Runway Feed

Gabriele Colangelo

Just when you're ready to sound the death knell for prints, along comes Gabriele Colangelo's first pre-fall collection. The Italian up-and-comer designed a gorgeous forest-scape suffused in either chartreuse or fire engine red that made a strong argument for another season of bold color and pattern. We'll be surprised if one street-style star or another doesn't snap up the sharply cut lapel-less coat in the collection's final look for the upcoming fashion show circuit.

With statement-making prints like that, Colangelo was smart to keep silhouettes clean and simple. The minimal streak extended to a pair of faux fur coats that were as streamlined as they were shaggy. Those look like they could be a hit with the fashion crowd, too.
—Nicole Phelps

Bottega Veneta

Not unlike his last runway collection, Tomas Maier's pre-fall lineup had a smart, urban look. And not just because the graphic print on a stretch jersey sheath was inspired by the windows of New York skyscrapers at night. Maier has a good sense for what a city girl (one with a hefty bank account, naturally) needs, from that day-to-evening sleeveless dress to a statement coat (it doesn't get bolder than his gold-dipped shearling bomber) to dressed-up yet unfussy tailoring. The best example of that was a suit in espresso brown stretch polyester, one part tuxedo and the other part track pants. A liquid gold evening dress with miles of fabric in its floor-length skirt had a similar sense of ease. There was more gold to be found on the collection's accessories. Your average city girl might not really and truly need a leather clutch with hand-painted metallic edges, but we can think of plenty who'd desire it.
—Nicole Phelps

Ter et Bantine

Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.

Cacharel

Following a convincing Spring debut, Cacharel's new designers, Ling Liu and Dawei Sun, are finding their footing at the storied French house. For pre-fall, the duo is staying true to the label's gamine DNA, but they aren't afraid to break a few rules. First, they jettisoned those signature Liberty florals and replaced them with graphic, pixelated prints, which added a welcome touch of modernity while maintaining brand identity. Liu and Sun also demonstrated their flair for tailoring with subtle, asymmetric seaming that gave comfortable jersey shifts and cashmere-blend topcoats controlled volume and interesting drape. You could imagine a girl meandering through the Jardin du Luxembourg in many of these everyday looks, accessorizing them with flat boots, berets, and chunky knit scarves.

Cacharel regularly sells alongside happening, contemporary Parisian lines like Isabel Marant and Carven. But if the label is aiming to siphon off some of that cool clientele, Liu and Sun are going to need to up the edginess factor with more pieces like the slim jersey pants with pleated side pockets and the peach fuzz-colored leather minidress here.
—Brittany Adams

Yigal Azrouël

Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.

Akris

The sportiness of race cars inspired Akris' Albert Kriemler to go shorter, sleeker, sheerer, and sunnier for Spring, but he's relaxed into his more restrained Swiss groove for his latest pre-collection. That sections of his new offering were divided into color-coded blocks called Steam, Wheat, and Steel should give you some idea. He was still thinking of travel, but of a less heart-in-your-mouth variety: The season's inspiration came courtesy of the Trans-Siberian Railway and its stately journey, in days gone by, between Moscow and the Far East. (To set the appropriate mood, he shot the lookbook in Le Train Bleu, the nineteenth-century train car-turned-restaurant at the top of Bloomingdale's.) The Trans-Siberian itself, and the views from it, provided the photo print that has become a house signature, here emblazoned on dresses, tops, and soft cashmere coats. Overall, fluid tailoring and smart outerwear (from almost-casual to full-on luxe in natural mink) defined this quietly elegant collection. The Akris woman travels business class, no doubt, but there's more than enough here to exercise her imagination.
—Matthew Schneier

Jean Paul Gaultier

Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.

Valentino

A conversation with Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri before the presentation of their new couture collection for Valentino quickly took a turn for the metaphysical. "If you don't think about fashion, you just do clothes," said Piccioli. "Fashion needs culture or it becomes empty." The duo found their cultural spine in the finest flowering of French thought, keying in on the eighteenth century's Age of Enlightenment and particularly the return to "real" values that Rousseau endorsed in his State of Nature philosophy. "Couture is a real value," Piccioli added. "It's not superficial."

