Spring is nature's way of saying 'Let's party'

Salut mes amours, here's a new post concerning Spring 2013 ready-to-wear collections. There are six days left until winter is officially gone. We must be ready to welcome spring 2013 with bright colours, happy moods and stylish outfits. Robin Williams has said the quote "Spring is nature's way of saying 'Let's party'", and he is so right. Once spring arrives everything is bright, colourful, sun is shining, clean blue sky..colours everywhere; thus as human beings - participants in nature's party - we must be dressed appropriately with colours. So, before going shopping have a look to get an idea of what I'm talking about. Ready, Set, Go.. 

Dean and Dan Caten (DSQUARED2) focused on the biker hats, the pearls and gold chains and the super-leggy silhouette. The runway was loaded with bankable merchandise of the kind that Dsquared² specializes in: shrunken leather jackets, even shrunken-er denim shorts with cheeky lace insets, an LBD with corset detailing, cropped schoolboy blazers, and a leopard-print party dress topped by bondage straps with hearts in place of O rings. All in all, a fun, sexy ride.

DSQUARED2

If Nicolas Ghesquière didn't invent the heritage brand reinvention, has certainly mastered the art. The cut—the way Ghesquière merged things that were quite graphic with movement. He set the provocative tone with the first model's midriff-baring molded bra and high-waisted pants. And from there, he came out swinging, slitting long black skirts almost to the hipbone and edging them with deep ruffles, the undersides of which were white. The ruffles nearly pulsed as the models strutted down the narrow aisles, in sharp contrast to the crisp cropped cape tops and T-shirts. Asymmetric, almost togalike skirts, so abbreviated they required shorts underneath, pushed the leggy theme further, and even Ghesquière's sensible pantsuits (more office-appropriate than anything in last season's office collection, ironically) were paired with those daring bra tops. "It's the most sensual collection I've ever done," Nicolas Ghesquière stated for the Balenciaga Spring 2013 rtw collection.

Balenciaga

Olivier Rousteing dug into the Latin theme, calling out Cuba as an inspiration backstage and using its black-and-white tile floors and wicker chairs as reference points. They rematerialized on his Balmain runway as graphic harlequin prints in the spirit of Gianni Versace and as dresses painstakingly created from basket-woven raffia. Rousteing's other touchstone: the early-nineties heyday of Linda Evangelista and her fellow glamazons, working major shoulders and men's trousers with high waists for photographers like Peter Lindbergh and Steven Meisel.

Balmain

Everything about bees was an endlessly rewarding inspiration for Sarah Burton's new Alexander McQueen collection. Forget the obvious—she has, after all, proved herself the McQueen Bee with a spectacular string of buzzy fashion coups. Instead, think about a honey-based color palette, plus the patterning possibilities of comb, plus the frisson of the bee sting, plus the salient fact that Burton is an expectant mother.

Alexander McQueen

In this fashion show we distinguish the progressively more elaborate iterations of the classic trench—from purest white through ruched pink and ombréd fuchsia to coppery lace and feathers—should earn the coat an Oscar for versatility. The finale featured trenches of many colors, "so intense," said the designer, "you could wring them out." Bailey claimed he wanted to communicate "a very British glamour." For him, that appeared to reach its apex sometime in the 1940s. Here, there were tap shorts, peplums, wedge heels, slinky pencil skirts with kick pleats—and those capes and corsets, of course. That says something about where Burberry, whose history is so rooted in the practical, is headed—toward escapism.

Burberry Prorsum

In this show, Phoebe Philo presented the Céline woman who is stylish and elegant in a dishabille way. We see black, slightly oversize, trousers slightly half mast, not too perfect. And then there were the shoes: black fur-lined sandals in a Birkenstock vein, and that fur looked like mink with the models' glossy red toenails nestled in it. The shoes were key to this collection: furry, witty, unhinged. In a mostly black and white offering, they disrupted any notion of sobriety. Predominantly flat—yet with some also rather remarkable fur-covered stilettos—they were fuzzy flashes of color, fun, and oddness.

Céline

The silhouette was dominated by an A-line or a bolero. Lagerfeld loved the skirt dress—pulled up in a bustier style—as opposed to the shirtdress. Karl claimed his three-dimensional cutouts in chiffon dresses were designed to introduce airiness to volume. "Normally they don't go together," Lagerfeld offered. Maybe it was that desire for lightness—in what has been an often dark season—that also saw him shelve the braid, the buttons, and the chains in favor of a liberal scattering of pearls. At that show Karl said that "energy is the most important thing in life, the rest comes later."

Chanel

What's an Emilio Pucci collection without any print? Peter Dundas filtered his style signatures through the lens of Vietnam. The designer, who was not shy about using the occasional military reference as well as traditional Asian motifs, showed bomber jackets (some embroidered with the house logo), sheer veiling, tattoo embroideries, and one unmissable cargo jacket-cum-kimono with lavish stitch work inside and out. And in fact the collection wasn't completely devoid of archival prints, even if they weren't the focus. This time, he layered a woodblock motif over the vintage find to make it modern, and used it for a bomber and matching pajama pants, as well as for a long evening dress with lace inset above the bust and a sexy cutout below it.

