Now that young women are in top spots at design houses, a baby boomlet has hit Paris. Both Stella McCartney and Chloé s Phoebe Philo are happily at home in London with their infants, Miller Willis and Maya Wigram, respectively, which leaves their teams to get on with their shows.
In McCartney s case, though, it seems she had the job done well before her visit last week to the delivery suite. Her fall collection was held together loosely with an eighties-sixties-Balenciaga theme, into which she rounded up her personal thoughts on volume, tweed, and the season s ubiquitous bubble skirt.
A big balloon-sleeve coat and a yoked wrap jacket opened the show, channeling both eighties Japan and Cristobal Balenciaga s monastic constructions. But McCartney s over-the-knee black leather boots grounded them in today. And the rest of the collection, too, read more as a young woman s take on current ideas than an earnest essay. Many of the pieces, like the oversize sweaters worn over leggings, were about translating the season into easy pieces.
One standout was a houndstooth tweed drop-waist coat, with a slight pouf at the hem. The look s early-sixties couture vibe extended into the evening pieces, with dresses that melded corseted bustier tops with turned-under hemlines, the best of which was done in a lovely shade of red. But the outfit that caused most comment among the exiting crowd was the one worn by Elise Crombez midway through the show. It was a boxy, elongated sweater pulled over a loose silk dress, executed in the dirty-pink shades Stella McCartney has established as her signature. It demonstrated a perfectly pitched, no-nonsense approach to dressing she would do well to build on in seasons to come.