But it was Marie Antoinette role-playing in her little farm on the grounds of Versailles who provided the collection's ambience. The first model seemed to arrive in the salons of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild on a breath of cool country air. Sprigged flower prints covered almost everything. An antique fabric alchemy transformed taffeta into equally antique-looking blurred floral chaîne. The sense of precious old artisanship was also evident in the swirling bouilloné decoration. The volumes were diaphanous, bucolic, like the cloud of point d'esprit scattered with organza lace cutouts. The designers sought a "deep lightness." It was beautifully exemplified in dresses with up to five layers of lace and organza.

Examined up close in the atelier, the workmanship defied comprehension. The stitching was so fine it was invisible. It signaled the heart-stopping delicacy that distinguished the collection. But there was a real resilience, too. Hence the use of cotton amidst the lace, organza, and filigree, as in a coat with tone-on-tone embroidery that felt embossed. Hence also the flat shoes, which loaned their own kind of grace to the purity of an ivory coat dress decorated with tiny spirals (Piccioli compared them to stucco). A chaîne skirt had deep, useful pockets. Smocking was a rustic detail. There was a casual quality that made the clothes ultimately feel more modern than their long-sleeved, high-necked, and lace-gloved propriety would at first suggest.

Chiuri pointed out that she and Picciolo come from an accessories background, where they learned to tell a big story with a small object. That skill is now writ large in the collections they are designing at Valentino. Today's story was their most exquisite yet.

—Tim Blanks

Maxime Simoens

Dressing Beyoncé for the cover of her album can do a lot for a designer's front row. Beth Ditto was whooping it up in Maxime Simoens' audience today, perhaps shopping for an outfit of her own for her upcoming release. The quotient of influential editors in attendance was higher, too.

Simoens, a cinema buff, traded in last season's Nosferatu inspiration for a film of a more recent vintage, Gaspard Noé's Tokyo-set piece Enter the Void. But despite the decades separating the movies, the two collections were consistent, with slim silhouettes and graphic embellishments dominating both. If the mosaic-like tiles on a long strapless dress and a structured short-sleeve jacket didn't quite evoke the "entirely new take on contemporary Japan" that the show notes augured, there was promise in Simeons' vibrantly color-blocked mousseline dresses. And it was likewise refreshing to see a designer using embroidery—in this case nail-head studs on black crepe—in a forward-looking way.

As for Ditto, we can see her rocking one of Simoens' fitted cocktail dresses. Their organza wings will come in handy for stage-diving.

—Nicole Phelps

John Galliano

Now why do you think Bill Gaytten chose Tippi Hedren as the inspiratrice for Galliano's pre-fall collection? The glacial Hitchcock blonde represented consummate grace under pressure, even when angry birds were tearing at her flesh. There must have been plenty of moments over the past half-year when this designer knew exactly how she felt.

Of course, there's a simpler explanation. Utter the words "Hitchcock blonde" and visions of immaculate tailoring and precise elegance spring to mind. And that's just what Gaytten was after with his dressy looks pulled together with head scarves and gloves. The hip-shaped jacket with a pleated neckline belted over a pencil skirt was typical. Trompe l'oeil scarf detailing added some old Hollywood swank to a coat that was already glamorous in crocodile jacquard.

Old-school screen glamour is a Galliano staple. Here, it was evoked with liberal use of gold lamé, guipure lace, and the bias-cut gowns that are the label's signature item. A polka-dot devoré was particularly striking. Once again, Gaytten proved that he's the one true keeper of the Galliano flame, but you can't help wondering what he's got up his own sleeve.
—Tim Blanks

Elie Saab

Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.

