Remember last season s retro sixties moment at Rochas? Marco Zanini is on a far more idiosyncratic trip for Spring. "It s personal, a melting pot of all I love," he said before the show. The silk florals and matching corsages felt like a callback to his first runway collection for the label a year ago. The scarf prints were homegrown in a different way, based as they were on paintings the designer commissioned by the Swedish artist Slotts Barbro (with titles borrowed from Françoise Sagan novels, a typical Rochas twist).
Zanini himself is half Swedish, and this Spring he and his collaborator sister (Christopher and Tammy Kane aren t fashion s only sibling act) paid a trip to Barbro s village. That apparently influenced the show s modest sensibility—cue the head kerchiefs, men s kneesocks, and, more tangentially, the loose, almost awkward fit of a black silk bustier bra (lingerie being a Rochas hallmark then and now) and a silk duchesse crinoline dress.
Indeed, there seemed to be a country mouse naiveté—the Twitter-verse immediately dubbed it "chic hausfrau"—to pieces like a boxy, rolled-sleeve cardigan jacket and its below-the-knee dirndl, or a peplum vest worn with matching pleated, cropped trousers over a puffed-sleeve blouse. But the designer also made sure to include the likes of a smartly cut blazer and wrap-skirted dress, which would be believable on the chicest of city mice.
As for the closing group of bias-cut, washed silk slipdresses, pajama sets, and dressing gowns (right on trend, by the way), it was about as romantic a moment as the Spring season has delivered so far. If other elements of the collection weren t so obviously seductive, they were all close to Zanini s heart, and it s hard not to be enchanted by that kind of go-your-own-way attitude.
