Texture, color and fit are pulling fashion forward from young designers like Julien David who refines his girlish vibe with fabric innovation, Raf Simons who is breaking the couture codes at Christian Dior to suit a modern woman and Isabel Marant who injected new volume into her trademark style.
Raf Simons continues his clean sweep at Christian Dior. His unconstricted silhouettes, a an easy mix of flou and tailoring, are beginning to make the secondskin hourglass look like fashion history. Simons playfully put what looked like corset lacing on the sides, and across the fronts of coats and dresses, but for him the refference is sneakers which just goes to show where his mind is leading Dior. He sportified classic black stilettoes too giving them multicolored plastic sneaker soles. Couture embroidery is reduced to a faux-brooch slashed through by the slit of a skirt, and Simons takes the paintbox to fur, coloring mink in yellow and green and giving the asktrakhan coat a wild ride in brilliant pink. Double dresses looked like paper doll cut outs and trapunto quilted silk was spiced up with sinuous nudes stitched into the patterns.
Is the Isabel Marant girl ready to trade in her swivel hips for a pair of slouchy pants ? Marant posed the question beginning her show with a pair of side-laced parachute pants with a high paperbag waist in white worn with a strapped on fur vest. Ethnic blanket stripes, leather strapped fur boots, military khaki tailoring, plaid shirt jackets, wrinkled silk and padded cottons followed for a more relaxed, rough and rustic look bordering on grunge.
Julien David did something marvelous this season, he managed to produce a collection that was both girlish and sophisticated. Two crushed barricade sculptures dipped in 24-karat gold by the artist Aaron Young set the scene for his exploration of texture in simple shapes with genuine street appeal. David’s girls like capes, duffel coats, bathrobes and T-shirt dresses, stadium jackets, cardigans, crunchy textured socks and cowhide leather shoes, but that’s just the sweet and simple framework. The real show here was all in the fabrics. Mixed in with honest wool melton and washed cotton is a cache of fantastic textures including stretch silk which wrinkles over the body like sculpture, shrunken leather, wild loopy hand knit wool, embroidered cord fringe and metallic wire loop embroidered in ombré colors for T-shirt flapper dresses with sizzle and shine.