Fashion Runway

Now that the runways are a medium for just about everything — celebrity, marketing, corporations — you can never be sure of the message, if there is one at all. On Monday, before the Carolina Herrera show, guests entering the Bryant Park tents were offered samples of Tasti D-Lite ice cream. A moment later the socialite Tinsley Mortimer stopped to pose in her black lace outfit. Beyond her, some women in pink evening dresses held out trays of Evian.

So many designers seem strangely displaced, through no fault of their own. Miguel Adrover, who came to New York on behalf of a German company, Hess Natur, which produces clothes from organic materials, turned his creative energy to nine pieces of high conceptual fashion. Maybe a museum will acquire them.

The clothes Isaac Mizrahi showed on Monday wouldn’t spark appreciation or desire except among connoisseurs or people familiar with his history and love of drama. There were coats and dresses that closed like a paper wrapper; neon underpinnings that mixed couture and sport; fuzzy, caterpillar-like skirts, a ball gown with a crackled pattern in gold. Seeing the clothes, he should have done the costumes for the new remake of “The Women”— that is, if the film had been given an arch style.
Women love to exercise their fantasies, and that is why we have designers. Ms. Von Furstenberg’s message was a simple one, as it always is, dressed up in memories of the 1960s and Diana Vreeland, who was famous for saying things like “Bluejeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola.”

Young designers tend to dress the women around them rather than provide direction of their own. Alexander Wang’s collection had the moment-to-moment quality of young urbanites who buy on Friday to wear on Saturday, and so you have the feeling that the clothes — the bloomers and perforated leather basketball shorts, the oversize tunic tops, the leggings — had been tweaked rather than wholly designed.


Source: NYTimes - Fashion pages