Before this morning’s show, held in a cavernous, age-worn hall upstairs at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Uma Wang said her main inspiration had come from a vacation in Italy, during which she discovered sculptures of the four virtues in the Loggia di David at the Palazzo Te, a Mannerist Renaissance villa in Mantua known as “the abode of the gods.”
There, she explained, she became entranced by the cascading draping of fabric and veils as rendered in marble. “I loved how the veil hid the eyes, which makes you wonder what the meaning is, so we started from that and asked ourselves how we can keep those gestures, something airy, soft and fluid that shows something strong yet very feminine.”
Contrasting with last season, the designer’s spring lineup explored the idea of structure and softness through easy tailoring and a warm palette of travertine, limestone, sand, dune, fossil brown and anthracite. Picking up on the ancient stones and sun-washed hues of Tuscany, fabric treatments had a weathered quality to them: a crinkle-coated jacket looked like a riff on ancient parchment; further along, another in tonal cream jacquard looked polished yet already lived-in. Looks that appeared austere from the front featured surprise details in the back, a discreet ‘wow’ factor rendered in graceful twists, drapes or cutouts.
Wang also amped up textural effects through dramatic knotting on a couple of striking one-shouldered tops, as well as distressed knits—“like lace, but our way”—and embroidery mounted both right-side-up and inside-out. Petrol blue tufts on billowy bronze dresses turned out, on their flip side, to be a floral motif borrowed from the Song dynasty, which rose a millennium ago. Quicksilver-colored silk, and silver jewelry in organic shapes by the Japanese brand Detaj added a dash of shine.
In her show notes, the designer commented, somewhat opaquely, that “Change is a way to postpone the inevitable.” On the runway, her clothes’ lush materials, relaxed cuts and sense of easy movement conjured a distinctly Armani-adjacent mood. By scaling down volume and focusing on softness and flow, Wang gave women clothes with strength but also a welcome measure of poetry.
