Fragrances Boutique

Alexander McQueen’s last works were given final honors by his trusted team in a hushed and dignified showing that went to his core as a designer who scaled the heights of couture accomplishment. Sarah Burton, his right hand, described how, in beginning this collection, McQueen had turned away from the world of the Internet, which he had so powerfully harnessed in his last show. “He wanted to get back to the handcraft he loved, and the things that are being lost in the making of fashion,” she said. “He was looking at the art of the Dark Ages, but finding light and beauty in it. He was coming in every day, draping and cutting pieces on the stand.” The 16 outfits shown had been 80 percent finished at the time of his death.


What McQueen was preparing had a poetic, medieval beauty that dealt with religious iconography while recapturing memories of his own past collections. He had ordered fabric that translated digital photographs of paintings of high-church angels and Bosch demons into hand-loomed jacquards, then taken the materials and cut stately caped gowns and short draped dresses. In its ornate surface narrative, that might read as a kick against the plain and restrained direction fashion is taking, but in their own way, the fluted, attenuated lines of his long dresses suggested a calm and simplicity. Instead of aggression, they transmitted the grace of the medieval Madonnas and Byzantine empresses McQueen had been studying.


For anyone who had watched his development through the years, the references to milestone collections were apparent. The bandage-bound heads, some with feathered coxcombs, simultaneously called up the designer’s rebel-British background and his landmark Asylum collection while also catching a likeness to the modest head coverings seen in Northern European medieval portraiture. When a high-collared, formfitting cutaway jacket made entirely from golden feathers appeared, it read as a direct retrieval of McQueen’s first step into haute couture in his Icarus collection, after he took the helm of Givenchy in 1996 at the age of 27. This time, though, it was realized with even more skill, with a multilayered white tulle skirt sprinkled at the hem with delicate gilded embroidery.


Somehow, that one outfit encapsulated everything about McQueen: both the tailoring and the romanticism. Perhaps he wouldn’t have chosen to show it in such a simple and intimate way—in a small, ornate room to privately invited groups of editors—because that left out the full realization of concept and showmanship that equally drove his creativity. But the circumstances, sad as they are, allowed his friends and colleagues to share a long and poignant moment to look at what the man achieved, and to grieve for him.
—Sarah Mower

Beige, beige, and more beige. It’s no news by now that the paler shade of brown, and the grown-up daywear it connotes, have become mainstays of the season. It’s the route Chloé has taken for Fall, with such thorough commitment that until halfway through, it almost seemed Hannah MacGibbon was reluctant to offer anything else.

From the outset, she whittled the look down to its clearest components: a long-sleeved silk blouse and high-waist flared trousers, and the bouncy, blown-out Charlie girl hair that captures the seventies American sportswear attitude this trend is all about. Next up, MacGibbon introduced knitwear, classic menswear overcoats, and an early-Armani-like jacket that might have jumped out of Vogue’s pages in the post-women’s lib era—when dashing to work while looking enthusiastically businesslike was the thing.

It’s a feeling, of course, that MacGibbon shares with her British female designer peers Phoebe Philo and Stella McCartney, who both passed through the Chloé studio some while back. They left the label with a reputation for girly dressing, jingly-jangly It bags, and statement shoes, but now that they’re all into their thirties, these young professionals are leading a different life.

MacGibbon’s house-cleaning instinct has thrown out the all the frills, prints, funny bags, and chunky clogs and platform shoes that last made Chloé hot. The bags have been stripped of hardware and logos, and the footwear renovated as sidewalk-friendly caramel riding boots and springy-soled wedges. The flirty, blowy dresses, once the Chloé signature, have been axed. The hip-girl, slightly streetwise element that used to be part of the personality here was this season reduced to a mild play on western styling—a minor outbreak of leather fringing and one pair of velvet, gold-embroidered jeans that turned up in the second half.

In terms of brand differentiation, though, that leaves a conundrum for buyers. Chloé’s offering for Fall puts the label in direct competition with what so many others are producing now. It left some puzzlement over whether leaving the house’s youth behind is such a wise move.
—Sarah Mower

The shoes at Valentino—blush-colored patent-leather kitten heels trimmed in metal studs—are an apt metaphor for the direction Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri are taking the storied label. Former accessories designers under Valentino Garavani himself, they’re utterly in touch with all of the house’s romantic, ruffled codes, but they’re determined to modernize it with their more dangerous, youthful sensibilities. Their biggest success so far: dressing fashion favorite Chloë Sevigny in one of their Spring gowns for the Golden Globes back in January.

