Milly – Pre Spring/Summer 2016 Ready-To-Wear

This season found Michelle Smith embracing the Resort spirit in a relatively classic sense. Here was elevated vacation dressing (nary a cutoff in sight) through Milly’s youthful lens, leaning heavily on fluid shapes, soft tailoring, and a beachy palette of white, with splashes of high-voltage color. Smith wanted to make the message cheery, sensual, and modern, so she whipped up pieces like a white tux with lime green accents at the collar and pocket. Fabrications are a clear source of pleasure for the designer, and her developments with custom textiles continued apace, as with a diamond jacquard with sheer insets (seen in the collection’s most dramatic item, a sweeping circle coat) and a rich linen blend striped in tan, chartreuse, tangerine, and teal. Not everything was quite so winning: The same shades that looked dynamic in stripes on linen seemed frenetic in an abstract print. In a head-to-toe look, the effect was not entirely sensual or modern. Still, there was plenty of ease to these pieces on the whole, and for all of Milly’s myriad crop tops, Smith has a knack for making clothes that would work for many a silhouette. Amy Schumer has lately been spotted looking stellar in the label’s wares—you got the sense that the high-impact comic and some of these equally punchy Resort pieces would be a similarly well-made match.