“Our girl is the cool surfer girl,” said Alexa Adams and Flora Gill a day before their show. That beach lover was filtered through the pair’s two favorite motifs: the fit-and-flare silhouette and an art beat. The latter came via Bianca Pratorius’ draped, hand-cut fettucine-like swaths of felt. How those disparate starting points melded was in a bright, textured, ultra-body-con collection.

Pratorius was referenced in the colorful fringe draped across skintight minidresses and swim looks in neoprene and latex. Snug is one word for them—and also unforgiving. But it was when Adams and Gill turned their attentions to sweatshirts, flared minis, pencil skirts, and cropped pants that things got interesting. Curvy pink and black striations on a silk shirt and matching tapered pants created a neat visual line. Meanwhile, when they did sweatshirts—which are generally starting to get rather old on all the runways—in colorful neoprene mesh, they looked more techy than sporty. In other words, fresh.

The designers really pushed themselves on the tech front, which is shaping up to be a big message this season. Nearly every look used some kind of scuba-worthy material or engineered wizardry (Gill creates their prints on Excel), such as a yarn sandwiched between two knit layers to create a textured sweater, or the mesh frills that ran up the back of to-the-knee gladiators. Most successful of all the techy-meets-surf craftiness was a pair of sophisticated cropped and tapered pants, in white and black, cut from neoprene. That would be a great idea for the designers to dive into for next season.