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No. 21
 Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
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Alberta Ferretti
 Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
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Gucci
 Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
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Dion Lee
 Before his presentation today, Australian designer Dion Lee explained—rather meekly—that he saw his London fashion week debut as "an introduction."
Suffice it to say, London fashion week was very pleased to meet him. Lee is incontrovertibly the leading light of fashion Down Under, and as his new collection confirms, he is certainly ready for a larger stage.
It's tempting to describe the appeal of Lee's clothes in terms of their technical accomplishments: the geometry of the silhouettes; the innovative, architectural quality of the construction; the unexpected materials artfully deployed. You can't avoid talking about those elements of Lee's work, and they form a tremendous part of its appeal. In this collection, for instance, he created strands of high-visibility fiber, and wove them into light-reflecting knits, and draped them off sheaths. (Perfect for cycling back from a party at night, maybe.) Another dress, suspended from nearly invisible mesh, appeared to hang on the body as if by magic; elsewhere, garments made from layered tulle and organza looked as though they were held together strictly by light. There is a cool intelligence operating here.
But what makes Lee really interesting, and eventually, perhaps, significant, is that his intellect doesn't work at cross-purposes to the unavoidable sexiness of his clothes. There is something deeply Australian about that: For whatever reason, designers from Oz seem to have a totally non-vexed relationship to sex and body-consciousness, and Lee embraces that, mitigating the potential aridity of his designs by integrating vampy notes. This collection felt relatively small in its ambitions and incredibly precise in surpassing them. Now that Lee has introduced himself, it will be fascinating to see what he does when he starts dreaming big.
—Maya Singer
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A.L.C.
 "Nostalgic in a modern way," is how Andrea Lieberman described her latest collection for A.L.C. Often multiple nostalgias mixed. The slim checked wool trousers in look 24, for example, conjured up the late-sixties ska era for the designer. The outfit's accompanying leather bomber with a street-ready coyote-fur hood recalled "the late eighties—like when the New York downtown crowd and hip-hop scene came together at clubs like Area and Madame Rosa's," as Lieberman put it. Not that you'd necessarily need to be conversant in the club-going ways of decades past to get in on the action. The DB navy peacoat, shown here with a curly lamb lapel, hit on the oversize, borrowed-from-boyfriend outerwear trend that will be everywhere in the fall. A string of covetable (admittedly non-PETA-friendly) cropped jackets featured various combinations of kangaroo fur, shearling, and baby calf hair. And still-selling silk pajama sets came in both macro and micro paisley prints. Nostalgic or not, Lieberman has a strong sense of the now. Whatever memories these clothes spring from, girls today will be able to make their own in them.
—Brittany Adams
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Joseph
 Joseph's grunge-inspired Resort collection came out of pretty much nowhere
to become a blockbuster for the brand: Those checks and diaphanous florals
have been in stores for a while now, and the demand for them shows no signs
of abating. The Joseph collection for Fall seems to have been designed using
the same formula that made Resort such a winner: In place of the grunge
toughness, there were biker leathers and a military inflection; rather than
the feminizing florals, there were ruffles and lace. And as always with
Joseph, the collection was studded with top-notch knits and the kind of
coats and jackets you wear to the point of disintegration.
One of the fresh ideas that designer Louise Trotter introduced this season
was sweater dressing: The collection was full of ribbed tops, dresses, and
skirts that were made to be layered. Another new element was ponyskin, which
looked particularly good in a muted leopard print used in coats, pencil
skirts, and bags. Elsewhere, Trotter traded in the punchy, Joseph-signature
intarsia handknits for Peruvian-inspired ponchos and fringed sweaters with a
more muted charm. All in all, this was a collection well stocked with
knockout pieces—curly coats and camo fur, zigzagged angora-blend
turtlenecks, ruffled dresses, and track pants in a soft gray lace-printed
silk—that were delivered with the typical Joseph understatement. But this
time, when the collection starts flying out of stores, no one is going to be
surprised.
—Maya Singer
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Thakoon Addition
 For his main Fall collection, Thakoon Panichgul was inspired by neon, but there was darkness lurking under that light: It was the glow of Amsterdam's red-light district, as reimagined by the artists Ed and Nancy Kienholz for their piece The Hoerengracht, that provided the juice. There were peacock-feather prints and appliqués—for pride and vanity, cardinal sins both—and a basket weave detail lifted from confessional screens. That girl's all grown up, and naughty, too. But at Addition, Panichgul's kid-sister line, things are still sweet and nice. "It's a little groovier this season," the designer said in his showroom, and patterned poncho tops, culottes, and wide-legged jumpsuits backed him up.
There were echoes of the main line in some of the shapes, like the high-waisted, wide pants, but overall the muse was Addition's usual gamine. For Fall, she'll wear "teddy bear" faux furs (the best of them in a bomber, trimmed with military-trench details); ultra-fitted blazers with asymmetrical, slightly flaring backs; and loose silk dresses, whose prints mimic knit stitches. There was more leather than ever before, in response to buyers' demands: a single-breasted blazer in cadet blue on one hand, and tiny, quilted short shorts on the other—the sort you might get if you had your old 2.55 retooled into hot pants. The collection continues to expand, and so does the brand: Panichgul revealed that he'll soon be in need of more space than his current digs afford, thanks largely to the sales of Addition. And the showroom buzzed with buyers. Addition's not grown up yet, but it certainly is growing.
