You d never know that Tawfik Mounayer s Tribune Standard label is just a year old. To begin with, Mounayer really knows his customer: "She s the chicest PTA mom out of the bunch. You want her to pick you up from school wearing this," he said, holding up a pair of perfectly tailored chinos and a sweater handmade by a Bolivian knitting collective. Second, Mounayer just gets what retailers are looking for. Buyers, he explained, are "deep into the silks and prints," so for pre-fall he offered up his best-selling silk color-block dress, updated this time around in an autumnal palette of teal and rusty reds. His hand-painted prints came back again, too. Mounayer showed a "desert scale" pattern as well as a "pan-animal" motif, which he said was designed to evoke "the idea of Georgia O Keeffe in line at Studio 54." Not sure if we buy into all that, but we d definitely wait on line for a pair of his chinos.