Today, the experimental films of Kenneth Anger, who sat front-row, gave the proceedings a bit of edge, but the contemporary feel came from the clothes themselves. Yes, there were ruffles by the yard, but they decorated little cropped leather jackets worn over party dresses just as tiny. There were scads of lace, too, but the designers patchworked it irreverently together with point d’esprit and leather mesh. And they didn’t ignore Valentino’s signature color, red, which looked fresh layered with a powdery nude on the final draped gown. That, however, wasn’t the collection’s most showstopping evening number. That title belonged to another dress, made from tiers of lace hand-embroidered with thousands of minuscule, shimmering lilac beads.

Giancarlo Giammetti, the house’s co-founder, famously criticized the duo’s most recent couture show on his Facebook page as a “ridiculous circus.” He was all smiles tonight, as were some young editors, whose collective reflections can be summarized as, “Wow, I want to wear Valentino for the first time.”
—Nicole Phelps

Freja Beha Erichsen and three bears on an ice floe. This was the arctic scene at Chanel, where giant chunks of bona fide iceberg, specially transported from Scandinavia, formed the frozen landscape around which models solemnly splashed through a sea of ‘berg-melt in shaggy snow boots with ice-block heels.

The Karl conceit of the season, no surprises, was an in-every-way extravagant play on Coco in cold weather. Using more fur than he’d even flung at Fendi—the twist being that here the fur was fake—Lagerfeld steered this collection nearer to couture than ready-to-wear than ever. Fur was woven into brown tweeds; formed deep pelmets on the lower half of leather jackets; became almost igloo-shaped capes, bonnets, even—for goodness’ sake—furry trousers. Meanwhile, the suit and coat combinations also had a level of lavish elaboration usually reserved for haute eveningwear. Fur-fringed embroideries and ice jewelry conspired to create intensely worked ruffled and beaded silhouettes that glinted with rock-crystal neckpieces and fistfuls of rings. Somewhere in there, a flash of translucent silver seemed to be a clutch in which the quilting of the CC classic bag had been frozen into the likeness of a refrigerator ice cube tray.

It was a lucky stroke that the weather outside had kindly assisted Chanel in whipping subzero winds around the Grand Palais while this display was going on. Since humans are suggestible, it took only the merest suspension of disbelief to imagine this collection hitting the mark next fall, despite the fact that it will start to be delivered in July—and who knows in which century we’ll have another winter like this one? Nevertheless, putting global warming and the melting of ice caps both center stage and on the back burner (as it were), this show swept the audience along as they were treated to such amusements as seeing Karl Lagerfeld’s favorite, Baptiste Giabiconi, swagger out of an ice cave in a full-length polar bear coat.

It wasn’t all played for laughs. Within the context of a season of innovative knitwear, Chanel’s was some of the most outstanding. A group of three short angora sweater dresses, tinted iceberg blue in the center, was an amazing follow-up from something Lagerfeld did with dégradé pastel embroidery in couture. One gray and black cardigan coat was knitted in a bubbly grid to mimic a down-filled puffer. And the finale was given to a wedding dress knitted in silk tulle ribbon to resemble Chanel’s bouclé tweed, forming a tight-fitting sweater in the body and then sweeping away in flounces in back. The bride—Freja, again—dangled an ice-block purse on a fur-woven Chanel chain.
—Sarah Mower

With its bricolage of classic men’s fabrics and sumptuous decorative elements, Antonio Marras’ own collection in Milan was one-of-a-kind poetry. A “laboratorio,” he called it. It was a genuine pleasure to see some of the results of his experiments filter down to the Kenzo catwalk, in the languid interplay between feminine and masculine; the magpie trove of paillettes, buttons, and beads that decorated sober gray flannel; and the combinations of leopard and pinstripe. But these signatures were actually so compatible with Kenzo Takada’s own aesthetic that it was hardly necessary to draw any clear distinction. The design of the runway said it all: willow branches woven into a spreading canopy of trees, representing the evolution of the Kenzo ideal under its current creative director.

