Come early February in fashion circles, "I love Fall" is a common refrain. There s so much more for editors and buyers to latch onto with Fall collections. The coats! The boots! All those cozy layers! For designers like Helmut Lang s Michael and Nicole Colovos, who specialize in tailoring, this is the moment to strut their stuff, and strut they did tonight. Claiming the Guggenheim s Picasso Black and White exhibition by way of Richard Prince s Prince/Picasso show as inspiration, they delivered a strong collection with a Cubist motif that had echoes in what the husband-and-wife team described as the "sharp slouch" of the silhouette. It was a rebuff to a Spring collection that felt somewhat derivative and a reminder that they cut the sharpest pants in New York.
To start, they showed a coat, a jacket, and then a dress in heather gray with heat-transferred laser-cut film shapes swooping and arcing across their fronts. The technique was particularly successful on a short jacket with cross-body closure that was shown with the Colovoses great-looking stovepipe pants. Graphic, geometric patterns recurred throughout the collection, as a print on an easy dress with short leather sleeves and a leather waistband, and on another dress engineered from over 125 pieces of leather, felt, ponyskin, and silk. Most of it worked, save for a pair of too-busy suits in a black and white version of that print.
If all that sounds a tad ornate, though, for every embellished piece, there was another one that was unadorned. A black coat with a contrast notched collar in gray and the double-breasted pantsuit worn underneath it skewed minimalist and sleek. As for cozy layers, it s hard to top a midnight blue rabbit fur jacket that they laser-cut for added depth and texture.
