After two consecutive seasons chockfull of her now signature trompe l’oeil dresses, not to mention two seasons of radical praise from the entire fashion world, Mary Katrantzou approached this third season in the spotlight with an understood concern.
Riccardo Tisci always seems to have an animal in mind when he’s designing a collection for Givenchy. Cranes, rottweilers, panthers – they’ve all made it down this runway.
The heavy handcraft touch was expected, given the sensational menswear showing three months prior. All of the same experiments with geometric wood carving appliques, the weaving and braiding, the heavy beading was all here, and played just as strongly in the womenswear.
Were I Christopher Kane, I’d be terrified to follow up the ingenious collection he showed for Fall/Winter 2011 back in February. His liquid pouched dresses and handbags are the stuff collectors’ dreams are made of and they signaled a true forward-thinking stance that not many would dare to muster in a scenario as grandiose as London Fashion Week.
A set of photographs that the late Sir Beaton snapped of his two sisters, Nancy and Baba, entitled “Symphony in Silver” was the initial spark, so to speak, of Giles Deacon’s latest outing for Giles. Warhol’s imitated to death ‘Silver Clouds’ took the baton from Beaton for a show that was laced in theatricality from opener to closer.
Jonny Johansson’s latest for Acne is the fruit of a recent inspiration-seeking vacation in Marrakech. Not wanting to go too easily with the grain, he worked against the trite interpretations spawned from such a place, not just with mania, but something more akin to verve.
This latest from Calvin Klein Collection saw Francisco Costa at his most paired down. While many designers felt around minimalism for Fall 2011, opting for saturated brights and piñatas of prints for spring and summer, Costa took nudes, metallics and black and made dresses, skirts, coats with a supremely subtle hand, constructing pieces that were far from being as simple and stripped down as they might first appear.
Flappers. Cowgirls. Industrial factory workers. They all came down Marc Jacobs’ stunningly constructed Edison bulb lit saloon runway at the Lexington Armory. If Jacobs has a knack for one thing in this industry, it’s showmanship. He’s one of the few designers who truly knows how to put on a show and his vision is always holistically considered. With Philip Glass’ 70s opera ‘Einstein on the Beach’ serving as runway music – it was hard to get the show’s pace, and the tune, out of your head once the gold lame curtain closed.
Kate and Laura Mulleavy have a knack for delivering such beautiful head scratchers. If you’ve followed their evolution through these past couple of years, you’d know that nothing is more totemic to the Rodarte DNA than their home state of California. Even their latest collection, which serves a concentrated mash-up of ‘Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty’, [...]
Thakoon Panichgul went for a very tongue-in-cheek mash-up for spring. After serving up Versailles by way of a Kenyan tribal plaid for Fall ’11, Thakoon delivered a skewed version of ‘Cowboys and Indians’.
Sportswear is already proving to be a predominant trend in New York this season, so should it be any wonder that it be Alexander Wang to shell out the definitive collection in the matter? This season, he took athleticism and took it from an abstraction and created a clear vision.
Joseph Altuzarra’s show moved fast. Kinetics is what seemed to be most at play. Working with a tropic Hawaiian print on white and black leather, it was a techno-fabric urban jungle explosion, but a calculated one.
New York Fashion Week’s favorite British exports – Marcus Wainwright and David Neville of Rag & Bone – are riding high on the sportswear trend that’s ringing true with the New York set.
Jason Wu is a cool kid trapped in a would-be couturier’s body – at least that’s what his latest collection seemed to signal. He’s also a ravenous aesthete. He is an artist who is inspired by other artists and is not afraid to acknowledge it.
Googie architecture. Ever heard of it? Probably not. But you’ve definitely seen it. The roadside architecture that defined the diners, hotels and motels of 1950s Americana was the jumping off point for the hotter than ever Proenza Schouler boys.
It wasn’t obvious that Marc Jacobs was working a fetishistic cycle for fall 2011 until he showed his latest for Louis Vuitton right at the end of Paris Fashion Week.
It was the perfect mix of sensuality and ‘haute’ fetishism that should turn any Burton naysayer into a bonafide believer.
Karl Lagerfeld tackled the apocalypse in his latest collection for the venerated house of Chanel. Perhaps it was the Kaiser’s ultimate statement in the power of optimism, or at least the power of beauty over impending doom. In the sun-ridden world of the future, Lagerfeld provides the light.
Fashion’s favorite bad-boy, Riccardo Tisci, bequeathed the Givenchy woman with a ferocious growl to complement the large bite his men served for fall 2011.
Victorian, romantic, ultra-femme – this Christian Dior show was laced in all the signifying qualities that have defined the brand since John Galliano took the helm as Creative Director. But with the famed couturier publicly ousted from the LVMH ranks – what lingers from this exquisite show is, unfortunately, not the clothes, but the disgrace.
This season, the fashion world’s new go-to minimalist, Celiné’s Phoebe Philo, looked to the sporty and streamlined nature of sports cars as inspiration for yet another miraculous outing at the hot-again French house.
Like many designers this season, Christophe Decarnin looked to David Bowie for his fall 2011 outing at Balmain.
Stars, glitter, a little androgyny. Dolce & Gabbana always make a big fashion soiree out of their Milan Fashion Week collections and this one was no different.
Last season it was a severely chic version of Olive Oil. This time – sirens, Mondrian art, Dian Fossey, Amelia Earhart, anthropomorphic serpents – that’s only but a handful of the different facets at play or interpreted from Miuccia Prada’s latest masterpiece collection.
The new reigning prince of downtown chic Alexander Wang did thing a bit differently this season.