Fashion Facets

First your mother, now Newsweek. This headline was also the headline of a recent cover story, highlighting America's trend toward dressing down. From work to church to Europe, Americans are going casual. With even IBM – the quintessential bastion of starched uniformity – now sanctioning Dress-Down Friday, it's not surprising that more than half of U.S. employers have followed, ahem, suit. And that's not counting the ones that already allow casual wear every day, namely entrepreneurial and creative fields where individuality of dress is considered a badge of honor.

Newsweek reports these shifts in dress-ups and dress downs:

• Church, where you once daren't enter without hat and gloves, now attracts bare legs, bare shoulders and sometimes bare feet.
• Travel, where you once dressed to present yourself to strangers, has become the second most important reason to wear sweatpants.
• National television. In recent appearances, Hollywood stars and moguls such as Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg and David Geffen dressed from rag bag chic (Pitt) to fifth grade chic (Spielberg's rumpled plaid shirt) to "Mr. Gap," as Geffen is known.
• Gangland. Even mobsters don't dress like mobsters anymore, says Newsweek, with John Gotti Jr. sporting an open tank top that his father wouldn't have been caught dead in.
• The White House. When even the president jogs by dressed just like your neighbor, well...

Newsweek says women used to dress up and put on jewelry to go shopping. These days, dressing up may be on the downswing, but it's still cool to wear jewelry. The November 1994 issue of Vogue showed Hollywood's favorite actresses wearing casual duds and designer diamonds.

Jewelry designer Henry Dunay suggests the easiest way for a woman to achieve this casually elegant look is to start with a pair of diamond earrings. He also says that today, jewelry should take a woman from day into night and should look as right with denim as it does with velvet.

Neiman Marcus has created a retrospective gallery show of the work of jewelry designer David Yurman. Included will be works from Yurman's early years as a sculptor and one-of-a-kind pieces from private collections and his archives. The exhibit was scheduled for Neiman's Houston Galleria and Atlanta's Lenox Square Mall in April, its Union Square store in San Francisco May 12-22 and its Las Vegas Fashion Valley store June 8-18, coincidentally overlapping the JCK International Jewelry Show in Las Vegas, being held across the street at the Sands Expo Center June 9-12.

The exhibit is in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Yurman's well-known cable collection.