The Lastest in Fashion and Style

All week, the Twitterverse has been asking, what’s Lindsay Lohan doing at Dior? At Viktor & Rolf? At John Galliano? Shouldn’t she be putting the final touches on her second Emanuel Ungaro outing? Today, before the show, the house gave us all an answer: Sorry, paparazzi, but the omnipresent starlet actually had nothing to do with the Fall collection.

Estrella Archs took her bow solo, but just because Lohan and the heart-shaped spangled pasties that got so much attention last season are out of the picture doesn’t mean that the pressure is off. On the whole, the collection of draped and ruched party dresses, scattered here and there with tailored jackets in menswear fabrics, was an improvement, if not necessarily made with the same joie de vivre or finesse as Ungaro’s originals. But with the eighties moment fast disappearing in fashion’s rearview mirror, Archs has new challenges ahead of her should she remain at the label. Now that everyone’s talking about minimalism again, the first order of business will be finding a way to make the house codes relevant again. As difficult as it’s no doubt been for Archs at Ungaro, it’s not yet clear that she has skills adequate to the task.
—Nicole Phelps

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Question: If all the camel coats in all the Fall collections were laid end to end, how many people would be able to tell them apart? Giambattista Valli added one of his own to the long line of beige show-openers: a cocoon-ish shape balanced on kitten-heel slingbacks. The shoes were a key to the slightly sixties theme he was working. It’s another trend of the season, of course, but it’s also a decade this designer frequently uses as a starting point for his unashamedly feminine, slightly frothy approach—which was soon to break out in tufted 3-D ribbon embroideries, variously deployed on shifts and gowns.

Whatever Valli does—cute day suits, short cocktail, or over-the-top statement gowns—it has the knack of charming the wealthy, social customers who are his loyal friends. The Valli girls, including Brooke Shields, Coco Brandolini, Dr. Lisa Airan, and Andrea Dellal’s shoe-designer daughter, Charlotte, were there in force this time to show solidarity with the designer, as well as to shop. Like several other Italian labels recently, Valli’s has caught the fallout from the financial catastrophes that have been sinking fashion conglomerates in his home country. Mariella Burani Fashion Group, which manufactures his collections, went bankrupt last month and is being liquidated. An announcement released just before the show stated he is taking production into his own hands.

Valli’s fans will find a lot to like among his Fall offerings, which eschewed plainness and sobriety for mostly short, swingy dresses with elaborate surfaces and sheer panels (perhaps the through-views to the panties will somehow be obscured in reality). Some of the tuxedo looks over wisps of chiffon—an homage to the Saint Laurent retrospective about to open in Paris—might well (again, with the underwear issues sorted out) appeal to the brigade of chic mothers Valli also serves. Considering the crisis conditions under which this collection was designed, it was a respectable show from one of fashion’s more resolutely optimistic survivors. Could the fact that there was an oligarch in the front row be a sign of hope? Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB agent who is a British newspaper proprietor, was scanning the show with his son Evgeny, a sponsor of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund.
—Sarah Mower

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With its bricolage of classic men’s fabrics and sumptuous decorative elements, Antonio Marras’ own collection in Milan was one-of-a-kind poetry. A “laboratorio,” he called it. It was a genuine pleasure to see some of the results of his experiments filter down to the Kenzo catwalk, in the languid interplay between feminine and masculine; the magpie trove of paillettes, buttons, and beads that decorated sober gray flannel; and the combinations of leopard and pinstripe. But these signatures were actually so compatible with Kenzo Takada’s own aesthetic that it was hardly necessary to draw any clear distinction. The design of the runway said it all: willow branches woven into a spreading canopy of trees, representing the evolution of the Kenzo ideal under its current creative director.

Marras is a free spirit, untouched by passing trends, which makes him one of the few designers who can get away with claiming a quest for liberty as the reason for his collection. Freedom here meant the loosest, easiest of shapes—usually layered—in fabrics that were a patchwork of florals, plaids, embroidery, and appliqué. The pursuit of ease yielded an unfortunate jumpsuit or two, but the mood was otherwise very much the casual hippie- and vintage-influenced chic of the seventies style icons that Marras name-checked—women like Tina Chow, Marisa Berenson, Florinda Bolkan, even Farrah Fawcett, some of whom undoubtedly wore Kenzo the first time around. Toss a pinstriped jacket over a patchworked smock dress and you get the point. The hair—a tangle of pretty curls, often topped with a man’s fedora—underlined it. With his own collection, at least, it’s hard not to feel that Marras is radically underrated. The crowd at Kenzo today included the omnipresent Lindsay Lohan, who seemed much more agreeable than she’s been the rest of the week. That possibly suggests the tide of attention may be turning Marras’ way.
—Tim Blanks

