Butterfly2883
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What They Design, Real Women Wear
ELIE TAHARI’S fall fashion presentation in Midtown last Thursday, which drew a respectable turnout of decision makers from the retail and magazine worlds, offered an encyclopedic overview of the season’s directions. Mr. Tahari’s ideas were luxurious, if not daring, sophisticated but never so tricky or ethereal that they would fly over his customers’ heads.
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Top left, Lucas Jackson/Reuters; center, photographs by Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times; above, Christopher Smith for The New York Times
CLOTHES THAT WORK Buyers can get behind trends with legs, like these designs by Ellen Tracy, right; DKNY, center top; Jill Stuart, center bottom; and BCBG, left.
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Left, Mark Mainz/Getty Images for Abaeté; center, Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times; Bryan Bedder/Getty Images
PATENT LEATHER Outfits and accents by, from left, Abaeté, Jill Stuart and Elie Tahari. The look was introduced by Lanvin, Fendi and Balenciaga.
Come fall, his swingy shift dresses, slim tunics and jumpers, cropped jackets and stretch cigarette pants are likely to be among the top sellers at stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue.
So why the glum look?
“I have never been featured in Vogue,” Mr. Tahari said, his dark eyes clouding over. With some bite, he added, “I guess I’m not important enough.”
That editorial omission is a telling one, sending the implicit message that Mr. Tahari is a designer of the second rank, one in a tribe of New York fashion makers — Nicole Miller, BCBG, Ellen Tracy, Jill Stuart and Tommy Hilfiger, to name but a handful — who are somewhat lost in the excitement of Fashion Week, overlooked in favor of editorial darlings considered more adventurous.
By designing accessible variations of last season’s creative storms, the Elie Taharis of Fashion Week are a shopper’s — and a merchant’s — best friends. Not on fashion’s leading edge, their collections nonetheless reinforce the ideas that have staying power. A woman shopping these lines rarely risks being called a fashion victim.
“They are spinning the trends of the moment, giving you a commercialized version of the concepts in the air,” said Michael Fink, the fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue. He is one of a group of tastemakers who view designers like George Sharp of Ellen Tracy, Max Azria of BCBG and Nicole Miller as reliable bellwethers of trends with legs, those likely to endure beyond a single season.
Their collections, Mr. Fink said, “help move fashion forward after the bigger creative statement has been made.” Their wide play on the runways, he noted, insures that once-difficult concepts like the tent dress or bubble skirt will burrow into the consciousness of American consumers.
“In a lot of ways these are the most important shows,” said Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director at Bloomingdale’s. Not only are they “big business” for Bloomingdale’s, Ms. Solomon said, but also: “We extract direction from these shows. If we see something repeating over and over, that tells us this is a trend we need to get behind.”
On the evidence of collections unveiled this week, designers are injecting a new rigor into their customers’ fall wardrobes, emphasizing shape and construction over romance and embellishment. Yes, there is plenty of traction left in the buoyant dresses and jackets that began drifting onto runways last year, but the newest interpretations are cut closer to the body, and their vaporous outlines are held in check by belts or balanced by fitted tops and form-defining abbreviated jackets.
Details like welt seaming, geometric color inserts and fabrics with substance — wool double knits, duchesse satin, two-ply cashmere — accentuate the cleanly sculptured lines. And patent leather, enthusiastically endorsed last season at Lanvin, Fendi and Balenciaga, lends collections as disparate as those of Ellen Tracy, Jill Stuart and Elie Tahari a hard-edge, lacquered look.
Swing jackets and dresses reminiscent of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s are prevalent in collections of designers like DKNY, BCBG and Diane Von Furstenberg. Many are pared down versions of the frilly tentlike dresses and coats that dominated the runways last year.
“The full-bodied dresses that we first saw at Chloé and Balenciaga two or three seasons ago had us trying to digest a new proportion,” Mr. Fink recalled. Though the latest variations are more streamlined, “the full-bodied dress has entered the mainstream vocabulary as a staple,” he said.
To a point that has some fashion watchers wringing their hands. “I don’t know how many bubble dresses people can wear,” said Stan Herman, the former president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Far too many designers, he added, seem to knock off ideas by rote and without scrutiny.
The problem, Mr. Hermann suggested, is the velocity at which trends move. “Years ago, before you copied a concept you could take the time to see if it was going to be good. Now the winds are blowing so fast, designers make mistakes. They catch the wind too quickly.”
