Antonio Berardi is on the side of women rather than girls. He s known for cutting a shapely dress; he s great at curvaceous paneling and emphasizing a bosom; and he uses excellent fabrics. For Fall, he worked a Mad Men-ish knee-length hourglass silhouette, with a strong salute toward the Saint Laurent seventies: sheer tops, fur chubbies, and all.
Those choices meant the bulk of Berardi s collection didn t seem totally up to speed with fashion s headlong dash to reinvent itself. Invoking YSL is one of the most overworked clichés in the book, and hobbling models with un-walkable stilettos on a slippery floor reduced the erotic intentions of those passages to near fiasco. It was the ones that got away—the pieces that somehow fell outside the show s themes—that seemed more cogent to the season s developing ideas. A jacket-coat-dress hybrid tailored in gray menswear fabric and the sinuous long red-velvet dresses, one with a deep cowl back revealing sparkle embroidery on nude, were standouts.