Marras is a free spirit, untouched by passing trends, which makes him one of the few designers who can get away with claiming a quest for liberty as the reason for his collection. Freedom here meant the loosest, easiest of shapes—usually layered—in fabrics that were a patchwork of florals, plaids, embroidery, and appliqué. The pursuit of ease yielded an unfortunate jumpsuit or two, but the mood was otherwise very much the casual hippie- and vintage-influenced chic of the seventies style icons that Marras name-checked—women like Tina Chow, Marisa Berenson, Florinda Bolkan, even Farrah Fawcett, some of whom undoubtedly wore Kenzo the first time around. Toss a pinstriped jacket over a patchworked smock dress and you get the point. The hair—a tangle of pretty curls, often topped with a man’s fedora—underlined it. With his own collection, at least, it’s hard not to feel that Marras is radically underrated. The crowd at Kenzo today included the omnipresent Lindsay Lohan, who seemed much more agreeable than she’s been the rest of the week. That possibly suggests the tide of attention may be turning Marras’ way.
—Tim Blanks

Question: If all the camel coats in all the Fall collections were laid end to end, how many people would be able to tell them apart? Giambattista Valli added one of his own to the long line of beige show-openers: a cocoon-ish shape balanced on kitten-heel slingbacks. The shoes were a key to the slightly sixties theme he was working. It’s another trend of the season, of course, but it’s also a decade this designer frequently uses as a starting point for his unashamedly feminine, slightly frothy approach—which was soon to break out in tufted 3-D ribbon embroideries, variously deployed on shifts and gowns.


Whatever Valli does—cute day suits, short cocktail, or over-the-top statement gowns—it has the knack of charming the wealthy, social customers who are his loyal friends. The Valli girls, including Brooke Shields, Coco Brandolini, Dr. Lisa Airan, and Andrea Dellal’s shoe-designer daughter, Charlotte, were there in force this time to show solidarity with the designer, as well as to shop. Like several other Italian labels recently, Valli’s has caught the fallout from the financial catastrophes that have been sinking fashion conglomerates in his home country. Mariella Burani Fashion Group, which manufactures his collections, went bankrupt last month and is being liquidated. An announcement released just before the show stated he is taking production into his own hands.


Valli’s fans will find a lot to like among his Fall offerings, which eschewed plainness and sobriety for mostly short, swingy dresses with elaborate surfaces and sheer panels (perhaps the through-views to the panties will somehow be obscured in reality). Some of the tuxedo looks over wisps of chiffon—an homage to the Saint Laurent retrospective about to open in Paris—might well (again, with the underwear issues sorted out) appeal to the brigade of chic mothers Valli also serves. Considering the crisis conditions under which this collection was designed, it was a respectable show from one of fashion’s more resolutely optimistic survivors. Could the fact that there was an oligarch in the front row be a sign of hope? Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB agent who is a British newspaper proprietor, was scanning the show with his son Evgeny, a sponsor of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund.
—Sarah Mower

Karl Lagerfeld goes for the cold.

Stefano Pilati, designing for Yves Saint Laurent, offers an attitude of protection.

Stefano Pilati categorically denied there was any religious symbolism in his Fall show. Nevertheless, the sober caped black forms, wimplelike head coverings, starched white cotton, hoods, and heavy chain pendants gave a nunlike impression. Granted, it wasn’t literal, but there was something of the Catholic convent in the high white dog collar on a suit, the yoked white blouse with full sleeves, the prim and modest mid-calf dresses—and the way a cardinal purple cape made an appearance at one point. Even when a sheer black dress came out, there was a cross to bare beneath it: underwear formed as a cruciform bodysuit.

But that wasn’t the gloss Pilati put on it at all. “It’s about protection,” he said after the show, explaining the plastic film he put over coats and inserted in patches in jackets. “And partly, an homage to YSL and the rigorous tailleur.” As for the figures dangling on the gold chains that swung and bumped on the lower body as the models walked? He said he’d taken those from silhouettes of Saint Laurent fashion photos he’d cut out of seventies magazines.

Still, this collection was sometimes tricky to fathom. It was best in the simplest and strongest pieces: seventies-influenced shapes, like the high-waist flared trousers, capes, mid-calf skirts; the smart slash-sleeved jacket; and the jumpsuits—all ideas that look timely in the context of this season’s trends.

