It s probable that many of Mark Fast s peers have envied him in recent years: Right out of the gate, he established the kind of instantly identifiable aesthetic signature that most designers take years, if not entire careers, to build. If you saw a corset-tight engineered knit dress laced with cleverly placed holes, you knew right away it was Mark Fast. Perhaps inevitably, though, he s had trouble proving he s not a one-trick pony; the collection he showed tonight was obviously intended as a riposte to that complaint. There was lots of leather, a new material for Fast, and more intriguingly, he played fresh technical games with his knits, developing ways of building them three-dimensionally. The leathers, it must be said, were a misfire. There were some decent T-shirt dresses in black leather and beige suede, and a few interesting jackets, high-necked and closed to one side with straps. But none looked quite accomplished or luxurious enough.
Fast s new knits are trickier to assess. The first few looks were promising—a wrap coat with massive shoulders that looked a bit like shrubbery; a high-waisted miniskirt, trademark-tight, in a dense wool rib, with a matching crop top featuring more of that shrubbery. Later in the show, Fast sent out a variety of typically skin-baring dresses with a cool accordion pleat built into the knit, and he used the same technique in a big, drapey cardigan. There was a great stretched wool that looked like Mongolian fur, too, used in a dramatic coat. It was nice to see Fast finding ways to accommodate his innovative knitting to covered-up looks, as well as racy ones.
But there was a certain point in this show—maybe around the time Fast sent out a super-mini knit dress, barely there in form as well as color, with a block of that shrubbery knit ringing the hemline—where he started to lose the audience. People can argue until the cows come home about whether or not Fast s super-sexed-up aesthetic is vulgar, but there were a few too many looks here that were just plain hard to fathom.
