It feels like the fashion crowd has waited all season for the other shoe to drop: the moment when some designer would muster the clarity to arrange a viewing of clothes any woman could look at and think, Yep, I can see myself in that. In Paris, it was Dries Van Noten who assumed the mantle of spokesperson for every woman s everyday wear. "Accessible" and "pragmatic" can sound like synonyms for "boring" in the lexicon of fashion-speak, but Van Noten s simplified solutions for urban elegance quickly put a stop to that kind of talk.
It was his marshaling of easy silk pieces that did it: breezy duster coats; shifts; and regular, non-freaky pants and shorts, pulled together with high heels, great jewelry, and sunglasses. As a look, it was a distinct move away from the layered, multi-printed, world-traveler groove he normally works. Restricting patterns to graphic grids, stripes, and checkerboards and color to black, white, and a section of orange, Van Noten subsumed the eclectic-ethnic effects into the jewelry and shoes: brass bells as necklaces, sequined tie-on wraps as bracelets, a note of "African" metal-studded craftwork in the ankle-strapped heels.
For day, that made the kind of sense women all over the world will get—and for evening, there was a stellar moment that distilled something that spoke directly to the tradition of rational American sportswear elegance that has gone missing in recent years: a white shirt tucked into a long, sinuous gold Lurex skirt. Strange that it s taken a designer from Belgium to retrieve the power of that simplicity, but it felt spot-on.
