END OF AN ERA

Seventy-five years after its inception, there is a sense that New York Fashion Week is at a make-or-break juncture. Some of its most promising new establishment names, like Proenza Schouler, Altuzarra and Rodarte, have made the decision to show in Paris instead in recent seasons. Victoria Beckham won’t be back for at least a year as she is bringing her collection to London in September.

It is the giants of American style which still give the event some sense of gravitas, but their number will also be reduced by one as Carolina Herrera presented her swansong collection on Monday evening. She announced last week that 31-year-old Wes Gordon would be taking over as creative director while she will become a roving global ambassador, striving to inspire women around the world with her label’s classically elegant look. “What they like now is ugliness. Women dress in a very strange way,” the 79-year-old doyenne observed to The

New York Times ahead of the show, reflecting on why now was the right time to move on.

She made sure to offer a vision of beauty and graceful style that could be tantalising enough to tempt at least a few of said women out of their frumpyfabulous Balenciaga trainers. Light-as-clouds tulle dresses in panels of scarlet and lilac and metallic tinsel pencil skirts and coats looked just modern enough. The show’s finale was an ode to Herrera’s own personal style, with 20 models parading in different coloured floor-length skirts and crisp white shirts, each one with a flipped-up collar and several buttons undone: her signature look – the very antithesis of ugly.