Damir Doma

Damir Doma's pre-fall lineup had the same multiethnic sensibility as his men's collection. "Bohemian techno" is how he described that show last week. The emphasis here was on bohemian, with capes and dressy shorts inspired by raw carpets, a high-necked blouse in a print lifted from an Oriental rug, and a pantsuit constructed from a tapestry-like fabric. Many-stranded necklaces of chunky beads added to the effect, along with even chunkier fur vests and coats.

Still, the results were resolutely urban. Doma confessed to growing up a Helmut Lang fan (he's Croatian but lived in southern Germany, close to the Austrian border), and he clearly absorbed the design star's modernist tendencies. The big takeaway here was Doma's strong yet soft tailoring.

—Nicole Phelps

Jean Paul Gaultier

Amy Winehouse might be a hard act to follow musically, but her personal style was so cartoon-graphic that it loans itself easily to carbon copies. Jean Paul Gaultier proved as much today with his latest show. The beehive, the eye makeup, the beauty spot, the clothes with their tarty fifties flavor, like the gang leader's girlfriend in a teens-running-wild exploitation pic—all these were present and incorrect on Gaultier's couture catwalk. Wait, couture? The last refuge of everything that is rare, precious, and beautiful in the world of fashion? And Amy Winehouse, resolute wearer of baby-boy-size Fred Perry polo shirts?

Yet, unlikely as the union may seem, Gaultier managed to turn his couture presentation into both a celebratory send-off for Winehouse and a colorful addition to his gallery of beautiful oddities. That polo shirt was sexed up and alchemized into a back-buttoning dress with a G where the Fred Perry logo would be. Amy's tiny waist and penchant for pencil skirts shaped the silhouette, with a lot of help from London's corsetry wizard, Mr. Pearl (in fact, the show was as much about him as it was Winehouse). And the singer's brazen, devil-may-carelessness goosed the color palette (Karlie Kloss, camping and vamping in a huge green taffeta trench, followed on the heels of a guipure lace column in lurid orange). There was also a dishabille edge, with necklines draping asymmetrically, jackets slipping off shoulders, and bosoms bursting ripely forth.

Excess ultimately overwhelmed Winehouse, so it was true to her spirit that it had the same effect here—and there. Vinyl leggings will no longer be mentioned in polite company. But the couture spirit of JPG managed to assert itself with pieces like the pinstripe suit jacket that fell away into a shawl on one side, or a languidly decadent satin peignoir over jet-beaded pants, or a corset-backed gray silk parka that flipped open to reveal a lining of pink sequins.

At the finale, the models paraded in veils. Mourners? Brides? Handmaidens of Amy? Four guys performed doo-wop versions of Winehouse's songs throughout. They looked just like the Dap-Kings, who backed her on Back to Black. Really, all that was missing was the woman herself. So sad.

—Tim Blanks

Elie Saab

Elie Saab is a name you hear on the red carpet more and more these days. What makes the Lebanese designer so popular with the Hollywood crowd? An influential celebrity stylist told us, "His dresses are shiny, uncomplicated, and easy to digest." That sums up Saab's new Couture offering quite well. He showed full-skirted party frocks and slim evening gowns in a rainbow of pastel shades, nearly all of them sparkly. What separated one from the next was the vertiginousness of a neckline, the presence or absence of sleeves, the length of a train, and the occasional cape. He included one print, an oversize botanical, but it looked like an afterthought amid all that pink, peach, yellow, mint green, and baby blue.

Our stylist friend neglected to mention one thing in her explanation of Saab's success: lightness. Despite all the handwork, these dresses—with the exception of an uncharacteristically heavy wedding gown—appeared almost weightless. That's gotta count for something when you could be walking away from the Oscars with a statuette.
—Nicole Phelps

Salvatore Ferragamo

Following the tropical vacation that was Spring 2012, Massimiliano Giornetti has put Ferragamo back on paved ground. Travel was still at the forefront of his mind, but of a different variety. He opted to show the collection in Milan, following the menswear shows, in a private room of the city's train station reserved for royalty waiting out their departures. The message was clear enough: These clothes are sensible enough to ride the rails, but luxe enough for a princess.

