Susanne Ostwald was a 10-year-old girl living in East Berlin when the wall came down. November 9 of this year marks the 25th anniversary of that epochal event, but that wasn't the reason Ostwald and her partner, Ingvar Helgason, decided to draw on her memories of the now-defunct East Germany for their new collection. No, ...
Blame the heat, blame how dang early New York fashion week began, blame the lackluster collections, but the crowd was a little deflated before the start of last night's Suno show. Then out came the first look, a boxy jacquard jacket with neon-bright stripes and hospital scrub-blue cropped pants, and people perked right up. Erin ...
The lights dimmed, and taut white sails were illuminated at the end of the runway. We were headed out into open water. Felipe Oliveira Baptista finds endless ways to mine the Lacoste archives for athletic motifs. His are the kinds of activities once reserved for the rarefied social strata: tennis, golf, and—this year's theme—yachting. But ...
Jonathan Simkhai is so keen on the look of shattered glass that he actually broke a few tumblers himself, photographed them, and used those images to create the textiles for his Spring collection. A fractured jacquard—in periwinkle, white, or blush—was hand-applied to mesh on pencil skirts and slim mid-calf dresses: The result cleverly resembled lace. ...
SHE'S an expensive creature the Altuzarra woman. Just look at her in that rich tobacco suede shirtdress. Even when she adopts a touch of seersucker pastel gingham, it's done so in a lean pencil skirt suit and comes over as more pristine than picnic, because well, everything is this woman's wardrobe is pristine: from the ...
Victoria Beckham is setting up shop on London's Dover Street; her first-ever store is scheduled to open later this month. Beckham has come a long way in nine seasons, from the hourglass dresses that launched her design career. For Spring, she's thinking about uniform dressing and the military connotations that the concept implies. Epaulets and ...
Mara Hoffman's name is synonymous with her electric prints, but for Spring she set out to prove her evolution and range as a designer. "I do fabrications. I do silhouettes. I do a whole lot more than just blasting you with neon prints," she said backstage before her runway show. "I wanted to shift the ...
Ralph Rucci wrote his show notes as an open letter to his audience, a direct appeal, which, in some ways, clarified his extraordinary technique, but in others merely served to obfuscate. Like so: "My dream is that the viewers will be hypnotized by the newness." That was Rucci's fervent wish for his use of tulle ...
Over the past few years, Tibi has become known for its clean, minimalist-with-a-twist aesthetic, but this season designer Amy Smilovic went for a worldlier look by turning to Asia and South America for inspiration. "I tried to bring together the modernity of Japan with the craftwork from Peru," she said backstage. "The reason is, I ...
Backstage after Hervé Léger, designer Lubov Azria talked about strong women. As though you could be anything else if you wanted to slip into one of these skintight sheaths. Aptly, Spring was inspired by Japan's onna-bugeisha, women warriors who, when necessity dictated, took up arms right alongside the samurai. Azria and her husband, Max, took it ...
Years working in sales at luxury brands like Lanvin, Céline, and Burberry have made Baja East cofounders John Targon and Scott Studenberg smart about moving product, and they can talk for hours about what's selling best, where, and to whom. (At Forty Five Ten in Dallas, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler recently purchased a floor-length piece, while ...
The cavernous, multidimensional glass sculptures of Australian artist Sergio Redegalli got Christian Siriano thinking about the "effects of transparency" for Spring 2015. The designer experimented quite a bit with layers, building dresses from sheets of striped organza, or adding spiky crystals as an underskirt peeking out from the bottom of a brocade cocktail dress. A ...
ACCORDING to Alexander Wang pimped-out sneakers aren't going anywhere, anytime soon. Following on from renditions by Chanel (a tweed and hologram mash-up) and Dior (scattered in twinkling gems) this afternoon, Wang put his case forward for a bad-ass high-heeled stretchy version woven in neon - imagine a high-end Nike Flyknit. And they looked just the ...
ACCORDING to Alexander Wang pimped-out sneakers aren't going anywhere, anytime soon. Following on from renditions by Chanel (a tweed and hologram mash-up) and Dior (scattered in twinkling gems) this afternoon, Wang put his case forward for a bad-ass high-heeled stretchy version woven in neon - imagine a high-end Nike Flyknit. And they looked just the ...
Zoë Jordan is not your typical London designer. Presenting for the first time in New York last night, she made the point herself, explaining that her penchant for straightforward, accessibly priced clothes made her something of an outlier on the London fashion scene. "Contemporary" has not been much of a thing there. Jordan is right ...
Yigal Azrouël surfs a lot, and that whole relaxed, just-go-with-it mentality seemed to have put him in a new sartorial mood for Spring. His latest collection was inspired by the early days of surfing, of an idealized notion of endless summers, rolling waves and swaying palm trees. For the last few seasons, Azrouël has been ...
LOUCHE, loose and lounge-y was the mood that underpinned Thakoon’s spring/summer 2015 collection today. It was comfortable and casual but exotic and elegant with it – the designer citing bohemia among his inspirations and playing that out to silk robe effect, fringed or punctuated with palms, shoulders slashed to make for more interesting sleeve (or ...
Alexis Mabille opened and closed his show with two versions of a "boxing dress," short in satin, long in crepe. Normally this would invite some analogy to being in fighting form. Yet the designer stressed backstage that, despite the obvious sport message, this collection was an exercise in conceiving a wardrobe of ultrafeminine essentials. Mabille ...
It's Alessandro Dell'Acqua's second season at Rochas, and he's made some adjustments since his rocky debut this February. For Spring, a hummingbird pattern that he lifted from the archives and used as both a print on georgette and as a beaded embroidery on silk faille signaled his intention to lighten things up. His fabrics were ...
According to the press notes at the show, the new Vionnet collection was inspired by curves and by dancing. That's the thing about semiotics, though: To each her own! An alternative reading of Goga Ashkenazi's latest outing for the label was vestal virgins circa 2500 A.D. attending a postapocalyptic prom. That seemed as coherent a ...
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