Frédéric Sanchez s soundtrack—a blurry, impressionistic, almost atonal mesh of Nico s and Chet Baker s versions of "My Funny Valentine"—suggested chaos. But the set was a precisely ordered group of colored pillars, like a geometric Stonehenge. Rodolfo Paglialunga imagined his new collection for Jil Sander forming somewhere between the chaos and the precision. The designer would pluck order from disorder.
It s all any artist tries to do, but Paglialunga s challenge was a little more pointy, given the patchiness of his efforts to date. Still, he made huge strides with this collection. It won t set Planet Fashion alight, but it registered as wearable, real-world, and properly proportioned. Credit the designer s precision for that coup. Long coats and matching pants made a new kind of elegantly elongated suit. A bone-toned leather coat was a standout. The lines that traced a navy blue coat suggested something military, the most precise association of all. And even when Paglialunga started to mess with precision, he didn t lose that line; it simply went diagonal. Shaved black mink was diagonally pieced for a coat. Dark green pony got the same treatment in a skirt.
Coatdresses were shadow-striped or crisscrossed with tape, always maximizing the line. You could follow the footwear for a subtext. One look featured correspondents paired with a pencil skirt and a full-sleeved knit top. Joan Crawford? That, at least, underscored Paglialunga s disdain when he dismissed the ongoing debate about the dialogue between feminine and masculine in Jil Sander s women s collection as "banal." If he could silence that debate, he d definitely be able to put his own thumbprint on the label. So he showed a lovely, simple slipdress, and he closed the show with Hedvig Palm in a blush-toned coat that was forceful in line but indubitably womanly. Paglialunga is finding his feet.
