Dallas bursts into color

Terry dresses and play clothes danced down the runaway in brilliant colors, often teamed with white or denim blue, at the Southwest Apparel Manufacturers Association's advance spring showing.

Town dresses and suits sported swingly pleated skirts or were sleekly trim with front buttons or side slits. As if area designers had orchestrated color preferences, all showed some versions of Chinese red and black or variations on the theme of red, white, and blue. Suits were in linenlike or silk blends, similar to the "Southern" fabrics favored by Louisiana-born New York designer (for Riva) Victor Joris, a special guest at the Dallas market.

The ubiquitous jacket topped town dresses or camisole-top casuals. For casual or career wear, terry dresses were slimly sheathed, some in luscious sherbet colors of raspberry, frosty tangerine, or lemon piped with white around deep V-necks.

Among the fashions on display here: Prophecy topped a navy, flower-splashed print skirt and blouse with a white blazer and matched a polyester and cotton jacket and fly front slit skirt with crepe de Chine blouse in surf aqua, cherry red, sunflower yellow, or black and white.

Appalause, whose poppy red linen skirt and black jacket was worn with a black laquered straw hat, went more muted with designer Donald Jones' two-piece clay linen suit trimmed with black braid.

Aquascutum, new on the Dallas scene, varied the jacket look with one high-wasted button for its soft yellow silk suit, and Catherine Carr's three-piece sand beige outfit carried her signature of a collage of applique in leaf colors on the jacket's back.

Maggie O topped an easy little yellor and turquoise stripped sheath with a short sugar-white jacket, and Jo Leslie's crepe surface art print adapted a short version of the Kabuki sleeve with wide armholes to capture precious breezes.