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It’s not usually a good sign when a designer opens up with a knit leotard with a cutout at one hip worn over a pair of clingy exercise shorts and heavy tights. Where, for example, might a young woman sport such an outfit, outside of the ballet studio? But there was more to this Vanessa Bruno show than the opening suggested. Dance, or more precisely, the layered and wrapped outfits that dancers wear to rehearse, provided Bruno with an organizing theme for her Fall collection. And if it’s hard to picture that first look hanging in the window of her Rue de Castiglione store, her outerwear, starting with a long, icy gray shearling knitted at the hem, will have them lining up.

Already own a trench? Bruno’s given her fans a reason to buy a new one in the form of a drop-waist camel leather version or another in tweed with a leather storm flap. She also made some smart moves with her tailoring. Adding a strap to a blazer so it stays on when you wear it tossed over your shoulders isn’t a new idea—Helmut Lang did it a decade ago or more—but it’s probably new to her girls. As for the season’s must-have mixed-media jacket, hers combined crisp gray flannel with a deep leather hem and a ribbed knit back.

There were other things to like here as well, including a ribbed cardigan with leather elbow patches, the floaty printed chiffon dresses, and Bruno’s patchwork stacked-heel boots with fur trim. All in all, a strong show from this well-priced Paris favorite.
—Nicole Phelps

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Stella McCartney’s show began with a fake recording of Tiger Woods’ alleged call to his mistress, the one in which he asks her to remove her name from her voicemail because his wife has found her number on his phone. Things ended, as usual, with a Beatles song; this season it was “Mother Nature’s Son.” They made for perplexing, if thought-provoking, bookends to a collection of daywear that for the most part looked tailor-made not for celebrity groupies but for the smart, powerful businesswoman. It was clean, polished, and chic—three buzzwords of the season.

An unfettered charcoal coat, a notched lapel its only decoration, opened the show, and was followed by streamlined, hip-grazing tunics. When they were worn with narrow, tapering trousers or even stirrup pants, along with pointy kitten heels, they looked like modern, easy answers to the much maligned boardroom pantsuit. Just as often, though, they came without bottoms, which meant that there was a lot of leg on McCartney’s runway. Plenty sexy, but perhaps not so user-friendly as a sleeveless coat-dress in camel or her beautifully spare double-breasted white coat.

For evening, the designer experimented with sheer organza overlays (a motif that also turned up at Givenchy). She draped them on top of a one-shoulder iridescent paillette dress or a nude bustier number embroidered with scarlet roses. In other words, they were quite a bit trickier than her fabulously minimal daywear.
—Nicole Phelps

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Stefano Pilati categorically denied there was any religious symbolism in his Fall show. Nevertheless, the sober caped black forms, wimplelike head coverings, starched white cotton, hoods, and heavy chain pendants gave a nunlike impression. Granted, it wasn’t literal, but there was something of the Catholic convent in the high white dog collar on a suit, the yoked white blouse with full sleeves, the prim and modest mid-calf dresses—and the way a cardinal purple cape made an appearance at one point. Even when a sheer black dress came out, there was a cross to bare beneath it: underwear formed as a cruciform bodysuit.

But that wasn’t the gloss Pilati put on it at all. “It’s about protection,” he said after the show, explaining the plastic film he put over coats and inserted in patches in jackets. “And partly, an homage to YSL and the rigorous tailleur.” As for the figures dangling on the gold chains that swung and bumped on the lower body as the models walked? He said he’d taken those from silhouettes of Saint Laurent fashion photos he’d cut out of seventies magazines.

Still, this collection was sometimes tricky to fathom. It was best in the simplest and strongest pieces: seventies-influenced shapes, like the high-waist flared trousers, capes, mid-calf skirts; the smart slash-sleeved jacket; and the jumpsuits—all ideas that look timely in the context of this season’s trends.

But perhaps a more explanatory perspective would be the one taken from the Petit Palais, just opposite the YSL show venue, where a major retrospective of the work of the late Yves Saint Laurent is about to open. Thus far, Pilati has avoided creating comparisons to the master’s archive, striving instead to make statements of his own about redefining the wardrobe for the twenty-first century. Oddly enough, if he relaxed more into channeling the way Saint Laurent nailed how the working woman wanted to dress in the Parisian seventies—as so many other designers are now—it might be an easier path.
—Sarah Mower

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