Today s VPL show was a relatively stripped-down affair, from the simplified styling to the back-to-basics concept that inspired the design of the clothes. This season Victoria Bartlett was playing with stretching and folding; as she explained before the show, she wanted to dig into the fundamentals of how fabric moves. "The kind of opposed actions," she said. "Stretching is expanding—it s suspending, it s draping. Folding is all about decrease, and a hard edge."
Most of the looks in this collection found a way to counterpoise those two actions. To wit, a stretchy jersey top with a stiff contrasting fabric folded on the shoulder like a tiny wing, or a draped nylon sweatshirt with origami-style folds down its front. The collection was occasionally too literal—the last look before the lingerie finale was an oddball jersey dress with shiny hip flaps—but overall Bartlett wasn t too religious about following her theme. Several of her most winning looks, like her yummy knits or the wrap jacket and short-sleeve coat in a metallic furlike fabric, hardly seemed to bear any relation to the conceptual inspiration at all.
One of the strongest sideline ideas was Bartlett s playful reinterpretation of the suit: She showed a few iterations, including a skirt and matching jacket cut from panels of contrasting boiled wool and a neoprenelike mesh. That suit—such as it was—and a cocoon-ish coat mixing the same materials offered a good primer on how to introduce "active" elements into sophisticated clothes. Another good sideline was Bartlett s play with latex, especially in the finale, which featured lingerie that was truly weird, impractical, and great. (She also developed a nice abstract print, in tones of brown, from her play with stretched and folded latex.) All in all, it was a typically good outing for VPL, one characterized less by Bartlett s formal explorations and more by her desire to, quite simply, make distinctive, wearable clothes.