But perhaps a more explanatory perspective would be the one taken from the Petit Palais, just opposite the YSL show venue, where a major retrospective of the work of the late Yves Saint Laurent is about to open. Thus far, Pilati has avoided creating comparisons to the master’s archive, striving instead to make statements of his own about redefining the wardrobe for the twenty-first century. Oddly enough, if he relaxed more into channeling the way Saint Laurent nailed how the working woman wanted to dress in the Parisian seventies—as so many other designers are now—it might be an easier path.
—Sarah Mower

It’s not usually a good sign when a designer opens up with a knit leotard with a cutout at one hip worn over a pair of clingy exercise shorts and heavy tights. Where, for example, might a young woman sport such an outfit, outside of the ballet studio? But there was more to this Vanessa Bruno show than the opening suggested. Dance, or more precisely, the layered and wrapped outfits that dancers wear to rehearse, provided Bruno with an organizing theme for her Fall collection. And if it’s hard to picture that first look hanging in the window of her Rue de Castiglione store, her outerwear, starting with a long, icy gray shearling knitted at the hem, will have them lining up.

Already own a trench? Bruno’s given her fans a reason to buy a new one in the form of a drop-waist camel leather version or another in tweed with a leather storm flap. She also made some smart moves with her tailoring. Adding a strap to a blazer so it stays on when you wear it tossed over your shoulders isn’t a new idea—Helmut Lang did it a decade ago or more—but it’s probably new to her girls. As for the season’s must-have mixed-media jacket, hers combined crisp gray flannel with a deep leather hem and a ribbed knit back.

There were other things to like here as well, including a ribbed cardigan with leather elbow patches, the floaty printed chiffon dresses, and Bruno’s patchwork stacked-heel boots with fur trim. All in all, a strong show from this well-priced Paris favorite.
—Nicole Phelps

All week, the Twitterverse has been asking, what’s Lindsay Lohan doing at Dior? At Viktor & Rolf? At John Galliano? Shouldn’t she be putting the final touches on her second Emanuel Ungaro outing? Today, before the show, the house gave us all an answer: Sorry, paparazzi, but the omnipresent starlet actually had nothing to do with the Fall collection.

Estrella Archs took her bow solo, but just because Lohan and the heart-shaped spangled pasties that got so much attention last season are out of the picture doesn’t mean that the pressure is off. On the whole, the collection of draped and ruched party dresses, scattered here and there with tailored jackets in menswear fabrics, was an improvement, if not necessarily made with the same joie de vivre or finesse as Ungaro’s originals. But with the eighties moment fast disappearing in fashion’s rearview mirror, Archs has new challenges ahead of her should she remain at the label. Now that everyone’s talking about minimalism again, the first order of business will be finding a way to make the house codes relevant again. As difficult as it’s no doubt been for Archs at Ungaro, it’s not yet clear that she has skills adequate to the task.
—Nicole Phelps

Stella McCartney’s show began with a fake recording of Tiger Woods’ alleged call to his mistress, the one in which he asks her to remove her name from her voicemail because his wife has found her number on his phone. Things ended, as usual, with a Beatles song; this season it was “Mother Nature’s Son.” They made for perplexing, if thought-provoking, bookends to a collection of daywear that for the most part looked tailor-made not for celebrity groupies but for the smart, powerful businesswoman. It was clean, polished, and chic—three buzzwords of the season.


An unfettered charcoal coat, a notched lapel its only decoration, opened the show, and was followed by streamlined, hip-grazing tunics. When they were worn with narrow, tapering trousers or even stirrup pants, along with pointy kitten heels, they looked like modern, easy answers to the much maligned boardroom pantsuit. Just as often, though, they came without bottoms, which meant that there was a lot of leg on McCartney’s runway. Plenty sexy, but perhaps not so user-friendly as a sleeveless coat-dress in camel or her beautifully spare double-breasted white coat.


For evening, the designer experimented with sheer organza overlays (a motif that also turned up at Givenchy). She draped them on top of a one-shoulder iridescent paillette dress or a nude bustier number embroidered with scarlet roses. In other words, they were quite a bit trickier than her fabulously minimal daywear.
—Nicole Phelps

“I was thinking of the ski world, and the scuba world,” said Riccardo Tisci. “And the colors of the Bauhaus.” True, his collection incorporated snowflake-patterned knits; neoprene diving fabric; and black, red, and beige as a color code. But the way he melded those materials into his collection spoke more of this Fall’s reworking of the aesthetics of the nineties, personalized with Tisci’s taste for high-drama Parisian glamour. Sporty piste- cum surfwear this definitely was not.


