Pixiepalace

A fairly new design team that has really wowed me for the last couple of years is Proenza Schouler. This collection was less spectacular than some of their previous ones, but it was still pretty interesting.

A lot of their designs had the stained glass look that the outfit above has. This also pretty much encompases their color palette. I like the colors, but this particular combination looks odd to me. Some others were much better.

There were a lot of outfits in this collection that had very architectural details. This one feels almost like the end of a building with windows and everything! Lots of designers take cues and inspiration from buildings, but something about these designs feels different. Almost like they took the inspiration from the blueprints rather than the final buildings.

There was a surprising amount of leather in this show. Several models sported leather jackets and others wore leather belts like the one above. I like the lines on this dress. It was a common element in the dresses and skirts and I think it looks really sharp.

Many of the skirts had wonderful flowing drapery like this dress. It softened the look and paired well with all the leather and geometric shapes. I love how elegant this gown looks. It just flows around her like liquid.

Overall I liked this collection. It experimented with geometric shapes and straight lines, which was unusual and nice. I loved the juxtaposition of the soft draping skirts and dresses and the leather jackets and belts. I liked the youth and freshness in this collection as well as the feeling of experimentation! It was great.

One of my all-time favourite designers is Oscar de la Renta and I am pleased that this collection is another great one! De la Renta’s designs always have a certain ladylike grace that many other designers never achieve. He also has a consistancy that seems to be rare in the fashion world (you can’t always count on Galliano or even Marc Jacobs to have collections that past fans will like).

There were a lot of coats in this collection. I’ve been slightly frustrated that so many of the other coats I’ve seen in collections have been so similar to each other, as if the designers couldn’t really find their own spin. De la Renta’s coats use a wide variety of shapes and styles though. I think this may be one of the only coats I’ve seen this season where the closures are offset! And it looks really good! Many of the short coats were wonderful too.

Notice how he actually knows where a woman’s waist is? I really like this outfit. It’s simple and elegent. Minus the sunglasses I would absolutely wear this. It’s casual yet would work well for work.

I love the shape of this dress. It’s very formal and pretty. The fabric is great. I’m so happy to see a collection with color! A lot of color! I’ve gotten pretty sick of black and white.

Couldn’t you totally see this dress on a starlet at the Oscars? Every year there are a few actresses who choose to wear de la Renta dresses to the Academy Awards, but I’m usually wrong about who and which dresses they wear. Nevertheless, this dress screamed Oscars to me this year. I like the shape and think it is pretty, but it’s a little too Barbie for me.

I really liked this collection. It broke away from many of the trends of the season and stuck true to Oscar de la Renta’s vision of ladylike elegance. I would wear several things from this collection. It’s not quite my favourite collection of the season, but it’s close.

Thakoon was another designer that I had never heard of before, but I can definately see the appeal of some of these designs! The collection felt very young, but still adult (aka. not high school).

Like many of the other collections this season, most of this collection was black and white. Unlike many of the other collections this season, the black and white outfits still looked distinctive in this collection. This dress uses a very common shape, but the line at the bust where the fabric changes gives it a very different look. I don’t know that I would wear this dress, but it does look very good.

I like this suit. It is very youthful and modest, but not dowdy at all. It has nice lines and the fabric has a great sheen. The edging on the jacket creates a nice detail. Many of the pieces in this collection had this sophisticated and youthful feeling.

I really like this outfit. It looks very casual-dressy, which is a hard look to achieve. It also looks really comfortable. It’s flattering on the model and the color is great. There were some wonderfully flexible outfits like this one in the collection, but I think this was my favourite!

I liked this collection a lot, but I probably wouldn’t wear a lot of it (I look awfully young as it is, highlighting that isn’t always a good thing). I loved how everything looked comfortable and attractive at the same time. This wasn’t a spectacular collection, but it was very nice.

Today I’m looking at the collection from Tuleh. Overall, this collection evoked old-fashioned college girls (Vassar came to mind a few times). The outfits were largely modest and in simple colors.

Suits like this one were common in the collection. They all had higher necklines and longer skirts, straight lines adding height (which most of the models didn’t really need), and simple accessories. The fabrics were nearly all blacks, grays, whites and creams. I like this style, but somehow everything seemed to fall just a little bit short of being as flattering as it seemed like they should have been.

