A smorgasbord of fashion as entertainment
This season’s New York Fash ion We ek ha s become a 10th year celebration of sorts for three disparate but talented designers. Alexander Wang, Phillip Lim and Riccardo Tisci have made their shows as much about spring 2016 as they are about marking a decade’s worth of work.
RICCARDO TISCI
Riccardo Tisci, who usually shows his collection for Givenchy in Paris, transplanted his women’s, men’s and couture shows to New York for one night only. It has been 10 years since he took the helm at Givenchy. I remember interviewing him in his early days at the storied Paris house when he kept getting terrible reviews despite the backing of Carine Roitfeld. But he pressed on with his vision of the Givenchy woman and ultimately won the approval of fashion critics and the following of celebrities like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian who showed up more than fashionably late for the New York show.
To the sublime track of Ave Maria, Tisci showed variations of lingerie and tuxedo dressing, sometimes showing both. His muse Maria Carla Boscano opened the show with an ivory lace negligee-type top paired with relaxed silk tuxedo trousers with flyaway details. Tisci’s proposition for spring is the delicate balance of masculine-feminine dressing and he did this by showing dressing robes paired with waistcoats and lace skirts and trousers worn with draped and flouncy blouses all in ivory and black.
ALEXANDER WANG
In the 10 years since Alexander Wang started his label, he’s won a CFDA award, opened stores worldwide and until recently headed the design direction of the legendary house of Balenciaga. He stepped down after three years at Balenciaga to concentrate on his own label.
Wang started his eponymous brand with the premise of creating what we now refer to as off-duty clothes: slouchy T-shirts, track pants, anoraks, tanks, hoodies — downtown clothes for Wang’s downtown posse. When he took the helm at Balenciaga, the clothes took on a more sophisticated, polished approach. Perhaps it was the access to Balenciaga’s ateliers and resources that contributed to this.
However, for spring 2016 and to mark his 10th anniversary, Wang returned to the clothes that sealed his career. In the cavernous Pier 94 space in front of a giant panoromic screen and with celebrities like Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Mary J. Blige perched in the front row, Wang sent down models in military jackets, jersey dresses, jeans, mesh tanks and multizip jumpsuits. The collection was meant to reference the mundane, the everyday but heightened to Wang levels. And so a denim jacket morphs into a motocross leather jacket, a tennis sweater is deconstructed and laced, pajama tops are given cutouts and dresses have jacket like zippers on the front.
After the show, the space turned into an after-party venue with pole dancers galore, hip-hop music and live performances by Lil Wayne and Ludacris late into the night.
PHILLIP LIM
Phillip Lim was in a reflective mood for his 10th anniversary. “Stop and smell the flowers,” he said of his spring collection and in a spacious set dotted by hills of dirt came the clothes like flowers sprouting from the earth. Lim is strongest when he shows clothes that have a modern, hip attitude. And those were the kind of clothes he presented for spring 2016.
In a palette of army greens, khaki, white and blue, the 3.1 Phillip Lim collection was the designer’s strongest yet. Lim employed various techniques like wrapping, twisting, splicing and strategic cutting to create skirts with asymmetrical hemlines, men’s-inspired shirting, anorak dresses and baseball jackets. Most of the trousers and skirts he showed featured paper bag waists with wrapped belts.
Flowers, his inspiration, made their presence felt as a singular gesture on a bandeau top or as an overall print on silk separates or as appliqués on pinstripe tank dresses.
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TORY BURCH
“Pretty” is such an overused and abused word but no other adjective can sum up Tory Burch’s spring 2016 collection more effectively or succinctly.
Despite the general move downtown of the New York collections, Burch remained at Lincoln Center for her show. If last season she covered her show space with more than 100 rugs, this time she used large oxidized doors and weathered floors as a backdrop. That aged look — the patina of time — ran through her collection, from the clothes to the accessories. “Beauty enhanced through time and nature,” was how Burch described it.
As for the clothes, most of them harked back to the looks that made Burch a household name — through caftans and tunics. This time however she cut them closer to the body and embellished them with fringing techniques or with lace appliqués or with beadwork. There were also dresses constructed from contrast guipure lace creating the effect of an Old World tapestry. The colors were anywhere from saffron to olive to oceanic blues. Towards the end, a parade of iridescent dresses and caftans with floral prints offered a fresh take on evening dressing.