The collection was in a lower key than some of Giornetti's recent hits, which walked a fine line between less and more. (Take his houndstooth collection for Fall, which kept silhouettes classic while exploding the print to cartoon scale—Anna Dello Russo, who knows something about cartoon scale herself, was a fan.) You wouldn't expect to see ADR in the more pragmatic pieces on display here, to say nothing of the kitten heels. But there was a kicky, sixties-inflected charm to the pleated skirtsuits, sweater sets, and capes, especially as enlivened by helpings of velvet and python. (One twinset featured python-laced argyle—good girl gone slithery.) And the exotic-skin portfolios and hard-shell makeup cases look like reason enough to take any show on the road.
—Matthew Schneier

Armani Privé

The worlds of fashion and show business collided at Giorgio Armani's couture show today in an entirely unprecedented way. Just before the show started, Jessica Chastain, settled in the front row, heard that she'd been nominated for an Oscar. There were shrieks, there were cheers, but Chastain held back the tears till Armani himself presented her with a massive bouquet backstage after the show. Now that's PR.

Given that thunder-stealing moment, you might imagine that the collection would be slightly back-seated, but it was almost as if Armani had anticipated the competition, because he rolled out his most persuasive couture outing to date. It helped that his theme was metamorphosis, with particular emphasis on the snake, whose powers of persuasion are legendarily recorded in best-selling novels like the Bible. The snake sheds skin, the butterfly emerges from a chrysalis—both natural processes influenced the silhouettes of the collection. The skirts, for one thing, which were deeply folded like a pod. Or the evening pieces, where a sequined bodice slithered out of a swag of silk.

Maybe Armani had been looking at the serpentine photos of Guido Mocafico, because the color palette starred the same absinthe-bright, disconcerting green of Mocafico's snakes, just as the prints had the same coiled intensity and the shiny fabrics duplicated the soft sheen of snakeskin. The mesh laid over jackets and skirts looked like reptile scales, the crocodile was obviously the real thing.

But the other message of the couture show was man-made—a shrugged-off casualness, jackets on shoulders, hair tousled (maybe too much so). The strong contrast made for a strong show. And if Jessica Chastain believes in lucky charms, we know what she'll be wearing come Oscar night.

—Tim Blanks

Albino

Albino D'Amato's fascination with architecture is carrying over to pre-fall, and after a Spring season full of unexpected volumes and couture-inspired shapes, the designer's sculptural silhouettes have somewhat of a renewed relevance. The peplum tops, rounded cocoon coats, and wide belts here hit on current trends while showing off his knack for sharp tailoring. D'Amato tends to draw a grown-up crowd with sumptuous fox accents, richly hued fabrics, and forgiving silhouettes, but the label is reportedly taking aim at a younger clientele. Detachable colored fur collars and a flirty yet smart skirt with a cascade in front are the kinds of pieces a twentysomething would consider swiping from her cool mom's closet. Still, if he truly wants to win over more mademoiselles than mesdames, he's going to need to think more outside the box.
—Brittany Adams

Azzaro

Mathilde Castello Branco is the newly installed creative director at Azzaro. She hails from Lanvin and has a bit of Alber Elbaz's gift for waxing lyrical about her creations. A Swarovksi crystal button at the back of the neck is "like a touch of perfume," and the organza sleeves of a dress are "like clouds."

So far, the clothes hold up to her résumé. There was a smart fur coat with puffed sleeves that unzipped at the shoulders so you can trade them for simpler ribbed knit ones. Clever in a different way was a short-sleeve sweater with a demure trompe l'oeil collar that turned to reveal a scooped-out bare back.

But Azzaro's raison d'être is dresses, and what was promising about today's presentation was the diversity of Castello Branco's offering, from long fourreau dresses with subtle, unexpected asymmetries to shorter cocktail numbers in jersey. The latter had knit waists that functioned like corsets but, the designer promised, were a hell of a lot more comfortable.

