DIANE VON FURSTENBERG AUTUMN/WINTER 2015-16 READY-TO-WEAR NEW YORK
“I’ve got a head for business and a bod for sin,” Melanie Griffith famously said in Mike Nichols’ 1988 film Working Girl. “Is there anything wrong with that?” Diane von Furstenberg would respond with an emphatic No. The designer had a not dissimilar tagline of her own this season—”By day she commands her world; by night she inspires fantasy”—and a collection that ran the gamut from pinstripe separates and power suits to evening dresses with peekaboo black lace bodices.
We’re all for women having and doing it all, and so, it goes without saying, is von Furstenberg. But by now pinstripes are a tad worn out. DVF made her fortune with the wrap dress, an unabashedly feminine frock that nonetheless was and is office appropriate. Surely there will be those who ask: Why, 41 years after she launched her business, does a woman in a man’s pinstripe suit still symbolize female power? As for those sheer cocktail numbers, they came off a little more boudoir-ish than the designer probably intended.
The clothes were strongest when they landed somewhere in between those two opposing poles. Kendall Jenner’s white and black jersey wrap dress was as simple and sublime as the very first one DVF whipped up. And there was no resisting the charm of a polka-dot shirtdress with the label’s signature lip print on the sleeves, either. The proof of that came when von Furstenberg chose it for her own spin down the runway. As for evening, a pair of long slipdresses were completely discreet, but remained the sexiest options going.