New York Fashion Week — actually a misnomer since it is eight days long — is underway, as designers show their spring previews for 2016. Here are some highlights of the collections.
Earthy ease at Kors
Elegance, the Michael Kors way for spring, doesn’t mean kid gloves, boning and tight dresses.
The designer had a more “earthy elegance” on his mind for the feminine Michael Kors Collection — a more creative, artistic energy like Georgia O’Keeffe and Elsa Peretti, the Italian model-turned-jewelry designer.
He sewed fluttery petaled flowers on dresses and offered sheer kicky pleats on dresses in classic red, blue, black and white. Wide, black leather belts and grommets along skirts and hems provided strength.
“I wanted to have that balance of the two things, think about things that were in fact very soft and romantic and feminine, but take them down-to-earth and make them work in a modern way,” Kors said in an interview.
Traveling with Tory
Wanderlust has been good to Tory Burch: Her love of travel often inspires her work, with past collections imbued with flavors of London, Marrakesh, the American Southwest and points beyond.
For her latest collection, Burch dug a little deeper, unearthing textures and intricate details one might encounter in far-off lands.
“It’s a bit more conceptual from an inspiration standpoint,” Burch explained. “I wanted to highlight the idea that beauty happens over time, and the patina that time creates.”
Burch kicked off her presentation with caftans and separates in cotton and linen, with fringe and frayed edges highlighting natural textures. More polished, office-appropriate pieces followed, including a knee-length linen jacquard tunic worn over cropped linen pants, a silhouette that has emerged as a spring trend. Handbags embellished with fringe or feathers likewise emphasized texture and movement, while the collection’s statement shoe featured a sculptured heel inspired by a sinuous piece of natural tree bark.
Also new from Burch is her Tory Sport activewear line, which debuted in a New York pop-up shop. That collection is designed “with elegance of sport in mind,” Burch said, adding that she included “coming and going pieces, what you might wear to lunch after the gym, or what you’d wear to the airport.”
Poetry at Rodarte
The designing duo at Rodarte, sisters Laura and Kate Mulleavy, always draw heavily on their past experiences when they design their collections: their childhood in California and their favorite paintings at a certain museum. For their latest collection, the sisters decided to draw on poetry.
“It was funny, we were listening to records and thinking about poetry,” Laura Mulleavy said backstage. “Kate and I just had this natural thought to do a collection about poets over the ages. Emily Dickinson, songwriters like Dylan or Leonard Cohen — we just melded it all together.”
The elements that kept cropping up, Mulleavy said, were roses, lace and a certain color palette (black, white, burgundy, brown, dusty pink).
The clothes were, indeed, heavy on lace, but many were also much flashier than either Dickinson or Cohen probably would have favored. There was lots of beading, some sequin work and generous helpings of fringe. Some outfits had sort of an Old West saloon vibe, particularly those with black lace. There was also velvet, silk chiffon and — for those poets toiling away in drafty attics, perhaps — some luscious Mongolian lamb jackets.
Sexy Vera Wang
Vera Wang showed tiny black bandeaus and bra tops, short shorts, sky high heels and plenty of sexy shoulders, if shoulders are your thing.
She included a pop of red, mesh and sheer elements, and a dose of gold sequins, with just a touch of mink in a mini-vest and spiky ostrich plumes on shorts, boy shirts and a halter-neck dress serving up those shoulders as cutouts did elsewhere.
Wang said backstage after the show that she drew inspiration from the duality of life, the pleasures of the imagination and a bit of mystery.
“There is that side that’s very, um, not prim but controlled, and then there’s a side where you let go, you allow yourself to have a bit of fantasy in your life.”
Wang included a lot of schoolgirl tailoring, but at the same time, “I could still go to the other side.
“There’s always that tension between everything in the show that went from boyish to girl, back to boyish, because I love that mix,” she said.
