softgrey
flaunt the imperfection
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25/07/2007
Sarah Mower salutes the return of womanly silhouettes
Facing the prospect of digging in with nylon rainwear and leopard spot gumboots for the next two weeks for a holiday in Devon, I have never looked forward to the beginning of September quite as keenly. High summer ought to be a moment when coats, knits and boots seem inconceivable. Not this year.
Never mind. In a grim and stoical way, I've decided that having a long time to mull over autumn has its advantages.
I always make my most regretted panic buys in anticipation of the awful back-to-school moment when the massed ranks of female fashion colleagues gather to silently pass or fail what everyone else is wearing on the first day of the shows. After weeks of forethought, I'm not going to let that happen this time.
What you need to do is take a position, and then whittle down your shopping list to the fewest, most effective strikes possible.
The position I'm taking is "womanly". It's the one tag I can think of that best clarifies all the confusing, sometimes downright contradictory, trends that have come out of the collections.
If you get too close, you can get bogged down in the detail. Is it grey or magenta, minimalist tailoring or metallic decoration, jodphurs or flares? They're all there, but if you stand back, the one thing that registers is the dramatic shift from girlish to grown-up.
Since I've spent the entire summer railing against mini-smocks, shorts, leggings and tent-dresses, this is music to me. If last season was a bowdlerisation of the dolly-girl 1960s, the next one is more along the lines of the glamorous 1930s and 1940s.
It means longer, more sinuous lines, skirts that hit the knee or below, and a waist that goes in where a waist is meant to be. So a prime purchase to search for is a plain, curvy dress that can be the central building block of a subtly tweaked wardrobe.
Because the thing is, even though I really liked the deco references in Marc Jacobs' collection, and enjoyed the retro 1940s spirit of Dior, Gucci, Missoni and Bottega Veneta, it would be a mistake to try to ape them to the letter. The skill is all in the adaptation and personalisation.
It is about knowing how to deploy a repertoire of belts, brooches (yes, now is the time to bring out your diamante) or cuffs to make a simple outfit (a dress, or a pencil skirt and sweater) read as modern rather than costumey.
I've decided that a streamlined black dress with cap sleeves by Narciso Rodriguez is a platonic ideal of this kind. You could make it look different in half a dozen ways, yet never feel that you're pretending to be Lauren Bacall.
However, you then have to work with the consequences of this new silhouette. The platforms and wedges that have been around for the past year are still right, but what changes is the cover-up. A Marlene Dietrich-type trenchcoat could be an option, but annoyingly, it will only look right if it's exactly the length of the skirt, or longer.
Long coats are a bit of a drag in real life, though; they're always getting stuck in car doors and turning out to be too hot to wear much. In that case, a hip-length pea-coat of the kind shown by Jil Sander and Stella McCartney is a sharper choice. It looks proportionately right with a long-line skirt, and will marry up with a pair of trousers equally well.
So this is my "womanly" hit-list so far - dress, pencil skirt, pea-coat, and maybe a new pair of two-or-three toned platforms. The rest I reckon that I already own, although I could fall for a great blinging Swarovski-crystalled Christopher Kane black leather belt to punch up that plain black dress for evening.
telegraph.co.uk
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