—Nicole Phelps

Anne Valérie Hash

Leave the flights of fancy to other designers. Anne Valérie Hash approached her pre-fall collection like a savvy marketing executive. Having brushed up on just who her customer is, she divided the line into four parts.

"Urban winter" is for the woman who shops year-round. In June (when pre-fall delivers), a bare dress in a lively batik print is an easy sell. "Country winter" is destined for colder climes, like Eastern Europe, Russia, the northern part of the U.S., places where a faux astrakhan coat could come in handy. The casual third part of the collection consists of jersey basics, although there's nothing exactly basic about a stretchy draped dress that clings in all the right places. Last, but certainly not least, came the masculine/feminine tailoring that Hash is known for. Pantsuits had an unstructured ease (see the ribbed knit lapels of a jacket and the cross-over waistline of slouched-on pants), while an evening jumpsuit—a perennial for Hash—had the sharp lines of a smoking.

—Nicole Phelps

Givenchy

Riccardo Tisci is in a reflective mood. Pre-fall, men's, and now his Couture collection have found him looking back over his first seven years at Givenchy and reworking familiar pieces with what he described as a new maturity. "To me, the mark of a successful designer is having an identity," he said, citing Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace, and Lagerfeld's Chanel. We'd say that Tisci more than qualifies.

His ten-piece Couture lineup was divided into three rooms. The first was devoted to crocodile, and what the Givenchy atelier has done to the precious skin is positively jaw-dropping. For a long, clingy dress, the scales on the hide were individually cut and numbered, then bleached, dyed, and resewn one by one in order onto a tulle body stocking. It took 350 hours to make. The artisans who worked on a cropped and fitted jacket (with the same star motif as the designer used in his menswear show) perhaps didn't log as many hours, but the payoff was just as impressive.

Tisci said his two inspirations this season were the 1927 Fritz Lang movie Metropolis and the theme music from a more obscure Russian film, 1924's Aelita: Queen of Mars (add that one to your Netflix queue, pronto). You could see their influence most clearly in the Art Deco embellishments on the dresses in the crystal room. The designer also pointed out the parallels between Lang's high-city/low-city film and his own bejeweled gowns worn over workmen's tank tops. In fact, the tanks weren't as proletarian as all that, coming as they did in a cashmere blend.

The standout in the black and white room was a white silk T-shirt tucked into a black silk cady skirt that unzipped almost all the way up to the right hip, the white sequin lining only flashing when the model walked by. In a week of ball gowns as wide as they are high and beads by the bushel, it takes a special maturity to exercise that kind of restraint, but in its own subtle way, it showcased the same kind of bravado as did the models' nose rings and doorknocker-size hoops. This is a designer with confidence to spare.
—Nicole Phelps

Chanel

One hundred fifty shades of blue. Obviously, everyone is going to jump on that extraordinary stat from Chanel's Couture show today. Why blue? Karl Lagerfeld is too much of a polymath to nail any one reason for anything he does, but he's a wicked player of word association games. Elvis' "Blue Moon," Miles' Kind of Blue, blue-sky optimism…"Anything but the blues," he said post-show. "I don't have the blues."

Hardly. The vision presented by the Chanel show was streamlined, upbeat, and forward-looking, quite the contrast with the decadent-Raj, drowned-world, and scorched-earth scenarios that Lagerfeld arranged around his most recent collections. Today's guests took their seats in a simulacrum of a commercial space shuttle flight that, during the course of the show, left the Earth's atmosphere and headed for space. Toward the finale, the Earth actually passed overhead, across the clear dome that allowed passengers a view of the starry sky outside.

