February 2nd 1995, Globe and Mail

 BY DAVID LIVINGSTONE The Globe and Mail ANY excuse for a party, or a product. If the fashion business has taught the rest of the world anything, it must be that. In the past couple of weeks, members of the local fashion media have been invited to a breakfast celebrating a new vitamin-enhanced skin-care line from Elizabeth Arden, cocktails in honour of new botanically enriched hair colourants from Clairol, and, yesterday, a lunch-time media conference to debut the official team uniform of the Toronto Raptors Basketball Club. Moreover, we were made to feel as welcome as the flowers in May by a Raptors official who let us know that this story was for us as much as it was for the sports journalists.

Fashion and sport have come to have much in common. Supermodel Linda Evangelista, with her ever-changing hair colours, and San Antonio Spurs' forward Dennis Rodman, with his, are both watchable as human beings capable of effects, on court or catwalk, that remain impossible for most mere mortals. And in the past several years street fashion has been but another way of saying sports fashion.

As for the Raptors uniforms, modelled yesterday by Toronto students, a boy and a girl, they are characterized by a graphic density that brings to mind the marriage of folk-art naivete and camp sophistication in the work of French couturier Christian Lacroix. Both gear for home, with white background, and away, with purple background, feature multiple marks. The jersey bears the logo, introduced last may, of the Globoraptor, white in tooth and Naismith silver in claw, the name Naismith being an homage to Dr. James A. Naismith of Almonte, Ont., who invented basketball in 1891. The shorts have the claw-print logo on one side, and, on the other, a new logo, announced just this past Tuesday, that depicts the raptor biting into a large TR, the team's initials.

Round neck, armhole, waistband and hem are bands in purple, red and black, and running down both jersey and shorts are jagged vertical markings that could be likened to excited pinstripes, condensed lightning bolts or razor wire. Player numbers, on the breast and back of jerseys, are also jagged in outline. Players' names are spelled out in arcs topped by a saw-tooth border reminiscent of crowns and pinking shears.

Made from machine-wash, tumble-dry nylon and polyester by Champion, the company with exclusive rights to National Basketball Association game uniforms, the Raptors uniform is busy alright, but not half so busy as David Strickland, the club's director, consumer products, who later this week will be taking the new outfits down to Atlanta for the Super Show, the major trade event in the realm of sports merchandising.

A regular viewer of fashion as televised on FT and Ooh La La, Strickland yesterday described the uniforms as the "freshest looks in the NBA." As anybody must - anybody dealing with 60 licensees some of whom are making as many as 10 products - Strickland has a head for details. He pointed out that the garments shown yesterday were not in their final form. The new TR logo, for example, will be fully embroidered. Shorts that were two joined layers (the under one trimmed in a Globoraptor print) will actually be separate pieces, one pair loose, the second, with spandex.

According to Isiah Thomas, the Raptors' vice-president of basketball, the idea of double shorts in basketabll originally had a practical purpose, the snug ones serving to warm up the hamstrings. Now, he grants, this habit of dress is equal parts function and looks. To the conference yesterday, Thomas wore black slip-on shoes with a reptile texture, finely ribbed white socks, white, single-pleat trousers, white pullover and a two-button, single-breasted jacket in Raptors purple, but with an Italian label and a luxurious surface that suggested the presence in its makeup of hairs from the alpaca or camel or the delicate Angora goat.