ELIE TAHARI’S fall fashion presentation in Midtown last Thursday, which drew a respectable turnout of decision makers from the retail and magazine worlds, offered an encyclopedic overview of the season’s directions. Mr. Tahari’s ideas were luxurious, if not daring, sophisticated but never so tricky or ethereal that they would fly over his customers’ heads.
Skip to next paragraph
CLOTHES THAT WORK Buyers can get behind trends with legs, like these designs by Ellen Tracy, right; DKNY, center top; Jill Stuart, center bottom; and BCBG, left.
javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.n...00,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')
Left, Mark Mainz/Getty Images for Abaeté; center, Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times; Bryan Bedder/Getty Images
PATENT LEATHER Outfits and accents by, from left, Abaeté, Jill Stuart and Elie Tahari. The look was introduced by Lanvin, Fendi and Balenciaga.
Come fall, his swingy shift dresses, slim tunics and jumpers, cropped jackets and stretch cigarette pants are likely to be among the top sellers at stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue.
So why the glum look?
“I have never been featured in Vogue,” Mr. Tahari said, his dark eyes clouding over. With some bite, he added, “I guess I’m not important enough.”
That editorial omission is a telling one, sending the implicit message that Mr. Tahari is a designer of the second rank, one in a tribe of New York fashion makers — Nicole Miller, BCBG, Ellen Tracy, Jill Stuart and Tommy Hilfiger, to name but a handful — who are somewhat lost in the excitement of Fashion Week, overlooked in favor of editorial darlings considered more adventurous.
By designing accessible variations of last season’s creative storms, the Elie Taharis of Fashion Week are a shopper’s — and a merchant’s — best friends. Not on fashion’s leading edge, their collections nonetheless reinforce the ideas that have staying power. A woman shopping these lines rarely risks being called a fashion victim.
“They are spinning the trends of the moment, giving you a commercialized version of the concepts in the air,” said Michael Fink, the fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue. He is one of a group of tastemakers who view designers like George Sharp of Ellen Tracy, Max Azria of BCBG and Nicole Miller as reliable bellwethers of trends with legs, those likely to endure beyond a single season.
Their collections, Mr. Fink said, “help move fashion forward after the bigger creative statement has been made.” Their wide play on the runways, he noted, insures that once-difficult concepts like the tent dress or bubble skirt will burrow into the consciousness of American consumers.
“In a lot of ways these are the most important shows,” said Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director at Bloomingdale’s. Not only are they “big business” for Bloomingdale’s, Ms. Solomon said, but also: “We extract direction from these shows. If we see something repeating over and over, that tells us this is a trend we need to get behind.”
On the evidence of collections unveiled this week, designers are injecting a new rigor into their customers’ fall wardrobes, emphasizing shape and construction over romance and embellishment. Yes, there is plenty of traction left in the buoyant dresses and jackets that began drifting onto runways last year, but the newest interpretations are cut closer to the body, and their vaporous outlines are held in check by belts or balanced by fitted tops and form-defining abbreviated jackets.
Details like welt seaming, geometric color inserts and fabrics with substance — wool double knits, duchesse satin, two-ply cashmere — accentuate the cleanly sculptured lines. And patent leather, enthusiastically endorsed last season at Lanvin, Fendi and Balenciaga, lends collections as disparate as those of Ellen Tracy, Jill Stuart and Elie Tahari a hard-edge, lacquered look.
Swing jackets and dresses reminiscent of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s are prevalent in collections of designers like DKNY, BCBG and Diane Von Furstenberg. Many are pared down versions of the frilly tentlike dresses and coats that dominated the runways last year.
“The full-bodied dresses that we first saw at Chloé and Balenciaga two or three seasons ago had us trying to digest a new proportion,” Mr. Fink recalled. Though the latest variations are more streamlined, “the full-bodied dress has entered the mainstream vocabulary as a staple,” he said.
To a point that has some fashion watchers wringing their hands. “I don’t know how many bubble dresses people can wear,” said Stan Herman, the former president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Far too many designers, he added, seem to knock off ideas by rote and without scrutiny.
The problem, Mr. Hermann suggested, is the velocity at which trends move. “Years ago, before you copied a concept you could take the time to see if it was going to be good. Now the winds are blowing so fast, designers make mistakes. They catch the wind too quickly.”
