Trying to understand designer Narciso Rodriguez is a bit frustrating. He appears to be an exercise in contradictions. And yet he'd probably disagree with that statement. It's not that he's argumentative or difficult -- he's too unassuming to be either of those things. (Note his acceptance in this year's VH1 Fashion Awards Best New Designer category: no speech, just a quick and general thanks to those who helped him.) Maybe it's just that he doesn't see things the way other people do. Asked if he'd consider himself a minimalist, and the former Calvin Klein designer says "No, never." He's almost prejudicially adamant about the fact that his strongest design influence is downtown, kids' street wear. And yet, he made probably the most famous dress of the decade (in the U.S. anyway) for Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, new American royalty. Meeting him in a fur salon is equally incongruous. Anne Dee Goldin of Goldin-Feldman, the New York company that makes his furs, quips that he looks like he showed up for our interview in his pyjamas. Certainly, after a sleepless night, Rodriguez would rather nap than answer questions about his style, yet Goldin emphasizes how strongly hands-on he has been in putting together his first fur collection with his own name on it. Clearly this is a man with defined ideas about his life, his designs and the fashion world in general. Take the minimalist label, with which Goldin herself identifies and also seems to think would apply to Rodriguez. "I don't believe that anymore," he says. "I think it's more about being clean, but I don't think these coats are minimal at all. There's a lot of thought that goes into the seaming and the shape and the color and the fabric, but it's not minimal. Minimalism is stick straight, square. To me, that's not where I want to go with this. This is more about shape and silhouette." Sufficiently chastised, anyone can look at one of the beautifully tailored, perfectly shaped jackets he's making and get the point. Yet there is still something pure in form about them. Asked if he'd agree with a magazine's description of his last collection of clothes for Cerruti -- "classic tailoring in luxe fabrics with just the right amount of spice" -- and he says it's a perfect way to describe it. Yet he seems to disdain the word classic in general. He concedes that maybe five percent of his new furs will be classic, but Goldin interjects, "It's all in a way classic, it's just modern. Can't you be modern and classic at the same time?" Rodriguez says pointedly, "I think classic has gone hand-in- hand with good taste for so long, and the avant garde or funky has gone hand-in-hand with maybe bad taste or young or gimmicky. I've tried to do something that's not either. It is modern and it is young, but it isn't gimmicky. And it's not classic." If he seems hard to pin down, it shouldn't be surprising. He received rave reviews for his fall '97/98 Cerruti collection, then flew the coop. Reportedly, he couldn't come to terms with the house over the length of his contract. Rodriguez refuses to discuss that situation at all, and doesn't want to even mention the name Cerruti. He appears puzzlingly unaware that it has become common knowledge in the fashion world that he was designing for Cerruti. As for his non-fur plans, he says, "I'm working on different things right now. Part of the way I'm structuring my life and my career is very much the same way that I've built this collection. I want it to be a little bit more free, a little more gypsy-like. I want to work in different places on different things and not necessarily have my own design house on Seventh Avenue or Avenue Montaigne. At the moment, anyway. I mean, things change. What I'm focusing on is doing this in a new way, so I don't have to stay in one place for too long. I've become a little bit of a gypsy. I don't think you necessarily have to have a company to have a collection. I had a collection with Cerruti and it wasn't my company. I like that idea. We'll see if it works." (In case you didn't notice, he just said the "C" word, right after he practically forbid Goldin from talking about it. Another interesting contradiction.) So far, his collaboration with Goldin-Feldman is proceeding successfully. Rodriguez and Goldin have a real rapport, which they originally struck up several years ago, when he was designing for Anne Klein, and Goldin-Feldman held the Anne Klein fur license. "That was a lot of fun for both of us, so when this opportunity came along, it was perfect," says Rodriguez. After Anne Klein, he moved to Calvin Klein, then Tse Cashmere and Cerruti. Rodriguez was born in Newark, New Jersey, educated at Parson's School of Design in New York City and grew up with a distinctly New York design sense. He feels that working in Europe has helped to alter that slightly. Also, his gypsy lifestyle doesn't seem out of place in today's world of continent-hopping fashion designers. "There's really such a change in attitudes world-wide," he says. "The Asian market is so big now for designers. All the European designers are coming over here -- I mean, they've been here for years, but they are more and more. And now the Americans are going to Europe in such a big way. All of the boundaries are being crossed. You have people like me