But the collection was scarcely the futurist extravaganza that such a setup promised. The key point in the presentation was a new fashion attitude. It's the sort of lip service notion to which designers often tip their caps, but in Lagerfeld's case, he delivered. How? By elongating his proportion even lower than dropped waist to thigh-top, so that when the models walked with their hands tucked in slash pockets, they looked, the designer said, "like boys whose jeans are slipping off." The boy/girl thing is a Chanel staple, and Lagerfeld has found a contemporary exemplar in Alice Dellal, who today was placed in the peculiar position of watching dozens of women styled to look just like her parading past her front-row perch. Think of stretched-out necks and pushed-up sleeves on sweatshirts and you've got other key components of the silhouette.

The youthful slouchiness of the attitude was a counterpoint to the byzantine complexity of the techniques that created the clothes. "A lot of it isn't even fabric," Lagerfeld said. "It's embroidery." And if it wasn't that, it was cellophane. Or something else unlikely. And yet, there was a classic elegance about the result. The stretched-out neck was a portrait neckline, the pushed-up sleeves were a perfect bell. The long, lean length that ended just above the ankle was culture incarnate. And the cellophane shimmered like the finest silk.
—Tim Blanks

Christian Dior

In a similar way to the couture parade yesterday, the Dior pre-fall collection stuck to the house codes. But whereas the made-to-measure clothes had a relatively experimental x-ray edge, the ready-to-wear was more approachable. That's not to say undone. The Dior woman loves to get "dressed," be it in a bar jacket with a subtle peplum and an elongated pencil skirt or a black patent-leather coat belted snugly at the waist. The most memorable look was a narrow, blush-pink column gown with a long-sleeve jacket on top that was split down the back and trimmed in gold embroidery. As of Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after the Oscar nominations were announced, it was still unclaimed, but we can't imagine it will stay that way for long.

—Nicole Phelps

J.W. Anderson

The buzz has been building for J.W. Anderson, but his first pre-fall collection suggests the ever-increasing attention hasn't turned his head. The big retailers and magazines have come knocking, but the man retains the courage of his convictions. So when pressed for the guiding spirit behind his new collection, he offers, "people who work in food shops." And then, to clarify: he's "playing with lots of ugly colors, like in McDonald's, or Tesco."

It'd be hard to go farther to the wrong side of the tracks. But good taste is a piety for which Anderson doesn't have much time. Debating it is part of his constant conversation. And it's given a tannic spark to his collections, this one included. His swingy A-line skirts and quilted suits are part schoolgirl, part hausfrau. They have a vintage twinge, but rendered in Op Art, they're clearly from no time and nowhere but Andersonland, a place as in thrall to its own off-kilter laws as Wonderland.

Back to that statement of intent: It'd be easy to get caught up in the word ugly. But the operative one here is play. All the more so because pre-fall substituted a breezier collection of snappy, Tesco-bright pieces, including plenty of the knits for which Anderson's become justly acclaimed, for some of the more complicated, architectural investigations he shows on the runway. Fun! And in a surely related bit, he's having a good time, too. "I'd do a collection every month if I had money to," he said.
—Matthew Schneier

Lacoste

"Lacoste has always been a lot about color," Felipe Oliveira Baptista said at his presentation of the brand's pre-fall collection for men and women. "But I like to combine it with neutrals. It's more powerful that way." That said, it was more a neutral palette of black, gray, navy, white, and tan that dominated. When there was color, it evoked sunset rather than midday by the Med. But that was better suited to the streamlined, citified feel that Baptista was after. Yes, the classic piqué polo made its inevitable appearance, but it was stretched into a dress. The Lacoste crocodile was transformed into a motif on a ski sweater.

The mood of urban utility was clearest in the emphasis on outerwear, with gabardine trenches, bonded duffels, parkas, and quilted jackets for men and women. Men also were offered smart tailoring. It came in gray jersey, a nod to Lacoste's sportswear heritage. Baptista was especially proud of everything Lacoste is doing with knits, not just in their ergonomic aspect but in small, sophisticated details, like the transparent piping that defined a white cashmere top.
—Tim Blanks

Giambattista Valli

Backstage, he was insisting he wanted haute couture ateliers declared UNESCO heritage sites, but, in lieu of that unlikely prospect, Giambattista Valli decided to offer his own personal ABC of couture, everything he'd ever learned in an atelier on one catwalk. It was intended as a reminder of what an invaluably inspirational resource those institutions are. And Valli has a trainee track record in couture, starting with the Roman legend Roberto Capucci, whose austere opulence was echoed in the first outfit, a white crepe cape with flowers trailing over its shoulders.

