To a degree, a designer’s job is to tell people what they want before they know they want it. That used to be a fairly easy game. Remember the craze a few summers ago for flounced
skirts? Now empty stores are testing everybody’s instincts. What irresistible fashion will tempt women this year? The recession is also challenging young designers to be innovative — and exposing those who are not.
When the model Ali Stephens came out at the start of Diane Von Furstenberg’s show on Sunday dressed in a leopard-print turtleneck with stretch jeans in contrasting red leopard and a grandfatherly camel cardigan and a big metallic green tweed coat thrown over the whole thing, she was essentially selling the idea that she was a member of fashion nation. She was defending every girl’s right to look as if she just blew backwards through a carwash of products. If there had been a subtitle printed on the sunset backdrop of Ms. Von Furstenberg’s show in the Bryant Park tents, it would have said “I love to shop.”
The collection was not so much about great fashion as it was about the things you want now. For instance, there was a plum wool dress, worn by Sessilee Lopez, that in photographs will probably look like nothing much, but it’s a honey of a dress — flattering, with a neckline that scrapes over the collarbone. Those stretch jeans and jacquard knit leggings, which were the basic underpinning of the layered collection, come in checks, tapestry patterns, black glazed cotton (like leather at a glance) and a print that suggests camouflage. They’re the kind of easy wardrobe pieces that women are always looking for.
As if suspecting that some people this fall may buy only one or two things, Ms. Von Furstenberg and her team seemed to give each piece marquee value. So those big, friendly cardigans that New York girls treat as a second home were bigger, more exaggerated. Abstract black and white prints were blown out. Tweed sparkled with Lurex. A gray bouclé wool swing coat came with a bushy hem and cuffs of pompom frizz.
So often in the last few years fashion has displayed a sense of entitlement rarely justified by the quality or variety of design. The thinking seemed to be: if we make it, they will buy it. Ms. Von Furstenberg has offered legitimate reasons to play the game.
Bold checks also turned up at Preen, the London label by Thea Bregazzi and Justin Thornton, who have shown in New York for several seasons. The look was especially appealing when the designers broke up the pattern with dense patches of black Mongolian lamb, or combined a dress in houndstooth silk with a black wool cutout coat.
Though it sounds nerdish to say that Ms. Bregazzi and Mr. Thornton treated the body as a canvas, their cutout dresses — in solids as well as print collages — nonetheless have a second-skin quality. The designers have refined their puzzle technique of cutouts and appliqués on chiffon so that the results look effortless. They also translated the sexy look into adorable trompe l’oeil knits. They could do more on that front.
The recession has caught a generation of designers, in their 20s and early 30s, unprepared to be innovative. Their frame of reference is the free-spending consumer, not the suddenly cautious woman who is starting to think of her weekly manicure as a luxury. Looking at Jonathan Saunders’s overwrought collection of suits and coats with caped shoulders, boleros seemingly over jackets, and stiff couture silks over more silks is to wonder if he considered something, well, less complicated. We last saw those hugger-mugger shoulders at Balenciaga and at Chanel couture, though with more finesse and purpose.
Mr. Saunders is a good designer. He knows how to make clothes, but that’s all he’s really telling us with this collection — that he can cut a sleeve or a shoulder razor sharp, or create prints with digitalized or painterly effects. The clothes he presented Sunday don’t travel well into the real world, at least not the world we seem to have. Even the palette of golden yellows, royal reds and black felt disconnected, like the palette of someone sitting in the dark looking at a computer screen.
What if someone were to take away his rich satins? What would Mr. Saunders do then? He would be forced to think of things that a woman might actually wear.
If you read a lot of depressing German literature or watch Ingmar Bergman films, you might find Carolina Herrera’s floor-dragging gowns, black stockings and drab jewel tones strangely affecting. Then again, if that’s not your particular turn of mind at 10 a.m. on a Monday, her collection will seem heavy weather indeed.
Day clothes were scarce, unless you wear embellished copper silk and lace. Texture marked the evening dresses — a cloqué silk, a floral organza that looked rough, as if washed or rewoven. A number of dresses had long trains, which, like the murky florals, recalled the romantic style of Olivier Theyskens. But it was a stale romance, with an awkwardness in the line — too many tucks and folds — that added bulk, and was uncharacteristic of Mrs. Herrera.
Maria Cornejo’s collection seemed very much of a piece, with draped black shifts gathered with wide leather belts, cool mohair blanket coats, a shearling hoodie and her soft version of urban jodhpurs. A dolman-sleeve coat in chalk white wool had a lovely shape, with nips at the back, and crackled leather caught the trend for otherworldly textures and shine. This collection also had lots of desirable pieces, like a slim-fitting blue mohair jacket, digital prints and knitted hoods with a slit at the back for your ponytail.