Dries Van Noten Fall-Winter Ready-to-Wear 2009

 Fashion Trends  Comments Off on Dries Van Noten Fall-Winter Ready-to-Wear 2009
Jul 282009
 
 Many designers seem to be running into difficulty over how to approach women this Fall, dividing their collections schizophrenically between sober-sided sellers and artistic gestures of the sort they hope magazine editors will put on their pages. Dries Van Noten has no such conflicts: He doesn’t have to cast about for a “realistic” attitude because that, and never made-for-editorial fireworks, is what his business is based on.

It’s given him the authority to respond to the times with a relaxed elegance that many women will identify with. It boils down to simple suggestions: an easy-fitting blazer to slip over a blouse and fluid pants; a draped day dress; a sweater to wear over a long skirt for evening. The show opened and closed with belted camel coats (an item that might turn out to be the sartorial symbol of this recession’s sudden shift in aesthetics), but the strange color combinations in between threw off any feeling of dullness. Van Noten had taken the shades of Francis Bacon’s paintings—shrimp pink, beige, ocher, orange, and mauve—and deployed them in a way that gave life to pieces that might have seemed boring in other hands.

While there was nothing overtly retro in it, the undercurrent was of the day-to-day glamour women in Europe and America mustered for themselves while facing the privations of World War II. It was there in the horn-rimmed sunglasses and the Eisenhower jackets, and the template of making the best of oneself in “good” simple clothes, with a slash of orange-red lipstick to keep up morale. All that was subtly reinforced by the long, streetlike runway, which was reflected in a two-story-high mirror that gave an angled overhead view, as if from an office-block window: an impression of a legion of city women pressing on with their lives, come what may.

 

       
       
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Jul 232009
 
 

If Donna Karan didn’t invent uniform dressing in the eighties, she went
a very long way toward making the idea a sexy one. Now, with the economy
in a nosedive, she’s brought the clever, potentially budget-saving concept
back for Fall, and the result is one of her strongest-looking collections
in seasons. It starts with a jacket or a draped jersey top—all exaggerated,
sculpted shoulders with a wrapped or belted waist. On the bottom, it’s
either a long, lean skirt or tapered trousers. That powerful, triangular
silhouette came down the runway in all sorts of arrangements, each ready
to be pulled apart and reconfigured with any number of different pieces.
A caramel calfskin trench jacket, a white poplin button-down shirt, or
a black silk parka might be paired with a stretchy, below-the-knee jersey
skirt, while a portrait-collar alpaca jacket or turtleneck bodysuit might
top cropped pants.

But it wasn’t all about separates. Dresses, whether they came long-sleeved
or in a drapey goddess style, followed the same commanding lines. Karan
only abandoned the bold shoulder to reproduce on the runway a look that
she herself has been wearing for years. Made from satin jersey suspended
from a necklace of leather-wrapped rings, the halter-style “cold
shoulder” dress—as she calls it—has been battle-tested
not only for sex appeal, but also for ease. Who wouldn’t want to slip
into a uniform like that?

 

       
       
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Marc Jacobs – Fall 2009 Ready-to-Wear – Accessoires

 Fashion Accessories, Fashion Trends  Comments Off on Marc Jacobs – Fall 2009 Ready-to-Wear – Accessoires
Jul 232009
 
 

Leave it to Marc Jacobs to deliver a neon-hued, big-shouldered, crimpy-haired
eighties antidote to the gloom and doom of 2009. “I was thinking
about the good old days in New York,” he said after the show, “when
getting dressed up was such a joy.” By the good old days, Jacobs
means the nights he spent at clubs like Area, the Palladium, and Paradise
Garage. Maybe it was the recent Stephen Sprouse project he completed at
Louis Vuitton, or perhaps it’s the fact that he now lives in Paris full
time, but his Fall show was a big, juicy nostalgic kiss to a city that
doesn’t really exist anymore.

The show started simply enough, with a gray cardigan sweater and charcoal
trousers, but when the model walked past, you saw the back half of a kilt
and braces—Jacobs’ new uniform—and knew it was going to get
personal. He worked his way through little silver-and-black A-line shifts;
party dresses in metallic leathers and floral brocades with flaring, full
skirts and monster shoulders; velvet bustier tops and high-waisted over-dyed
jeans; and Crayola-bright jackets, capes, and hooded coats. The only filter
that separated these clothes from their East Village forebears was the
expensive, luxury fabrics they came in. Every girl had a different hairdo,
shellacked into Mohawks, flips, and bouffants, and the makeup was straight
off the album cover of Duran Duran’s Rio. The cumulative effect of all
that color, volume, and optimism? One editor called it “A Flock of
Seagulls meets Alexis Carrington.”

Will fashion as outrageously ebullient as this—in some cases, make
that just plain outrageous—sell in the harsh reality of the late
aughts? (And talking about harsh: More than 1,000 people were nixed from
the invitation list this season in a cost-cutting slash and burn.) Jacobs
insists that he wasn’t thinking about the economy when he was working
on the collection, and maybe he wasn’t. These days, wagering that women
will splash out on feel-good clothes is as good a bet as any.

 

       
       
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