A better way of looking at it was as one of the season’s rechannelings of the work of Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela, two towering heroes of modern fashion design whose retirement from the scene has left a gaping hole in women’s wardrobes. Tisci’s tailoring, like Phoebe Philo’s at Celine, is a way of filling that gap with sharp camel coats, tuxedo suits, and lean black pants. In Tisci’s case, it’s also accompanied by tape-bound throats; red glitter gloves, bags, and lips; and sexy workings of scarlet, black, and nude lace. That’s all fully in line with his own gothic taste but also reminiscent of Margiela’s styling, back in the long-lost day when “edgy” was the buzzword of the nineties.


The scuba-ski dynamic meant traditional alpine patterns reengineered into formfitting bodysuits, sunk into neoprene lower garments that unfurled at the waist by means of zippers (the look happens to cross-reference with a section of Nicolas Ghesquière’s collection this Fall). For evening, the fold-down device was transposed to inform the shape of black velvet and satin evening shifts and tunics. To end with, Tisci returned to working with feathers—a feature he’s made his own in his couture collections over several seasons. Last in the line: a puff of white ostrich on an organza T-shirt, paired with narrow black pants, poetically trailing a pair of diaphanous “wings” as it exited. It was quite beautiful—and then again, in spirit, inescapably Helmut Lang.
—Sarah Mower

After two seasons of shows at her Boulevard Saint-Germain boutique, Sonia Rykiel returned to a larger space today. Just as you can count on her models smiling and slapping high fives, you can be sure that if it’s Fall, there will be plenty of knits. A trio in colorful stripes evoked not only vintage Rykiel, but also her recent collection for H&M. Smart move: Lure them with fast fashion and hook them with the real thing. Also mingling on the runway were cardigan dresses, both fitted and slouchy; a frock that looked as if it were made from a pair of sweaters, one wrapped around the waist, the other around the bust; and some familiar trompe l’oeil faux-layered numbers.

What looked different for Rykiel, and like a nod to the current moment, were the oversize takes on classic menswear: a big, boxy suit with rolled cuffs (a bit too big, actually), a long red trench fastened with a giant safety pin, and baggy knit cargos held up by suspenders. By the finale, we were back in familiar territory, with models not yet born when the tune came out singing Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” as they traipsed down the catwalk in coquettish ostrich-feather tanks, tunics, and coats. All in all, it was a bit predictable, but still loads of fun.
—Nicole Phelps

Stella McCartney’s collection is clean and linear.

Yesterday was a pretty interesting and confusing day. First, there was the Celine show, where Phoebe Philo’s slim, terse coats with high necks and off-center buttons caught my attention.

“Modern is for today,” Karl Lagerfeld said before his show, emphasizing his in-the-moment view of fashion, but the collection he showed under his own name impressively encompassed past, present, and future. Though the designer also featured a swingy A-line shape (in winter white, say, with silver piping and zip), the silhouette that mattered was streamlined to the nth. It was composed of a rigorously tailored jacket, its front folded back to create a kind of angular peplum, worn over a second-skin skirt-and-pants combination in a new kind of patent leather that had a flawless vinyl finish (in brown, it looked unsettlingly like chocolate). The patent was also used to line lapels or those folded jacket fronts. But equally, many of Lagerfeld’s details harked back to history, like the corset detailing on one jacket or the buttons that ran up to the elbow on the sleeve of another. One navy jacket with a little stand-up collar was piped in red like a vintage military uniform. The puff of black netting on a one-shouldered silk dress added a fin de siècle touch, of old Vienna perhaps. The beaded or pleated chiffons that made up the finale had that same feel, even when worn over patent pants. The bands that held hair high off the forehead added inches of height to models who were already towering. Backstage, they set Lagerfeld to thinking about the Na’vi and Avatar and maybe even a collection of KL in 3-D eyewear.
—Tim Blanks

In these days of reduced budgets and the pressure to sell clothes, the art of the fashion show as theater—which Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen both pushed to a pinnacle of creativity in London in the nineties—has, much to the detriment of audience fulfillment, been shoved to the back of the agenda. Now meanings and messages are often delivered only aurally, but in some hands they can still be powerfully affecting. Such was Chalayan’s voice-over preface, a tribute to McQueen, in which he honored his peer as a man whose work probed a raw, dark beauty and through his work became a mythical hero himself.