working in France and Italy, and now [Americans] Marc Jacobs [at Louis Vuitton] and Tom Ford [at Gucci] of course. Look at [John] Galliano at Dior and [Alexander] McQueen [at Givenchy]." Rodriguez became interested in fur again a year ago, while he was still at Cerruti and began to feel a return to fur fashion. For the past few seasons, "You see it on everybody's runway, whether it's fur-trimmed leather or linings or whatever, it's there." So, while he was deciding what to do with his ready-to- wear alliance and whether or not to go ahead with this license, he put some furs in his fall collection, which recently premiered in Paris. "For fall, the sportswear collection that I worked on was very sexy. I think it's time for a little bit of that new glamour and shape and femininity. I'm excited about what we're doing with this fur collection, because it's not your typical fur collection. It's not so precious. It's treated a little more casual, like a sportswear collection. It's about great little jackets that aren't so serious. It's about short little sweaters. I love knits -- we all wear t-shirts and sweaters. There's a big portion of the collection that's treated like a great cardigan jacket with a good collar or a little blazer, as opposed to a full sweeping mink. It's much younger than I think you're used to seeing fur, a lot more relaxed. But then again it's still very tailored, which is what I love to do." He sees fur as just another textured fabric, in which to create his feminine shapes. He wants to throw off the old ideas about furs and start over. "Since furs are coming back, let's look at it in a new way, not so precious and not so lady," he says. "They don't have to be that way." Goldin has introduced him to some new finishes, and he loves the idea of working with non-traditional furs, or at least making them look non-traditional. Shearling is "micro-sheared" as flat as velvet. A mid-length curly lamb looks a bit like kalgan lamb but isn't. Long-haired shearling is the new fox. All of the pelts are reversible, hide-out or unlined, and many have unfinished edges. Natural brown mink is reversible to suede dyed aubergine, as is persian lamb. Rodriguez prefers classic colors and dark colors, like black, purplish browns, vicuna, camel and a range of off-white tones. The collection is set to premiere with a show at Goldin- Feldman/Group Panache on May 22, and is expected to include about 45 pieces. "I adore the persians," says Rodriguez. "When you think of persian you usually think of something so lady and so heavy and so precious, and these are just like little reversible cardigan nothings." "And don't forget the sable," Goldin reminds him. As if anyone could miss it. In the middle of a wall posted with small bits of dark, flat sample furs, a hunk of fluffy sable is smacked right in the center. The key to the entire collection, however, is the tailored shape. Goldin tries on a canvas of a simple (classic, dare I say?) bathrobe coat, and it becomes clear why Rodriguez decries the label minimalist. Perfectly cut panels are sewn together to create gentle curves and a strictly disciplined, shaped drape. To most furriers, the idea of a fitted coat is positively hair-raising. But when it's accomplished like this, it looks like the most obvious thing in the world -- and like a favorite wardrobe essential to wear every day. "It's all about the shape, the proportion of the shoulder," says Rodriguez. "It's not a big, heavy skirt or top or big, huge sleeves. It's much more streamlined, much cleaner, with all the seam interest and stitching." He says his designs are all about celebrating the beauty of a woman's body. Trends aren't important. He practically goes ballistic when questioned if these furs will fall in line with fall's '80s flashback. "No. That's not my thing. I could never do that look. That's a little bit misogynistic and not where I'm at right now." Misogynistic? Here we go again. Just when all of the fashion editors are talking about fall's '80s images as the type that make a woman look like she's in control, this media darling disagrees. He leaps, "Do you want to walk around with football shoulder pads again, or in a heavy black leather dress? Do you want to go back to the '80s? We just left the '80s. I've got news for you, it wasn't that interesting. And anybody who wants to go back there, go. I'm looking toward the future and something more beautiful than that. I don't believe in gimmickry. I think it's much more flattering for a woman to just put on something really beautiful and feel really confident, and that's it. It's very easy. It doesn't have to be so intellectualized, so short or so long, or the shoes so heavy you can't walk. There comes a point where enough is enough, and I think we've reached that point in fashion." Which might seem like fashion anarchy but ring like a mantra to a lot of women trying to get dressed in the morning. So, forget the contradictions, the low-key mannerisms and sudden vehemence, the debate about what's classic and what's minimal. What it all comes down to with Rodriguez is clean lines cut to skim a woman's curves and make her look beautiful. That was sharply obvious on Sigourney Weaver and Claire Danes in their Cerruti dresses at the Academy Awards, and it's equally so in his new fur collection.