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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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