Certain designers, because of their youth, spunk and in Luella Bartley's case, London cool, fill the house season after season even when their collections appear as dangerously mixed bags. The most memorable feature of Bartley's collection were the lace-tied, sky-high spectator shoes, memorable because you couldn't envision a single woman in the metropolitan area ever wearing them. This may seem like an arbitrary geographical reference, but Bartley built her collection in some part around apple prints, which one took to mean as a tribute to New York life. Bartley's collection lacked any of a New Yorker's sense of polish.
Because of his work for Marc Jacobs and Tse, Richard Chai has arrived onto the fashion scene with a bit of buzz. The collection he showed indicated it might have been premature. Chai can cut a pair of skinny pants rather well. He seems enamored of almost no other shape but the high and narrow. But his clothes lack both the excitement of the experimentally impractical and the cheerful safety of the commercial.
Commercial is one of the many adjectives that one might pluck to describe the clothes of Lilly Pulitzer, which have changed, through history, only in the reach of their market. No longer the exclusive domain of third- and fourth-home owners, colorful Lilly shift dresses turn up across the country now. Younger women wear Lilly dresses with a sense of irony and that was precisely the spirit with which the show was delivered Sunday.
In addition to the traditional florals and faunas, solid-colored palazzo pants worn with gold belts were shown on models with heavily sprayed hair. The clothes had a sense of liveliness and fun. The costumers on Desperate Housewives will undoubtedly be calling.
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