Emilio Pucci

The designer mentioned the perspective of the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel as a reference point for the way that dresses were multiple lengths—or shorts had pannierlike pockets— so that your eye was drawn into them. Same effect with the black and colored borders that "framed" the clothes. The idea was apparently three-dimensionality. Alos note that there was something more sculptural than painterly about the silhouettes. And if all of that sounds a bit much for a fashion show on a Saturday morning in Milan, you should also know that the clothes in this particular Fendi show were a lot of fun. The leather coat with the upside-down F for Fendi was the cleverest piece of Russian Constructivist branding we'll see all season; and the bags and shoes should keep kids entertained for hours. One pair, for instance, arrives with a set of uppers that will allow you to compose your footwear at will, Lego-like. And by hand, of course.

Fendi

Gucci

This Gucci show set a late-sixties/early-seventies vibe and a feel-good mood that Frida Giannini called "aristographic." "I love to play with color for Spring," Giannini said backstage, and play she did. In addition to that bright pink, there was cobalt, citrus yellow, coral, and turquoise, each one as vibrant as the next and worn head-to-quite-literally-toe with sunglasses, bags, and shoes matched to outfits. It wasn't subtle, but subtlety, at least in terms of palette, wasn't the designer's game this season. Plastic necklaces and earrings were designed to look, as she put it, "like fake Liz Taylor." Silhouette was a big story. Tunic and trouser combinations have been getting major play lately, and Giannini is positioning herself as a serious proponent for Spring. She believes in ruffles—tracing the single sleeve of a column dress, arcing around the shoulders and down the back of another, adding major drama to an otherwise quite minimal V-neck gown. Cutouts also played a starring role, upping the provocation factor and giving these polished clothes a modern update. Giannini looked east for the collection's prints but not in any obvious way. A karung motif was stamped on a crisp Japanese paper fabric and the floral was inspired by Japanese wallpaper.

Gucci

Marc Jacobs made a fab show. The mod, sixties-ish shapes, the eye-grabbing checks, all those miles of legs gliding around on sharp little heels. The girls walked out in pairs—models of efficiency! The show's starting point was the columns arranged in a grid whose three different heights suggested the show's three lengths—mini, midi, and maxi. The floral embroideries were stitched in mini-squares, and the house's iconic Speedy bag got cubed, too. The checks gave this collection a graphic immediacy not unlike that of Jacobs' signature line in New York, where stripes ruled. A flash of flat tummy between bandeau top and maxi skirt and hipbones jutting out from a cropped jacket and a lean pencil skirt ensured that the collection didn't feel cold, despite its comparative lack of emotion. The sunshine yellow worked its optimistic magic, too.

Louis Vuitton

Rodriguez dug into color for Spring: a blood orange sheath was bisected down the front and across the waist in brick; a teal and moss green crepe dress came with laminated-wood paillette embroidery; and one of those muscle tees was embellished with dense swirls of brick, marigold, and black beads. And then there was the sex. Rodriguez spliced shirts all the way down to the navel, and cropped the underpinning below the bust to reveal several provocative inches of midriff. He placed an arrowhead-shaped cutout at the solar plexus of an otherwise demure ivory silk sleeveless shift.

Narciso Rodriguez

"Dream is forbidden, nostalgia is forbidden, to be too sweet is not good. Everything we used to feel historically, now you can't enjoy. The clothes are the expression of this impossible dream." Miuccia Prada stated backstage talking about sentiment and feeling. She opened with a short black dress in stiff satin, a panel print of two flowers stitched to the torso. There were only a handful of looks that followed that didn't have some sort of florals blooming on them: A white fur coat (for Spring!) was inset with Andy Warhol's Pop art daisies in red (adding to the sixties feeling was the collection's whiff of Courrèges). A black satin coat, meanwhile, was embroidered with papery origami blossoms. Still, the clothes had a spareness that worked like a balm after seasons of endless prints. The collection moved from dark to light. By the end, Prada was manipulating, folding, and wrapping duchesse satin in palest pink and green to evoke the ritual of kimono dressing. Prada explained that the Japanese element came late in the design process. "I wanted it to be tough and serious," she said. "All the folding was a consequence." Duchesse satin tough? Again there was that duality. There was poetry to these clothes, but walking the runway in either towering Harajuku girl platforms or leather judo socks bound with patent leather bows—flats in both cases, Prada pointed out—the models exuded power too. Leave it to Miuccia to tweak nostalgia into something that felt modern and new.

Prada

Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez presented Sleeveless dresses collaged from squares of exotic skins and leather; oversize, slouching-forward coats in perforated leather bonded to jersey that was laser-cut, then crocheted back together; and Gerhard Richter-inspired jacquards cut into a boxy cropped jacket and an A-line skirt. The most energetic pieces came toward the end: photoprints are a dime a dozen on the runways, but McCollough and Hernandez found a new way to work them. By cutting them on the bias into strips, then stitching them diagonally across the torso, found images like crowd scenes and kids in a pool looked almost abstract. Pushing their experiments even further, some of those dresses were embroidered with flat colored studs on the bodice and silver grommets at the hem.

Proenza Schouler

Peace. x

A