Trends for Fall 05/06 -womenswear
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Divining Fall's Fashions
By Holly Haber
“This will be a Geoffrey Beene/Ralph Rucci kind of moment,” said Wolfe.
As creative director of the Doneger Group forecasting service, David Wolfe studies worldwide style shifts and predicts how they will play in the U.S.
For fall, Wolfe predicts glamour, vulgarity and sexuality will start to fade,
D.W.: I think it means what I’m calling “deluxe minimalism,” because we still want to look and feel like we are being cocooned by luxury, but we want to feel luxurious instead of showing off our luxury to other people. That is what lots of Europeans are talking about. That is where they are heading, and we will end up following.**
We love eye candy, so there will still be plenty of color, but it will be expansive and subtle, with unusual combinations. Color will drive the business but not in such a heavy-handed way. The big things will be luxury fabrics with surface interest — not so much applied embellishment, but furry or hairy or sparkly in some way, including an enormous amount of patterning, damask, tapestry and brocade.
The silhouette will calm down a lot. It’s not going to be as body flaunting. It is a natural fashion pendulum swing, but this also reflects the fact that the
industry is starting to pay attention to the [Baby] Boomer-plus customer with a lot of money who doesn’t have a 14-year-old body she wants to expose.
I don’t think the grown-up fashion consumer any longer wants to emulate the young. A discernable generation gap is opening. There is not so much cross-pollination between junior and misses’ and designer as there has been.
We will still be under the thrall of retro. Young people will still dress in a thrift-shop, rag-bag luxurious way, but the more mature customer will rediscover retro elegance that is late Fifties and early Sixties without that camp [period] makeup, hair and accessories…We are seeing a love of Victoriana and the Thirties with “The Aviator”; the clothes that Kate Beckinsale and Cate Blanchett wear in that film are so beautiful.
excerpt from wwd...
