Graphic, Graceful and Slightly Perverse

By ERIC WILSON
Published: September 10, 2008

For a while, fashion’s new guard seemed to be stuck in a sophomore slump. Some, and I will be kind by not mentioning names, appear to have already fallen off the radar, gauging by the turnout at their shows this week. Even more-popular designers, though producing nice enough clothes, have been struggling to achieve more than a passing grade.

DEREK LAM A tank dress with drawstrings.
But among the newer names of Fashion Week, the spring collections have included two A-game shows, from Thakoon Panichgul and Derek Lam. Each designer has developed a signature. Mr. Panichgul’s is the floral print dress draped in an offbeat way; Mr. Lam’s is a preciously tailored ladylike look that always seemed somehow appropriate for the Midwest. And this season each was smart to ask himself, “Well, what else have I got?”

Mr. Panichgul, whose label is called Thakoon, started by cutting away panels from his dresses and replacing them with cages of tulle ribbons, suggesting a harder edge, if not quite bondage. This also gave a sense of transparency to the clothes, some of which were put together in combinations of sheer and opaque fabrics, like one dress with a skirt made of cotton organdy and an exposed bra top bound in tulle. Another chiffon slip dress was covered up with a see-through trench coat, something a flasher could wear without all the effort of buttoning and unbuttoning.

Mr. Panichgul also collaborated with the artist Laurie Simmons on a surreal print of long-stemmed roses, the stems being women’s legs, which added a slightly perverse feeling to his collection. That’s a nice contrast for a designer who had built his reputation with sweetness.

Like other designers, Mr. Lam appears to be wrestling with the heavy legacy of Yves Saint Laurent, who died in June and whose work has been the subject of major exhibitions in Montreal and San Francisco. Although Mr. Lam cited Coco Chanel as an influence, his oversize lamé chiffon peacoat, sheer blouses and elegant black evening trousers were crisp-looking in a YSL way.

He also showed a group of jersey tunic dresses and jumpsuits in the pale sandy color of microfiber raincoats from the 1990s that, with the addition of adjustable drawstrings, seemed unusually casual and relaxed. All this, and it didn’t look weird at all.

If the new guard needed reinforcements, there were plenty on hand. Of note was a playful performance by Catherine Holstein, a peppy up-and-comer who made some voluminous little dresses that looked to have bathroom tiles attached as sequins. And the models were wearing sweaters wrapped like mushroom-shape turbans on their heads. Until a dress passed by with tiles arranged like a heart on the back, it wasn’t obvious that she was drawing the pixilated characters from a Nintendo video game.

At Ohne Titel, Alexa Adams and Flora Gill turned sequins into tattoo patterns on sheer tights and bodysuits. (The American synchronized swimming team, lampooned for their ensembles, should feel a sense of validation.) More practical were beautiful pistachio and pink knit dresses, which looked like summer-camp potholders as interpreted by Balenciaga.

One of the cutest ideas to come out of the very cute Brian Reyes collection was an oversize pocket T-shirt made in an expensive silk fabric for evening. This was an old Bill Blass trick, luxing up the basics.





Mr. Reyes showed some chic shirtdresses and gazar tops that also called to mind the old guard, but his vision of transparency, in a beaded dress with a sheer panel of fabric in the back, was certainly new. It was cut low enough to reveal the model’s thong.

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Bankable Glamour From Kors

By CATHY HORYN
Published: September 10, 2008

Michael Kors got down to business on Wednesday, sending out a smart spring collection that probably saved a few retail chiefs from watching their profits further erode. And Narciso Rodriguez, in a cooler mood, lightened up his minimalist line with stripes and offbeat prints.

RODARTE A pleated skirt with a chiffon top and laser-cut leggings.
Wherever Mr. Kors plants his oar — Portofino, Malibu — the results are inevitably and hopelessly glamorous. And with the economy entering what appears to be a long stew, Mr. Kors’s sporty American glamour seems highly bankable. And this time he has found just the right contemporary looks. The Beach Boys were on the sound system in the Bryant Park tents, but that’s about as nostalgic as the show got.

Just as in Mr. Rodgriguez’s show on Tuesday night, Mr. Kors offered a fresh take on stripes, opening with a belted tunic in royal blue and black striped cashmere over black stretch-wool shorts. Despite the surf theme, and some adorable two-piece swimsuits, the stripes were more graphic than nautical, and were complemented by bold polka-dots and gingham checks. So the style can be worn anywhere.