There were a lot of coats in this collection and for the most part they played with the same elements as the suits - modest designs and basic colors. Several of the girls carried suitcases in different shapes and sizes, but always in matching pairs. It was an interesting element of the show, but I’m not sure what it added.

The end of the collection was all more formal dresses and gowns. Several of them had interesting elements to them that made them stand out. The dress above caught my eye because there is so much going on, yet it doesn’t feel overly complicated. I love the very high waistline of the very fitted skirt and the sheer sleeves really add a lot. Some of the dresses were not so well done, but all were interesting.

While there wasn’t a whole lot from this collection that I could really seeing myself wearing, a lot of it was nice. I liked the idea behind it and many of the elements worked. I just felt like it didn’t quite make it in some cases. More tailoring in the suits would have been nice, but that tends to be what I look for in a suit, so my opinion in this case may be suspect. Overall I liked the collection, but wasn’t wowed by it.

Today’s collection may well be one of my favourites of the season! It’s from Vena Cava, a design team that I’ve heard of but am not at all familiar with. The presentation of this collection was really cool. Rather than having the observers sitting in chairs watching the models walk down a runway, the models were standing around in four rooms made up to look like a house (using props from the designers’ own homes) and the observers walked around looking at them. I’m not sure it’s the most practical way of showing a collection, but it gets big points for creativity and homeyness!

I really like the simple, flattering lines of the dresses in this collection. Everything was very soft and flowy. I like the rich color of this dress and the stripe at the bottom that almost seems to suggest a layered skirt. If there was a theme in this collection, it seemed to be coordinated, sophisticated, comfortable pieces.

I really like this outfit. The skirt has sailor pant closures in the front, which is unusual and cool. The top has great detailing around the neck! Doesn’t it just look like something one could throw on for work? I love it.

I just had to post this picture. It’s a model reading a book! And it looks like an old book! How cool is that? Oh, and you can see the detailing on the top more clearly. It’s very pretty and provides an interesting element in what would otherwise be a pretty boring black top.

Ok, before I get into the outfit, will you look at that model? Isn’t she gorgeous? And she’s not 17! What a novel concept! I think she looks great. I’m not really a fan of very wide-legged pants, but they go well with this set of tops. What I like about this outfit is that she looks so complete and put together. She looks elegant and comfortable at the same time. Like a professor giving a paper for facinated students, or an art director surveying pieces for a collection.

I really liked this collection a lot. It was very simple and elegant. I kept thinking of very well-educated young women discussing great works of literature or critiquing art. The presentation was unique and worked exceptionally well to showcase this particular collection. I like that the designers created such a beautiful collection and then chose a way of showcasing it that would bring out the best qualities of their designs! This was a great collection. I will definately keep an eye on this design team from now on! I would even consider buying some of their pieces.

Today I’m looking at a very small line from a designer I’ve never heard of, Lela Rose. There were only eight outfits in the pictures I could find (I have no idea if that was the entire line or not, but I would hope there was more).

I like this dress a lot. The shape is very simple, but the fabric is used to make the dress very visually interesting. It’s a really nice effect. The entire line was in the two colors on this dress - a rich cholcolate brown and a soft taupe. They go well together and she used them nicely for the most part. All of the dresses were short like this one.

This dress was very simple from the front, but had this frill around the back. This was probably my least favourite design from this collection. The frill just looked uncomfortable. It comes up high under the model’s chin in the front and the back is pretty, but impractical. I kept wondering if you could sit in a chair without having to sit forward away from the back with this design. There were a few odd elements, like this frill, but for the most part the lines on these dresses and coats were very flattering and simple.

I like this collection. It may have been little, and fairly simple, but it was very attractive. There were creative and interesting elements, the fabrics were used creatively and interestingly, and the designs were flattering to the figure. Other than a few dresses with odd elements, almost everything in this collection is something I could consider wearing. This is a designer I definately intend to watch!

Today I want to look at Donna Karan’s signature line. I always have trouble with Donna Karan. I don’t know if there is just something weird about my taste or what, but I really don’t understand her designs. They are all over the map and I often wonder what she actually designed about them. That said, this wasn’t an awful show.

