New York Fashion Week 2016: A smorgasbord of fashion as entertainment

This season’s New York Fashion Week has become a 10th year celebration of sorts for three disparate but talented designers. Alexander Wang, Phillip Lim and Riccardo Tisci have made their shows as much about spring 2016 as they are about marking a decade’s worth of work.

Riccardo Tisci

Riccardo Tisci, who usually shows his collection for Givenchy in Paris, transplanted his women’s, men’s and couture shows to New York for one night only. It has been 10 years since he took the helm at Givenchy. I remember interviewing him in his early days at the storied Paris house when he kept getting terrible reviews despite the backing of Carine Roitfeld. But he pressed on with his vision of the Givenchy woman and ultimately won the approval of fashion critics and the following of celebrities like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian who showed up more than fashionably late for the New York show.

To the sublime track of Ave Maria, Tisci showed variations of lingerie and tuxedo dressing, sometimes showing both. His muse Maria Carla Boscano opened the show with an ivory lace negligee-type top paired with relaxed silk tuxedo trousers with flyaway details. Tisci’s proposition for spring is the delicate balance of masculine-feminine dressing and he did this by showing dressing robes paired with waistcoats and lace skirts and trousers worn with draped and flouncy blouses all in ivory and black.

Alexander Wang

In the 10 years since Alexander Wang started his label, he’s won a CFDA award, opened stores worldwide and until recently headed the design direction of the legendary house of Balenciaga. He stepped down after three years at Balenciaga to concentrate on his own label.

Wang started his eponymous brand with the premise of creating what we now refer to as off-duty clothes: slouchy T-shirts, track pants, anoraks, tanks, hoodies — downtown clothes for Wang’s downtown posse. When he took the helm at Balenciaga, the clothes took on a more sophisticated, polished approach. Perhaps it was the access to Balenciaga’s ateliers and resources that contributed to this.

However, for spring 2016 and to mark his 10th anniversary, Wang returned to the clothes that sealed his career. In the cavernous Pier 94 space in front of a giant panoromic screen and with celebrities like Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Mary J. Blige perched in the front row, Wang sent down models in military jackets, jersey dresses, jeans, mesh tanks and multi-zip jumpsuits. The collection was meant to reference the mundane, the everyday but heightened to Wang levels. And so a denim jacket morphs into a motocross leather jacket, a tennis sweater is deconstructed and laced, pajama tops are given cutouts and dresses have jacket like zippers on the front.

After the show, the space turned into an after-party venue with pole dancers galore, hip-hop music and live performances by Lil Wayne and Ludacris late into the night.

Phillip Lim

Phillip Lim was in a reflective mood for his 10th anniversary. “Stop and smell the flowers,” he said of his spring collection and in a spacious set dotted by hills of dirt came the clothes like flowers sprouting from the earth. Lim is strongest when he shows clothes that have a modern, hip attitude. And those were the kind of clothes he presented for spring 2016.

In a palette of army greens, khaki, white and blue, the 3.1 Phillip Lim collection was the designer’s strongest yet. Lim employed various techniques like wrapping, twisting, splicing and strategic cutting to create skirts with asymmetrical hemlines, men’s-inspired shirting, anorak dresses and baseball jackets. Most of the trousers and skirts he showed featured paper bag waists with wrapped belts.

Flowers, his inspiration, made their presence felt as a singular gesture on a bandeau top or as an overall print on silk separates or as appliqués on pinstripe tank dresses.  

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Tory Burch

“Pretty” is such an overused and abused word but no other adjective can sum up Tory Burch’s spring 2016 collection more effectively or succinctly.

Despite the general move downtown of the New York collections, Burch remained at Lincoln Center for her show. If last season she covered her show space with more than 100 rugs, this time she used large oxidized doors and weathered floors as a backdrop. That aged look — the patina of time — ran through her collection, from the clothes to the accessories. “Beauty enhanced through time and nature,” was how Burch described it.

As for the clothes, most of them harked back to the looks that made Burch a household name — through caftans and tunics. This time however she cut them closer to the body and embellished them with fringing techniques or with lace appliqués or with beadwork. There were also dresses constructed from contrast guipure lace creating the effect of an Old World tapestry. The colors were anywhere from saffron to olive to oceanic blues. Towards the end, a parade of iridescent dresses and caftans with floral prints offered a fresh take on evening dressing.

