Rained on, delayed, exhausted: the New York collections ended yesterday with Donna Karan and Isabel Toledo of Anne Klein each taking on that most feminine of summer staples: the dress.
Ms. Karan’s show recalled a million movies of women airing themselves on their stoops on a hot summer night, usually within sight of a man in an undershirt. Classy halter and shirtdresses in waxed poplin and linen gauze came in khaki and cocoa, often with a wide belt. The waist was the focus of the collection, with full skirts and taut white cotton body-shirts.
Flattering, the dresses should appeal to a lot of women; wrapped styles in taupe silk jersey looked sexy. Ms. Toledo’s tunics and sundresses, by contrast, will probably find fewer customers. They were complex in color and pattern, surprising in their design, and for that reason more interesting.
As simple as her shapes are, Ms. Toledo invests them with something special: a swingy cotton dress with Aztec striped panels, a conservative black sleeveless dress with a white underskirt; a short-sleeve shirtwaist in a silvery crystal tone. She keeps moving the marker around, producing more thoughts. There were some terrific dresses in white crinkled silk that were hand-painted in bright drizzle patterns, almost with a beach-souvenir quality. They were unlike anything else on the runways.
Into the divide comes L’Wren Scott, with her close-fitting, confident clothes. Ms. Scott took her boyfriend, Mick Jagger, to her intimate showing, at the Gagosian Gallery, and Mr. Jagger sat with the editors at a long lunch table, which was kind of sweet. She makes a fresh case for wardrobe building, adding a soft black cape to a pantsuit with a nipped-waist jacket and full trousers, a long water-repellent black silk raincoat (with a lace fedora by Stephen Jones), and a hand-embroidered black sequined pantsuit.
Ms. Scott’s message is narrow but distinctive and clear. She started her line with glamorously simple dresses. Her best additions are in deep teal jersey with a ruched panel down the back and fanny, and in blue silk brocade with a boat neck and a loose tie falling across a half-bare back.
It’s hard to really find fault with Francisco Costa’s Calvin Klein collection, on Tuesday. The long slim dresses and pantsuits in white stretch cotton were very Calvin Klein, a job well done. And it’s a collection that will gain more meaning with time, as the spring shows shift to Europe and people will recall, if not wish for, a breezy shirt dress in pale gray silk or one of Mr. Costa’s long stretch silk T-shirts in egg-wash shades of green or blue.
The colors helped convey the coolness of the lines, particularly in the spare evening halters worn with high-waist silk trousers and a strapless dress of pale jade organza.
Yet if there was fault to be found it was in the faultlessness of some of the day looks, a sense that Mr. Costa was quite consciously aiming for a visual statement and, in the process, didn’t see or refused to see that the hemlines of the dresses might have been better shorter. If you’re noticing something like a hemline, that’s a problem.
Another thing: all of the models in the show were white, with hair at a uniform length. You can’t tell women to be individuals in their style and then not show a range of individual faces, hairstyles and ethnic backgrounds.It seems out of touch.
Willa Cather was one of Bill Blass’s favorite writers, but he had the good sense not to base a collection on one of her books. It’s not that the Great Plains or a frontier style of dress is sacred, but unless you’re prepared to understand the nuances, you’re really not offering much more than a version of the old Sears, Roebuck catalog.
That was Zac Posen’s problem the other night. He was out of his hood, straining with black “Shaker” coats and flat-collar shirts and skirt hems with a “wheat” fringe. Tall Hana Soukupova, in a dress with a ruffled train, looked as if she were pulling a plow.
Just about everything in this collection was off, from the heaviness of the layers to the pointless details. And after seeing Marc Jacobs’s whittled-down evening dresses, Mr. Posen’s prairie frou-frou looked old hat. He ought to figure out how to innovate rather than badly commemorate.
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