Sound was also the guide to understanding Chalayan’s theme for Fall: a car engine firing up, followed by snatches of radio-station music and weather reports gleaned from across the U.S.A. He was on a road trip. Once you tuned in, it was clear he was setting off from New York, with a clever observation of the urban mix of tailored coats, jeans, hoodies, and sneakers that has become a city street uniform since the nineties. Soon, we were heading through Pennsylvania and Amish land, as the hoods took on the structure of bonnets, and the modern world was briefly silenced. From there, Chalayan took a turn south, making glitter-sleeved, formfitting dresses with diagonal necklines suggesting beauty-pageant sashes. Then it was out through hurricane country: Steel gray pleated twister dresses whipped around the body, then up and over the head, accompanied by emergency on-the-spot updates from a radio reporter.

In a way, this narrative is too literal an explanation for either Chalayan’s thinking, or the fact that the clothes followed a completely wearable, on-track route for Fall. On one level, the collection traced the concerns with landscape, history, environmental crisis, ethnography, and culture that have always informed his work. On the other, Chalayan’s American explorations allowed him to tick off trends and stop by every category needed in the span of a day-to-evening, casual-to-formal collection. Somewhere in Utah, he brought up a shearling coat with matching binoculars and a camel poncho. Later on, he worked through sportswear in gray sweats and then, maybe on the West Coast, arrived at a place where sinuously glamorous full-length gowns (beaded in dégradé patterns suggesting headlight flashes at night on a dark freeway) made complete sense.
—Sarah Mower

If you felt like you’d seen it all before at John Galliano, it’s because you did. At least in some ways: A year ago, he sent out a parade of Russian/Balkan folkloric princesses; this season, as his program explained, “a tribe of adventuring nomads” trekked “through a mountainous terrain, crossing imaginary borders in search of a new land.” Last March, there was fake snow; today, his bronzed, bewigged, and behatted models walked through a blizzard of silver glitter. There were some striking similarities between the two collections’ clothes, too, starting with the very first pannier-skirted caban coat.


Of course, Galliano’s workmanship was, as ever, top-notch. And the imaginative melding of cultures and eras into single outfits—a popular theme this weekend, with Jean Paul Gaultier exploring similar territory—was something to marvel at, too, especially near the end, when bias-cut gowns aswirl with yak fur (not as strange as it sounds) made their grand entrance.


However, now, even more than a year ago, there is a rather glaring disconnect between this spectacle of a show and the bigger fashion picture, with its new focus on simplicity. The fireworks (yes, fireworks) that accompanied Galliano’s bow only threw that disparity into higher relief.
—Nicole Phelps

Australian designer Martin Grant has made a modest but steady name for himself, proving that stylish and practical need not be separate entities when it comes to women’s fashion. His very consistent collections have always been quietly chic and eminently wearable, and this show displayed his USP nicely. It also demonstrated, though, why he would be best advised to stay within those restrained but effective parameters.


Shown as a presentation in the gorgeous École des Beaux-Arts, the collection began with a dress that was a good example of Grant’s modus operandi, being a seemingly simple mid-length black dress with demi sleeves. But look a little closer (and this is one reason why the designer has been wise in rejecting shows for presentations in the past year, as they allow onlookers to appreciate his careful handiwork better), and his skills are more apparent. Witness how he cut the bottom of the dress to blossom out into a small bubble, but stitched it in such a way so as not to bulk out the wearer. Similarly, a simple pair of black trousers had an interesting drape effect on the hips, which actually made the model look even more sylphlike. A beautiful oak-colored leather minidress included some pockets carefully cut into the side, lightening up the material’s potentially heavy effect.