If that was A, B might be a strapless polka-dotted dress draped to one side and exploding into a puff of fabric at the shoulder (that would represent the Ungaro atelier where Valli once labored). After that, everything was coming up Valli. C might have stood for the hints of Chaos that nibbled at the collection. If you give perfection a bit of a shake, you make it memorable. Like the sheer polka-dotted dress whose embroidered flowers clustered around the shoulders and fell to a random scatter on the skirt. Or the linear black sequined gown that was clasped at the throat by a crumpled sheet of silver. (Luigi Scialanga's jewelry has always been an exquisite complement to Valli's clothes.) A sleeveless crocodile top had a waist that was cinched into a peplum flare over a white lace pencil skirt. The visible underwear was black. There was something Roman bourgeois but memorably twisted about such an idea.

Valli mentioned Ava Gardner to one guest who detected a hint of old Hollywood glamour in his eveningwear. The spitfire actress could undoubtedly have animated his strapless, wide-skirted billow of floral mousseline, but the columns of silk with draped shoulders were more evocative of the elegance of Adrian. At the same time, they pointed to Valli's own mastery of couture's ABCs.

—Tim Blanks

Vionnet

Madeleine Vionnet introduced the bias-cut dress to the world, and in the process helped liberate women from corsets. So it makes sense to see a pair of forward-looking young sisters at the helm of the revived house. Since being picked to replace Rodolfo Paglialunga, Barbara and Lucia Croce have been studying Vionnet's groundbreaking oeuvre, and for their debut at the label, selected a few of her signatures to reinvent.

The rectangle dress—a simple swatch of crepe draped and stitched to a smaller back panel—has a modern allure that belies its decades-old origins. Same goes for Vionnet's trademark Grecian gathering and draping, which looked particularly fresh here on an evening top with an asymmetric train that trailed behind one leg of a pair of tapering pants.

Accessories and jewelry are also in these designers' purview. The twins put their sensible, chic stamp on shoes with substantial heels that are low enough to do some serious stomping around in. Smart.

—Nicole Phelps

Roberto Cavalli

His wife, Eva, claimed the kinetic art of the 1950's and 1960's as the inspiration for Roberto Cavalli's pre-fall outing, but if that reference made you think of the airy, primary-colored geometry of an Alexander Calder mobile, you were in for a surprise with the dark, fuzzy clothes that made up the collection.

Cavalli's standout Spring show set a shimmering new gold standard in fashion. What was on offer here was a shaded view of the Cavalli signatures: blackest fur trims, leopard-colored khaki, python graphically reconfigured in black and white. Actually, that way, it did look almost as geometric as a Calder. Or maybe more Art Deco, especially in drop-waisted flapper dresses.

There was geometry in the silhouette, too, often short and tiered, with volumes emphasized by the use of plissé and structured fabrics like silk gazar. They made the Cavalli woman look a bit more aloof, maybe even stern, especially with added details like her haute bourgeois jabots, pie-crust collars, ruffles, and discreet little bows.

She could still find her floaty python-printed mousseline if she wanted it, but there was a new seriousness of purpose in the substantial outerwear: shearlings, alpacas, a crocodile-print jacket with a detachable fur collar. Intense, overdyed shades of garnet and teal—not to mention the furred, feathered black that was the foundation of the collection—loaned a rich but solemn air to the clothes. If it's been the season of the bandbox-smart gentleman in menswear, here was a gothic-ized twist on a rather strict gentlewoman.
—Tim Blanks

Christian Dior

John Galliano was always mesmerized by the inner workings of haute couture. He devoted shows to it. Standing beside him at Christian Dior for 16 years, it was inevitable that Bill Gaytten would come to share the same preoccupation. Anyway, that's the way it played out in Gaytten's second couture collection for the house. He x-rayed the craftsmanship of the Dior ateliers, and the riveting result was a show that dared to inject an unfinished quality into the most polished fashion arena of them all.

