"You know, we just wanted to make real clothes," designer Thuy Pham said with a shrug after the United Bamboo show today. "Like, the kind of thing people could wear to work or whatever." Pham s matter-of-factness seemed appropriate, considering the collection he and United Bamboo co-designer Miho Aoki sent down the runway today: crisp cotton and silk shirting, frilled here and there with girlish detail. Clean, almost-basic leather jackets and skirts. Dress-up/dress-down high-waisted trousers, wispy silk dresses, and linen shorts. Microdots. Chambray. Barely there stripes. Lots and lots of neutrals. As Pham said, he and Aoki weren t trying to reinvent the wheel this season. But there were a lot of niceties that shoppers will appreciate, such as the contrast collar on a striped blouse, or the flutter of fabric on the sleeve of a drop-waist, printed maxi.
And then there were pieces that made you think Pham might have been underselling the ambition here. A pair of gauzy gray harem pants, for instance, had a particular volume and movement that suggested a lot of care had gone into their construction. And a blazer toward the close of the show that had an internal crisscross-strap closure turned out, on inspection, to be comprised of two different patterns, front and back, that had been made to conform to one another. Pham owned up: "I was looking at this old Miyake stuff; it was something on YouTube," he said. "But that stuff was pretty crazy. I wanted to see if you could take those ideas and do them in, I guess, a more reasonable way."
