouldered, tucked in at the waist. But it's 19%, not 1936. Fashion, for me, cannot be retro. So, yes, my clothes are classically cut, but done with new fabrics--it must be classic, with a twist." His credo now imparted, Tyler says he has a simple message for Hollywood men. OK, fire away. ''Holly-wood men should all look at them-selves very long in the mirror before they go out," he asserts. "'I know they have very tight schedules, but they also have huge egos or they wouldn't be doing this work."

"Are you talking about stars in grunge or about stars dressed to the nines in designers' clothes?" I ask.

Apparently the latter. "Sometimes designers push their weight around too much with stars and make them look forced and overdone, especially when it comes to evening wear." he tells me. "I really hate seeing a star wearing a tuxedo with one of those little band-collar shirts and a bright floral vest. I guess they feel they look hip and happening but if they'd look in the mirror, they'd know otherwise," Ah, yes. Oscar excess,

"A lot of these guys sometimes look overdone," Tyler says. ''It's just too much. If you're going to do for-mal evening wear, I much prefer the tuxedo with tails we did for Denzel Washington [for last year's Oscar show].

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