In every way the collection seemed thought out, full of trends like clam-digger pants and metallic fabrics as well as more-sophisticated pieces. The best of these were a pair of dresses — one in red gingham silk and the other in a lightweight navy wool pinstripe — that were cut so that the hem rose on one leg. A number of designers have shown variations on the hiked skirt, including Marc Jacobs and Mr. Rodriguez. There was also a style at Kors with a spilling top in white silk. It’s a great look.

Overlapping stripes of electrical tape gave Mr. Rodriguez the pattern for graphic black-and-white prints. They were rendered as a slim cotton skirt shown with a sharply notched black canvas jacket, and skinny print trousers worn with a clean, tailored jacket. Mr. Rodriguez evoked the line and dot theme in other sexy ways — with black stripes caging a slim dress of burnt coral silk or as a bandeau top under a lean black linen jacket.

The collection was as fresh-looking as it was varied. Jackets were generally cropped and close to the body, usually with a curving line. But the newness was really in the dresses, in the waves of stripes over a silk dress with black chiffon shoulders and a floaty, sheer back.

Let’s imagine that Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Rodarte line was designed by Alix Grès, the Paris couturier who set the postwar romantics straight with her modernist pleated dresses. What would Alix do? It’s an interesting exercise to compare the working methods of two contemporary designers, widely hailed for their “vision,” with a woman of unquestioned genius. What made Madame Grès exceptional?



For one thing, she held a set of beliefs about women. She designed for them, not for editors or abstract notions. Though she was a tyrant in her fashion, she always had women in her sights. This is not the case with the Mulleavy sisters, at least this season. Their latest collection consists of pleated skirts and body-conscious mesh tops and slick pants, all in monochromatic Pan-Cake hues with laser-cut leggings and nasty gold platforms. The mood is tough — Valkyries in chiffon — and the style clipped and pasted from other designers, mainly Azzedine Alaïa.

But that’s not the real problem. It’s that the Mulleavys didn’t seem to have a woman in mind when they put together these clothes, as they plainly did when they first showed their lovely, broken-down knits. It was as if their interest lay solely in achieving an effect with an object.

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Wanted: Genius Designer

By GUY TREBAY
Published: September 3, 2008

WHO will be the Next Big Thing? That’s the question that perennially fuels the rave of creativity, stitchery and circus nerves that is New York Fashion Week. It’s the tease that attracts the thousands of designers, buyers, editors, photographers, stylists, models, bookers, trend forecasters, sharp-tongued blogosphere sibyls and the strung-out accountants who attempt to ride herd on all of the above to the Bryant Park tents twice a year. It’s the dream we all dream of a sartorial Lotto win.

Even with an economy dazed and numbed, the United States remains the world’s largest market for fashion, and New York is unquestionably the center of the global fashion image machine. True, consumer pocketbooks seem to be on temporary lockdown. But the assembly line keeps cranking all the same; the maw must be fed.

But who will do it? Cast a seasoned eye across a landscape ornamented with scores of shows during the next nine days (officially Fashion Week runs today through Sept. 12) and what’s immediately apparent is that while fashion is healthily supplied with journeymen there is no clear visionary, no obvious genius in sight.

“The business is much too safe,” Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barney’s New York, said last week. “There’s just too much money at stake.” Thus, we should not expect a season in which designers go out on a limb and propel models down catwalks in get-ups concocted from seaweed or kitchen utensils. (Both have actually happened.) This is not to suggest, as Ms. Gilhart also noted, that New York is suffering from talent shortfall — far from it. Among many others, we have the team of Proenza Schouler, with their knack for making middle-of-the-road design seem indie and cool. We have cartoonish pop cultural gadflies like Isaac Mizrahi, and chaste classicists like Francisco Costa at Calvin Klein. We have elder statesman like Oscar de la Renta and Ralph Lauren, who, far from seeming moss-covered and passé, have been more alert to shifts in the cultural marketplace than some who were zygotes when those men first hit professional stride.

We have loopy design theoreticians like threeAsFour, holding up the fort for Downtown Style. And — back from a barkeep hiatus in Majorca that followed his Big Apple flameout—we have Miguel Adrover, the man who captured the imagination of the fashion establishment with clothes made from a recycled mattress and Yankees caps.

Still, there is no world-beater. There are no names that suggest clear-cut potential both to reshape fashion and somehow with it the global culture of style. There is no one, to take the obvious example, likely to replace Yves Saint Laurent, who died in June and seemingly took with him not merely a genius for conjuring glamour from whole cloth, but also for draping his designs to suit the mood of his time.