Aside from detailing, Grant is also known for his ladylike aesthetic and, true to form, the only cleavage on show was on the models’ toes, thanks to some particularly beautiful brightly colored round-toed high heels—cut away, rather saucily, just over the models’ mid-toe joints. Less appealing, though, was the end section, in which Grant had included the ubiquitous big-shoulder trend—a misguided effort that brought to mind a normally dignified uncle getting down to some hip-hop at his niece’s wedding. Grant works better when he sways gently to his own refined tune.
—Hadley Freeman

Ah, Costume National: the label where hems must be high and leather isn’t so much an option as a staple. There is nothing wrong with this kind of molto-sexy-with-a-tough-edge signature style—after all, it’s far better than the brand having no style at all. But you sometimes suspect that designer Ennio Capasa and his label would be better served by showing the collection at home in molto sexy Milano as opposed to très chic Paris, where the show can come across like a thigh-high boot accidentally placed in the kitten-heel section of a shoe store.


Yet perhaps the city is rubbing off a little on Capasa, because this was a relatively toned-down collection. Sure, the hems were still up around the hip-bone area, but the clothes themselves came in soft grays and browns, wool and mohair—a cleansing effect after last season’s leather short shorts. There were some very good trouser suits that achieved Costume’s necessary sexy quotient, thanks to the excellent fit. The cleverly morphed thicker materials of the short dresses—that wool and mohair—almost seemed designed to distract the eye from the models’ upper thighs, although perhaps that only works on fashion editors as opposed to, say, footballers.


Quite how any of this fit in with Capasa’s surprising source of inspiration, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a nineteenth-century book about self-imposed isolation and self-discovery, is anyone’s guess. Maybe it just suggests that Capasa is beginning to resist the Italian nightclub scene, staying home instead with a good book and a cup of cocoa. Well, a good book and a glass of Champagne.
—Hadley Freeman

Picking up where his smart pre-collection left off, Albert Kriemler’s Fall lineup was focused on languid, seventies-ish tailoring and outerwear with a sportif sensibility. The lean, spare silhouette of his suits—elongated jacket, high-waisted flared trousers—provided an opportunity to showcase the fine fabrics that Akris‘ St. Gallen mills specialize in: Prince of Wales checks, houndstooths, tweeds, and plaids, all in the supplest cashmere. And it doesn’t get any more luxe than Kriemler’s long-sleeved blouse in a taupey-gray sheared astrakhan. As subtle as that fur and those menswear cashmeres were, his leathers were vibrant: a trim, to-the-body sleeveless dress in cassis, a fitted double-breasted coat in plum. As for the sportier fare, you’re never going to see a straight-up down parka here. Kriemler’s came in camel hair with drawstrings on the sleeves and across the torso and back to adjust the fit.


Ornamentation only entered the picture for evening, but it remained understated: Trapezoidal black crystals adorned the sheer shoulders of a black double-face long dress; the bodice of a strapless cocktail number was stitched with smooth feathers.


If Kriemler got carried away, it was with his bags—not with the totes themselves, which are as finely made as they were when they debuted last season, but in the sheer number of them on the runway. In the end, though, they didn’t detract from this well-considered, elegant collection.
—Nicole Phelps

The return of minimalism may be setting the agenda elsewhere, but you didn’t expect Andrew Gn to abandon his signature embellishments, did you? Inspired by a Louis XV commode in his Paris apartment, part of his collection of antique furniture, and a Montesquieu book, Lettres Persanes, Gn’s Fall collection had an eighteenth-century look, albeit with a twenty-first-century spin. He called it “modern rococo.”


The rococo element came through in the form of narrow jackets with stand-up collars and double rows of silver buttons marching up the front. It was also present in a re-embroidered cut velvet coat with passementerie trimming at the cuffs and in a bustier gown made in a re-edition of a vibrant teal and violet floral velour de sable. Then there was all the embroidered leather scrollwork at the necklines of dresses and shoulders of coats, the oversize silver belt buckles, the densely beaded belts. As for the modern touches? Those included Gn’s technical fabrics and innovative techniques—a microfiber satin that resists wrinkles for a ruffled lapel, and leather smocking trimming the edge of a cropped jacket. But the most obvious twenty-first-century element was the ultrashort length of the ruched jersey cocktail dresses. All that leg, not to mention the cutouts under the bust, would surely have made a lady of the court blush.


If those looked like tough sells with the designer’s own ladylike clientele, there were plenty of other frills to seduce his customers in a collection that mostly stayed within their—and Gn’s—comfort zone.
—Nicole Phelps

There could almost have been a Celine convention going on in the tennis club where Phoebe Philo showed her second collection for the label. Up and down the ranks, dozens of women were proudly displaying their Celine allegiance in camel coats, tux jackets, wide-legged high-waist pants, silk blouses, leather T-shirts, silver-heeled boots, and sandals. Almost the entire Spring collection was there somewhere, save for the sheer trousers (and it’s a fair bet someone has those at home).


