In a season of fashion-world uncertainty like the one just passed, with questions percolating — Who will end up at Dior? What is happening at Lanvin? What will be the impact of the new direction at Balenciaga? — drama reigns. That keeps the system churning along; fashion runs on the stuff. But to focus on only the biggest names, the biggest changes and the biggest questions is, inevitably, to miss many of the worthy, quieter labels.
That struck a viewer at Vanessa Seward’s unostentatious, pretty show (though unostentatious is not always the word that springs to mind when a metallic gold jumpsuit comes galloping out). Ms. Seward, a veteran of Chanel and a former creative director of Azzaro, is a fashion lifer rather than a touted tyro, and her namesake collection, backed by the casual company A.P.C., took up residence on the runway early last year. Her collections run to the realistic rather than the fantastic, but they are filled with appealing items: elegant long coats, no-nonsense midlength skirts, smart denim and gaucho tailoring. Those appealing items fill her stores, too, which are popping up at great speed: The first, in the First Arrondissement of Paris, opened in September, quickly followed by a second in the Third Arrondissement this year. Two more, on the Left Bank in Paris and in Los Angeles, are on the way.
Quieter in presentation (secreted in an upstairs studio on Place André-Malraux, without a formal showing) was Hillier Bartley, the collection by the former Marc by Marc Jacobs creative team of Katie Hillier and Luella Bartley. Their designs are brash where Ms. Seward’s are coy — Ms. Bartley spoke of the influence of 1970s rockers, “wolves in women’s clothing,” as she called them, and how to translate their devil-may-care embrace of women’s wear back into women’s wear — but grand. There is humor and spark to the collection (Ms. Bartley lovingly referred to an oversize, rust-colored mohair sweater with leopard elbow patches as “the orangutan”), which is still in limited distribution but rapidly growing.
Ms. Bartley, who is a longtime industry veteran and the partner of David Sims, the fashion photographer, is well aware of the line to be straddled between salable clothes and those made for magazine pages. The goal, she said, is “trying to keep that balance of something you want to wear and want to shoot.”
“Something that has the creativity but doesn’t scream of silliness,” she added.
Silliness is not the word for Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran of Lemaire, who are serious, poetic but pragmatic, whose clothes are “always about a woman rooted in real life,” Mr. Lemaire said. So as their models cantered through the Université René Descartes, their skirts flying and sleeves flapping, they glanced around them, like commuters on a busy street. It was a small but touching effect, the kind that Mr. Lemaire and Ms. Tran specialize in. There were bolder gestures in this collection, like the exaggerated, bulblike shoulders of some of their sweaters, but the subtler ones hit harder, like the finicky precision of a many-buttoned blouse.
By MATTHEW SCHNEIER
Source New York Times
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