Tommy Hilfiger

Island life was the inspiration for Tommy Hilfiger’s collection. He created an elaborate set complete with beach sand, water and bar at New York’s Pier 36. What does the Hilfiger woman wear to the islands? Variations of crocheted bikinis and cover-ups, floral print maxi dresses, jean jackets and pants with Rasta twists and Oxford shirtdresses with bands of floral prints in the bottom. To close the show, a gaggle of models headed by Gigi Hadid in a bikini jumped and skipped in the water while Bob Marley’s music played in the background.

Polo Ralph Lauren

At Polo Ralph Lauren, there was an explosion of color and oversized floral prints. Men’s shirting worn with floral pencil skirts, bias cut dresses in colors like lipstick red, orange fringed trousers paired with crest emblazoned blazers, and several denim looks including a jumpsuit and a men’s style three-piece suit.

For his first collection as designer of women’s wear for Brooks Brothers, Zac Posen went unabashedly uptown. Think Babe Paley and her ladies who lunch set. There were clean skirt suits, striped shift dresses, flared plaid trousers, and other tailored ensembles. It was city dressing mixed with a dash of Lyford Cay.

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Ralph Lauren

Ralph Lauren started the day with his vision of an American woman in France. With French chansons playing in the background, models came out decked in all-white ensembles including a pair of racing style overalls, sailor T-shirts paired with double-breasted blazers, swimsuits worn over skirts, tank dresses with side cut-outs and a generous serving of tan leather pieces like a pant suit, shorts, anorak and culottes. It was une Americaine in Paris and the French Riviera and you can see this clearly in the seafaring styles Mr. Lauren sent down the runway: from the abstracted nautical flag prints to the color-blocked separates which featured swishes of fabric like boat sails to the beautiful use of stripes.

He ended the show with stripes. Blue and white striped floor-length dresses fashioned out of humble cotton but spun and styled in the privileged Ralph Lauren way.

Calvin Klein

At Calvin Klein, the designer Francisco Costa’s treatise for spring 2016 was the “morning after” and out came slip dresses held together by straps falling off the shoulders, skirts with panels that seemed to have come undone, trench coats with frayed hems, and sweaters and knitwear that looked as though they were unraveling. Deconstruction by way of minimalism.

The middle of the show featured long-sleeved dresses, pajama-style pants and shoes in prints that combined both sharp and out-of-focus florals. This was a welcome surprise from a house that one never associates with prints, let alone the flowery kind.

Marc Jacobs

The New York Fashion Week spring 2016 season ended with a bang. A finale show served with mega doses of pomp and circumstance courtesy of Marc Jacobs, who for the past few seasons now, has been the official season-ender show in the Big Apple.

For one night only he took over the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York and dubbed his show as a world premiere of sorts. There were many things to glean from this turn of phrase. It communicated questions about the future of the brand and it also spoke of just how Jacobs planned on combining his main collection with his secondary line. Marc by Marc Jacobs, which was dropped last season. On a literal level, world premiere provided clues to the mise en scène of the show.

True to movie and play premieres, there was a red carpet, a step and repeat, and branded popcorn, napkins and memorabilia.

It was a show that was primed for Instagram — production and clothing-wise. Here were clothes that had glamour and glitter and all sorts of textures in homage to the movie industry. There were Hollywood golden age references, nods to popular culture and American symbolism. The stars and stripes figured prominently on sweaters and bikinis. There were sparkly dresses paired with feather and fur stoles. Maria Callas’ face was repeated ad infinitum on a coat and opera gloves. The silhouettes ranged from the 1950s to 1990s grunge. It was showgirls and Hitchcock and pin-ups modeled by a diverse cast including Karen Elson, Alek Wek, Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and long-time Marc Jacobs muse Beth Ditto. It was a spectacular smorgasbord of fashion as entertainment or vice versa.

You walked away from the theater with one word on your lips: Wow. And what better way is there to end the season than with a monosyllabic superlative.