The economy may not have entirely recovered, but the collective fashion mood has. "It's time to be bold," Miuccia Prada told us, and in a resurgent Milan especially, it was out with the safe and the predictable and in with color, sex, and a nostalgic seventies mood. This wasn't empty escapism, though. The spirit of Yves Saint Laurent lingered over many of the collections, which meant there were fun and function in equal measure. We had the sense that designers were (gulp) enjoying their jobs again, and that feeling transferred to the clothes—nowhere more so than in these ten shows.
It's hard to conceive of a more thankless task in fashion than taking over from a designer as galvanizing as Alexander "Lee" McQueen, but Sarah Burton is precisely the kind of quiet powerhouse who has what it takes to grab hold of his legacy and drag it where it needs to go to survive and prosper. As much as she worked beside McQueen for 15 years and clearly had a symbiotic connection to his very particular vision, it's her gender that is her greatest asset and point of difference, at least as it shaped tonight's show. The very first outfit could stand as a manifesto for the future: The tail coat is a trad McQueen piece, but here it was softened, its edges unfinished, and the hard, peaked shoulders that were another McQueen signature had been slashed open, relaxed.
Karl Lagerfeld gets a lot of his inspiration from dreams, but he didn't need any help from them today, because he already hadLast Year at Marienbad, that hallucinatory slice of avant-garde celluloid from the early sixties, on his mind. Some would say that, despite its storied reputation, it's the most boring movie ever made, but for Lagerfeld—and Chanel—it inspired a breathtakingly surreal setting: a monochrome ornamental garden, complete with fountains, which mirrored one of the film's most famous scenes. A full orchestra of 80 musicians sawed through romantic arrangements of Björk, the Verve, and John "007" Barry to soundtrack the 18-minute show (positively epic by today's ADD standards). The models, meanwhile, paraded in a carefully schematic way that had a little of Marienbad's arch, rigorous formality. It all conspired to make the boldness of the clothes even more audacious.
On every guest's seat at Louis Vuitton was a single piece of paper with a quote from a famous Susan Sontag essay: "The relation between boredom and camp taste cannot be overestimated," it said. But if Marc Jacobs' Spring show bordered on camp, boring it wasn't—not with all the desirable party clothes he put on the catwalk. Backstage, with glitter all over his face (residue from a hug with Kristen McMenamy, whose torso was painted with black and white zebra stripes), Jacobs was talking about Art Deco, Art Nouveau, orientalism, and the first designer he ever worked for, Kansai Yamamoto. "Basically, I didn't want anything natural," he said. "I wanted everything overly stylized."
Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri have connected with the in crowd. The studded patent kitten heels from their last collection are among this fashion season's It-est shoes—no small feat, considering the kind of girls we're talking about are used to wearing 110-mm stilettos to lunch. Something about the duo's new take on Valentino's signature elegance looks fresh to the under-35 set, and they're buying. In response, perhaps, the designers' focused Spring collection wasn't so much a step forward as it was a refinement of ideas they proposed for Fall.
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Nearly every model on the runway at Paul & Joe was smiling—from "smizes" to the full monty with teeth. Was it the all-flats footwear? Or the fact that this was the second-to-last show of a grueling month? The explanation came from designer Sophie Albou. "I like smiley girls!" she exclaimed backstage. "I tell them all to smile."
Those happy expressions were a perfect fit for these giddy-cute clothes. This looked unabashedly like a Spring/Summer collection, a thing of note at a moment in fashion when seasonlessness is the standard. Albou opened up shop recently in Los Angeles—her sole stand-alone U.S. outpost—and while her brand of bohemia isparisienne, these flippy printed minidresses, shrunken bombers, embroidered peasant blouses, and fluttery maxi skirts should do a brisk business on the West Coast.
Those happy expressions were a perfect fit for these giddy-cute clothes. This looked unabashedly like a Spring/Summer collection, a thing of note at a moment in fashion when seasonlessness is the standard. Albou opened up shop recently in Los Angeles—her sole stand-alone U.S. outpost—and while her brand of bohemia isparisienne, these flippy printed minidresses, shrunken bombers, embroidered peasant blouses, and fluttery maxi skirts should do a brisk business on the West Coast.
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