Sheer layers exposed the underlying construction of garments. The black floral designs that were picked out on a flaring white skirt were like an initial guide for a master embroiderer who would fill in the colors later. On one dress, black crocodile scales were randomly picked out in patent. On another, ostrich had been dissected into paillettes of skin, like a body map. On yet another, sequins traced a grid, like a pattern-maker's directives. The mood carried all the way through to evening, where a one-shouldered black gown featured tone-on-tone embroidery and a random splatter of sequins suggesting a naïve effort to add glitz. The same effect was realized a little more fulsomely with a galleon of a dress in Dior gray, its panniers exaggerating the billows of tulle.

There is a school of thought which says that mystery preserves the magic, but Gaytten understands, as did Galliano, that if you reveal the machinery, you can enhance the mystery. That's because you're throwing a spotlight on the intangibles of creativity. It was probably a coincidence, but the choice of pop ingenue Lana Del Rey as the show's musical accompaniment was perfect. She's manufactured, but it detracts not a jot from her plangent allure. Something else to consider: In its charmingly unfinished tentativeness, this felt like the sort of collection a designer might offer if he was laying out a blueprint for the future—this is me, this is what I can do and how I can do it. Curiouser and curiouser, as the decision on the Dior succession continues to dangle like a hanging chad.

—Tim Blanks

Marni

The mix is what defines Marni. Season in and season out, Consuelo Castiglioni piles pattern upon pattern, clashes print with print. Her more-is-more aesthetic is trending at the moment; our eyes have adjusted of late to head-to-toe florals and neon shades. Even so, Castiglioni still has a way of making your eyes pop. With an egg yolk yellow sheepskin coat, say, or a brocade tunic and matching pants in mint ice cream green, the detachable collar in pastel sequin sprinkles.

Her custom blend for pre-fall is a little bit rockabilly and a little bit jock, leavened with the label's signature sweetness. A fur and houndstooth coat worn with blue and white striped leggings, for example, was followed by a spongy royal blue top and a white tulle dirndl accented with fluorescent orange dots. Adding to the eclecticism: gold toe-cap ballerina flats and kilties with rubber soles and tufty fur totes. Even Marni acolytes might shy away from a tartan top and trousers set, but for every look like that, there was a simple green leather unlined coat.
—Nicole Phelps

Alexis Mabille

A quote from Marcel Proust—"It is only women who do not know how to dress that are afraid of colors"—preceded a brief statement from Alexis Mabille about "the science of color" and energy as therapy. His show certainly promoted a fearless approach to color blocking. Each outfit was monochrome, from brightest red to palest blue, and each model's face was painted the same shade as the enormous tissue flower mounted on her head.

But the real inspiration for the show was anything but pseudo-science. Mabille was inspired by a photograph of iconic model Lisa Fonssagrives on a beach, her face suffused with pink from the sunlight coming through her umbrella. A more recent picture of Christy Turlington by Patrick Demarchelier also provided a bit of background.

That's the kind of forensic stuff that establishes Mabille's love of fashion. But it also isolates the quality that makes his couture collections so much less than those of the grand masters, who feel the clothes in a much more instinctive way. "This is couture you can really wear," Mabille enthused after the show, but actually it was a boy's dream of Paris fashion, gorgeously complete in its solipsism. There was scarcely an outfit that wouldn't have worked a miracle in a Hollywood film from the thirties or forties or fifties that called for the heroine to wear "fashion." Take a look at the kimono jacket in pink-lined red satin over a red column dress, or the peignoir of palest blue tulle over a full-skirted gown. The painted faces only emphasized the artificiality of the clothes.

—Tim Blanks