Rosie Assoulin – Pre Spring/Summer 2016 Ready-To-Wear

There is no designer quite like Rosie Assoulin. As runway fashion veers ever more plainspoken, Assoulin stands firm on the principle that every article of clothing should be a statement piece. Other designers reserve high drama for the red carpet; Assoulin proposes that even looks for day should be visible from space. If you’re going to wear a cotton poplin shirtdress, why not wear one with vast, waterfall ruffle sleeves? If you’re going to wear cargos, why not choose a pair that’s metallic, with pant legs of ball-gown proportions, their hems dripping languidly about the ankles? If you’re going to wear a suit, why not wear one in sunshine yellow, the flares livened up further by giant floral laser cuts?

Why not, indeed. There are plenty of pragmatic retorts to that question—some girls have day jobs!—but Assoulin will have none of it. Even the most deadpan pieces in her latest collection featured a grand, or at any rate grand-ish, gesture, like the cape back on a double-breasted gray blazer. The danger, for Assoulin, is that she’ll feel the need to keep upping the ante. This season, though, the designer proved her canniness by erring toward the matter-of-fact in precisely the category where you’d least expect it. Though there were some operatic looks in her selection for evening, for the most part she played her gowns down, offering buttoned sundress styles in silk, a tie-dyed T-shirt maxi dress with a ruffled slit, and relatively sedate numbers like a long-sleeve frock in white with a single floral cutout. You got the sense, looking at those evening pieces, that Assoulin is getting confident enough in her aesthetic signatures that she feels OK turning down the volume and expressing her distinctive point of view in something closer to a whisper. That doesn’t mean she’s going to start churning out basics anytime soon. And for that matter: Why should she?