What seems disorienting about this absence is that fashion is no longer a discipline of interest mainly to female consumers and a cult of aesthetes. Like it or not, fashion has become something larger, a viral cultural force that sometimes seems only incidentally concerned with clothes. Cocteau wasn’t kidding when he said style is a simple way of saying complicated things — a point the United States Olympic Committee clearly noted (American teams may not have dominated in the medals, but in the parade of nations they killed the competition in jauntily classic Polo Ralph Lauren uniforms), as do politicos. Were the Dead Sea scrolls subjected to more exegesis than Michelle Obama’s floral print sheath at the Democratic National Convention in Denver? (Thakoon, by the way.) The voices of the blogosphere say, No.

Yet, contradictory as this may seem, the notion of a Next Big Thing in fashion may itself be culturally discordant. As in film, music and other arts, consumers have wearied of big names and labels. Except on TV, they are bored with diktats, with taste legislated by self-appointed “experts” and with camphor-scented archaisms like “stars.”

They have lost the desire to partake of media in hunks: an entire musical album, or a single artist’s whole career.

The D.I.Y. ethos prevalent among young consumers has led to an overall relaxation of the boundaries of style. Given that a 12-year-old with a MySpace page and access to digital “mood boards” or electronic makeover applications (girltech.com) can become an instant authority on fashion, is there truly a need for the dictators of the front row, the editors who once chose the stars?

“No longer is fashion force-fed to the consumer,” said Robert Burke, a former fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman who is now a luxury goods consultant. “They don’t have to wait for magazines and editors to tell them what they must buy and must have.”

Fun as it is to indulge in the game show fantasy retailed by programs like “Project Runway,” with its winners and losers and dubious jackpots, it is probably time to face the truth about the In or Out divide, which is that it is subjectively judged and decreed by a posse of Heathers.

“I really never understood the next big thing,” said Kim Hastreiter, an editor of Paper magazine. “How can someone be a genius this season and next season they’re not?”

She added: “This completely drives me crazy. Everyone can be raving one season about how great a designer is and then the next season they’re dumped.”

People do not become “un-brilliant,” Ms. Hastreiter said. “Designers really suffer from this because you get lifted up and put in this place and then someone else comes along and is put in that place and it’s never really about the work.”

Passionate fandom, the widespread devotion that also helps invest a star with authority, seems quaint today. Every anonymous nobody with a social networking page or a “fun wall” can build a cohort, whether imaginary or virtual. Appended to the snapshots of everyday people and their sartorial innovations on blogs like Scott Schuman’s The Sartorialist (thesartorialist.blogspot.com) are kite-tails of commentary from scores or even hundreds of commentators, who hold highly evolved (and occasionally creepy) views about what fashion is and should be.

In a lot of ways, the life and career of Saint Laurent are instructive and also helpful in understanding why it is futile and also probably dumb to sit around waiting for his avatar. “That world is gone,” his former partner Pierre Bergé said days before Saint Laurent’s death.
By that Mr. Bergé meant, as Jill D’Alessandro, an associate curator at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, recently explained, that “fashion was more about artistic and creative output” when Saint Laurent held his first runway show in 1962 than it was about celebrity name-checking and the creation of the latest “It” bag. “He was adapted to his times,” Ms. D’Alessandro said. “He was someone who wanted to help with social change. The world was also changing a lot then, and he very consciously wanted to be part of that.”

The film director Jean Renoir once wrote a letter to Ingrid Bergman, motivated by what I am not quite sure, in which he cautioned the actress against falling for the hype axiomatically attached to the next big thing. “The cult of great ideas is dangerous and may destroy the real basis for great achievements, that is the daily, humble work within the framework of a profession,” Renoir wrote.

And it’s that quote I plan to take with me into the Fashion Week fray, with a hope that the onus of expectation placed on any single designer (even New York’s favorite son, Marc Jacobs) will eventually yield to something more flexible, plural and modern, to use a hated fashion term. The next big thing may not be a single person at all but a yeastier and more broadly based network of shared information and connections.

It’s an optimistic thought, and none too reasonable, given the financial stakes. But there has to be a role for fashion more interesting than producing a few hype artists whose greatest skill is slinging a dumb It bag off the licorice-whip arm of this season’s hot socialite.

“Very few people have this ability to be the great designers and also generate the necessary buzz and excitement,” Ms. Gilhart of Barneys said. “It’s a trap.” So formulated around star-creation right now, she added, that the business may actually be “closing out a lot of opportunities for people who are original and good and who actually have something to say.”

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