There were a lot of coats in this collection. I don’t know why I picked this one in particular to show since many of them pretty much looked like this. Some of them were more coat-dress like than this one, but most had similar shapes and details. Almost the entire collection was black and white. That seems to be a theme this season and, while I appreciate that it makes it easier to mix and match from many different lines, it does get rather boring.

Another element that popped up in many of the designs in this show was sheer fabric (like on the chest here). In some cases this worked. I think that it looks good on this suit, although I wonder what kind of office this would be appropriate for. Some of the designs with sheer fabric came out looking more gothy than she probably intended. I like the suit (although I usually prefer more tailored suits), but I swear I’ve seen it in lots of other places. It’s really the sheer part that makes it different, and I think that would be the first thing to go if I ever intended to actually wear this.

Probably my least favourite pieces in this show were the ones like this dress with strange side cut-outs. The idea of these cut-outs is pretty sound (they are usually intended to make the wearer appear more slim), but it just doesn’t look right here. Maybe the cut-out is too big or the angles aren’t right, I don’t honestly know. The problem is that they make the models look cut freakishly. It makes me think of really blocky cartoon characters. It’s very unattractive and makes me want to feed the girls a cheeseburger even more than I otherwise want to!

Overall I was very underwhelmed by this collection. Parts of it felt very underdesigned while others, like the cut-out dress above, felt overdesigned! The combination is very strange and it just kind of rubs me wrong. I can see potential in some of these pieces, but I really would like to see more.

Today I’m looking at the DKNY collection (I plan to check out Donna Karen’s signature collection later). I’m not usually a big fan of DKNY. Maybe it’s because I don’t live in New York, who knows. Regardless, this collection in some way surprised me and in some ways was pretty expected.

Black with small amounts of underlying yellow was a big theme. There were lots of black dresses with hints of yellow under the straps and neckline. There was so much black in this collection! Some of the pictures seriously look like legs and a floating head with just space in between because the blackness blended in with the background! I wasn’t a big fan of these designs.

The menswear was mostly unremarkable, but for some reason I liked this one. There were lots of black suits with white shirts and black ties. This outfit plays with texture a little more though, and I like that. He doesn’t look like a paper doll. I’m not crazy about sweater vests usually, but the texture and contrast on this one works well.

This is such a cute dress. There were a few cute, flowy dresses, but this one is by far my favorite. First of all, it isn’t black (most of the others were). I love the detailing near the hemline and the green is a great color that you don’t see often. I would absolutely wear this dress. I would even pay money for it!

Overall I was unimpressed by this collection. Too much of it was black and it got boring. There were some gems, like the dress above, that I did like. I can’t say this collection made me any more of a fan of DKNY, but it was one of the best shows I’ve seen from the brand.

Since I looked at Dior yesterday and it was so very very scary, today I decided to check out a collection that I normally really really like - Carolina Herrera. Her designs always have great shapes and beautiful flattering garments. This collection had both of those things, but I was pretty luke-warm about a lot of it.

There were a lot of coats in this collection. Most of them had fur trim (although many had less fur than the coat above). I chose this picture because it gives you a good idea of her coats for the season as well as her color palette. The colors were mostly muted browns, grays and blacks. There were pieces with more color, but the overall color palette was pretty muted.

I love this outfit! It is very very flattering, showing curves beautifully. There were a lot of details (like the neckline above) that were very evocative of Jackie Kennedy’s White House style. Normally that annoys me, but these dresses are so pretty and well cut that it doesn’t bother me. They have the nice details without the boxiness that characterized a lot of Jackie’s suits.

This was one of the most colorful pieces in the collection. I love the color and fabric, they are great, and the design is very pretty. I could absolutely see wearing this to a party!

I loved the flattering details in Carolina Herrera’s designs for this collection. I have liked some of her past collections better, but this one really is stunning. I would love to own some of her designs!

Today Almost Girl has a very interesting post about a problem that exists in fashion that really bugs me. It’s the problem of the Child/Woman. It exists elsewhere too (most notably in anime), but is very evident in fashion. The designs are very childish and clearly designed to make adult women look like little girls. High waists, short skirts, baby-doll necklines and puffed sleeves are common.

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