The woman who leaves her house wearing Felder Felder s Fall silver leather, crystal-embroidered minidress is expecting some attention. Ditto the girl whose winter coat is the British label s white wool number, with its heaps of Mongolian lamb fur. Sisters Dani and Annette Felder are expanding the borders of their line beyond the rock-chick looks they ve been known for, but they re still designing for the customer for whom all the world s a stage.
The big new ideas this season were print and that floral crystal embroidery. It was refreshing to see color on the Felder Felder runway, and printed looks like tank-top minidressses with short dirndl skirts were uncharacteristically sweet. The sisters also used prints on their standby pieces, ultra-lean leggings and cropped biker jackets, and the graphic effect somewhat ameliorated the feeling that those silhouettes are passing their sell-by dates. If the crystal was overused, both in individual pieces and in the collection as a whole, the Felders use of goat hair had intelligence and specificity. On a couple of pencil dresses, one printed and one black, the fur appeared as a kind of floating sleeve. That was a nice, subtly glamorous touch. Elsewhere, the designers seemed to be struggling with how to accommodate softer shapes to their sexy aesthetic, with decently commercial if hardly groundbreaking results. (See their bias-cut slipdresses.) All in all, this read like a "work-in-progress" collection: The Felder Felder sisters are clearly aiming to stretch themselves, but will need to continue to push further next time.