That the above bears noting is a gauge of the huge significance of Philo’s comeback. What she accomplished in restoring the status of rational, classy daywear last season has finally shattered the personal-purchasing moratorium that set in with the recession. Now women have seen what they want, impulse buying is back, and the atmosphere in the house was strumming with the collective will that Philo would follow up with more to keep the spending valves open.


She did so in wave after wave of clothes that fed the pent-up desire for grown-up, flattering, simple but sexy dressing. In her own words: “Strong. Powerful. Reduced.” Narrow navy funnel-necked coats and dresses, slim cropped-at-the-ankle kick flares, A-line skirts, and cream silk blouses started it off—all styled in a no-fuss manner with sheer black tights, riding boots, or high-heeled loafers. At a stroke, it carried the wholeness, simplicity, and confidence of a definitive look, perfectly judged and attainable.


Part of the genius is the way Philo has reframed the sullied term “luxury” by harnessing the DNA of Celine—a Parisian bourgeois sportswear label that was at peak fashionability in the seventies. Her skillful deployment of leather is part of that. She did it with her placement of deep, smooth patch pockets on the sides of shifts and peacoats, as well as in her Helmut Newton-esque black patent wrap skirts and a black double-breasted military trench, belted with a domed brass buckle.


The variety of Philo’s outerwear was amazing—spanning a chic-casual navy hooded parka-coat hybrid, slim three-quarter jacket-coats, and a stunning cream teddy-bear shearling cape. Alongside that, a plethora of daywear options focused on separates—a refreshing breakaway from the dress obsession that has stuck fashion in a rut for too long. For evening, she sustained that sense of practical reserve in a cutaway pantsuit with a tunic fluttering beneath it, and two outfits with sculpted black paillettes. None of it was body-baring, none of it showy. Yet it still exuded the calm sense of assured sexuality that adult women have been waiting for since Helmut Lang left the runway. The fact that Philo chose to stage this show in the very venue in which he presented his final collection can’t have been a coincidence. In her own feminine way, she is picking up the cause for women exactly where he left off.
—Sarah Mower

One could argue that red-carpet labels have it easier than their more broadly focused colleagues in times of recession. After all, they exist in a crystal-studded world where there has never been any pretense that their clothes are for the “normal woman,” whoever that mythical beast may be. And no matter how badly the economy tanks—heck, even if there were a nuclear apocalypse—Ryan Seacrest will still be standing by a red carpet somewhere, demanding to know who Kate Bosworth is wearing.


On the other hand, there must be something a little weird designing intricately beaded and diamanté-dappled dresses while the news is still full of bankruptcy. Azzaro’s Vanessa Seward seems to think so. In this collection, wisely shown as a small presentation in the store (Azzaro may be perfect for the celebrity market, but it still hasn’t quite got the clout to withstand the pressure and expectation of a full-scale fashion show), she included a surprising amount of daywear and sober coats. Woman cannot live by diamanté alone.


But even these black and white dresses and tuxedo jackets had something of the starlet to them, not least because so many of them ended at the upper thigh. Some of the dresses had flippy little skirts, others had a stiffer bell shape, and the designer had particular fun with some louche seventies pieces, such as strapless jumpsuits. As if to prove that these wispy bits and bobs weren’t only for Hollywood waifs, a very pregnant Seward sat in the audience sporting a white playsuit from the collection splattered with paw prints. These were supposed to represent the paws of her cat Monsieur Jo—who also made an appearance in Seward’s last collection. This was clearly Seward’s favorite part of her collection, as she couldn’t resist jumping up, mid-presentation, and explaining the reference to the audience. How many Azzaro customers will feel as enthusiastic about Jo’s contribution remains to be seen—though, to be fair, the cat-loving fashionista is a fairly well-established sub-demographic.


It was soon back to business as usual with plenty of long or mini black dresses, heavy with embellishment. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that the best were the ones that kept decoration to a seductive minimum, such as the floaty black minidress with sparkling black buttons. It turns out that not only can red-carpet brands work in the recession, in some ways they can be improved by it.
—Hadley Freeman

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