The First Few Strides Are Looking Good New York Times, 12-Sep-09
By CATHY HORYN
Fashion is such a complete world, wrapped in its own myths, that if the industry is in a bad state, nobody really notices. What you notice instead is someone’s shoes.
My, my: where did she get those? The fashionista’s long legs, exiting a cab on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street, setting off a wail of honking (why hurry?) were extended by her super-size, strappy heels, probably a Givenchy model. Killer.
That’s the way it was Thursday and Friday, the opening days of the spring 2010 shows: a dozen little back-to-school wardrobe crushes. There were also some good collections.
Prabal Gurung, a relatively new designer — he spent five years at Bill Blass before he set out on his own last winter — makes sophisticated clothes. He is aware of fit. He can set a proper sleeve. He has good connections with fabric mills, which will sell him small amounts. He makes everything count.
“When I started this collection, I thought, ‘What can I do to get people to buy my clothes? ” said Mr. Gurung, a native of Nepal. That’s a worthwhile question today. Why buy a $3,000 trench-coat dress in khaki double-face silk when you can buy the look for a lot less elsewhere?
Mr. Gurung’s answer is to create clothes that aren’t really about a one-dimensional look. That’s fine for an androgynous-looking label like Wayne.
On Thursday in a stripped-down loft in Chelsea, with a D.J. playing, the designer, Wayne Lee, presented a skinny silhouette of draped jersey T-shirt dresses, leggings split at the knees and gauzy minis that looked tied on the body. At some point the cement grays and whites blurred into the background, the low sky over the Hudson. Did the hard-edged clothes look familiar? A little.
Mr. Gurung knows he has to do something particular, with more depth, if he wants to stand out. If his first collection, shown last February, emphasized tailoring, this one displayed his skills at draping. Also, Mr. Gurung has added a few sportswear looks: slim trousers with diagonal seams or ribbon ties at the ankles, sleeveless silk jackets.
The most interesting dresses were a crisscross of fabric, fitted but not tight and more suggestive of pretty packaging than bondage. A cocktail dress in deep royal blue silk had a doughnut swirl of fabric on one shoulder. From a single piece of fabric, he worked a flat bow into the lapel of a cream pantsuit. There was a too-much-ness to everything that made for a nicely twisted sensibility.
Have you ever become completely irritated by a box of chocolate? You know the kind: concept chocolate, artfully arranged in a just-so box, flavors exotic and trying. I’m afraid that was my overall reaction to Jason Wu’s collection on Friday at the St. Regis Hotel.
Mr. Wu has a pretty good eye for color and prints. This season he plays with broken-wave prints (he called them Rorschach prints in his show notes) and some silk or denim tweeds with the small-grid pattern of industrial screens. For some reason I liked the idea of a slim, hooded tracksuit in dark tweed. It’s wearable and, at the same time, just a little out of it. A tweed mini-sheath with whorls of staple-like embroidery was lovely.
But a banality creeps into the picture. Whereas Mr. Gurung manages to take lightly the notion of feminine packaging, Mr. Wu treats it with a prissiness. Waists are defined and ribbon-tied. There are peplums aplenty. You suspect that Mr. Wu, like many designers, has spent a few hours gazing at the play clothes of Claire McCardell. Yet his cuffed shorts look unplayful and certainly not original. Though he tries.
He should try a little less hard is the answer. Not everything in life is a spotless decorator interior or a magazine spread. He should loosen up a bit. And why the uniformly short hemlines, six inches above the knee? That in itself is the sign of a fairly conformist outlook.
The scene at Elie Tahari’s presentation on Thursday felt like an industry cocktail gathering. The GQ guys are here! The models kept whisking past, on a continuous loop. (“Every seven minutes,” Mr. Tahari said.) There were little things to eat. The clothes were perfectly comprehensible: softly draped dresses and sarong skirts, smart-looking linen shorts and a trim jacket, blasts of orange silk, and a tailored denim shirt with a lovely starchiness.
Then it was out onto 42nd Street toward the wailing taxis and Ms. Hot Shoes.
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