—Matthew Schneier
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Roksanda Ilincic
 Last spring, Roksanda Ilincic took a sporty
approach to classically elegant clothes. Today, she did the mirror reverse:
an elegant eye cast upon sporty clothes. As a description, "sporty" might
even skew a bit formal. After the show, Ilincic described her source material
as "weekend or leisure wear, the kind of thing you put on when
you're cozy at home."
The humble and often maligned sweatshirt and sweatpants had a moment to bask
in their cozy glory. The former came in charcoal jersey pieced with navy
silk and often a luscious fox hood. In one look, she turned it into a
blouson and paired it with a matching New Look-ish jersey skirt, and in another, it was a hoodie tucked into a skirt with a blue-gray astrakhan panel in front and a dyed-to-match fox hem. Put that in your pipe and smoke it,
Juicy. Elsewhere, she shot navy melton through with gold thread and cut
it into a jacket with puffer sleeves. And in keeping with the puffer panoply
on the rest of London's runways, Ilincic did one with gracefully rounded
shoulders in a silk ink slash print. There were few of her signature dresses
on display—and little in the way of serious evening—though she assured that
the sales collection back at the showroom is massive.
Luxed-up comfort is undeniably a crowd-pleaser. Who doesn't love being able
to wear your slouchy Sunday afternoon digs to Friday night dinner? But these
ideas were easily best when administered with a light hand—a crepe
dress with raglan wool sleeves or a blouson bomber paneled with a bit of
astrakhan. Often, the concept—and an excessive amount of fur—threatened to
overpower Ilincic's inherent sense of elegance. For exhibit A of said
elegance, see the exceedingly simple white wool dress that closed the show,
a winner any day of the week.
—Meenal Mistry
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Meadham Kirchhoff
 How did this happen? Once upon a time, Ed Meadham and Ben Kirchhoff were the angry young men of English fashion. They used their runway as a stage for expressing feminist rage, romantic torpor, alienation. Now they're hosting an interplanetary disco. What?
None of the above should be read as a complaint. Quite the contrary: For Meadham Kirchhoff, jubilation is its own kind of political stance, a way of telling all the depressed, enraged, alienated misfits out there to screw the world and come join the party. There's no revenge sweeter than turning a frown upside down. After today's show, Kirchhoff described the new collection as being inspired by the club he wants to go to, if only it existed; he and Meadham used their slot on the fashion calendar not only to illustrate that fantasy but to enact it. There were colored lights on the runway, models throwing glitter in the air, and an audience of Meadham Kirchhoff cultists jamming along in the seats. It would have been fitting if the show had concluded with a spontaneous dance-off.
OK, the clothes. There was a lot to take in here, and the obvious highlights included the rainbow-hued chiffon dresses, the sequin bustiers, and the showstopping, paradigm-shifting multicolored furs. The furs worked almost like an intarsia knit, with cartoon insignia made by piecing together various cuts of dyed fur. Yet the most impressive thing about this collection may have been its deep bench of accessible pieces, like the denim with cartoon appliqués, or the silvery brocade tailoring, or the nubby graphic sweaters, or the trousers in a yellow and black lumberjack check. There seemed to be a rationale beyond the commercial in these pieces; namely, Meadham and Kirchhoff are extending a hand to all the people for whom a dress made out of tinsel, say, is a bit de trop. It's their party, and seriously, everyone's invited.
—Maya Singer
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Emilio de la Morena
 Emilio de la Morena fans were in for a shock today. The designer has earned a fervent following for his kicky frocks, with their sexy winks of skin, punchy color combinations, and fit-and-flare cuts; meanwhile, the first look at the designer's Fall 2012 show was a head-to-toe black ensemble comprised of narrow—gasp—trousers and a belted wool mantilla. Quite the 180, suffice it to say.
But the change in direction was welcome, and not just because it saw de la Morena trying on a new, long and lean silhouette and experimenting with leather and daywear. The biggest change here had to do with the intent in the clothes, and the feeling behind them. De la Morena is by nature an intellectual designer, and in past seasons he's shown a tendency to abstract himself with references from art and architecture. This time out, he worked from the heart, seizing on his Spanish roots. And so, for all the superficial severity of this collection, there was a nice warmth of tone. Much of that came through in the collection's mix of textures—wools, leathers and patent leathers, slinky silks, cabled hand-knits. There were also textural gestures—ruched leather detailing, leather in a marbled print—that added to the collection's tactility.
Somewhat surprisingly, de la Morena showed a real knack with his tailoring. His kick-pleated coats and jackets were really sharp, and though the leather trousers could have used some finessing, the slim wool pants were well-done. And he had an interesting thought in applying daywear materials to his evening pieces, making gowns with high-waisted skirts of tailored wool. Not everything worked here, but there was a lot of promise on the runway; it would be nice to see de la Morena continue to refine his new ideas.
—Maya Singer
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Holly Fulton
 With her eye-popping graphic style, more-is-more approach to color and
embellishment, and overall campy attitude, Holly Fulton practically dares
you to hate her clothes. Somehow, that proves impossible. The collection
Fulton showed this morning was a case in point: Rainbow-hued and covered in
ecstatic hothouse-inspired patterns, the clothes had a certain irrepressible
chic. They were about as hard to dislike as a milkshake.
In some ways, this was Fulton at her most circumspect. Embellishment was
kept to a relative minimum; silhouettes were simple and sophisticated.
Working with a canvas of A-line minidresses, turtlenecks, boxy jackets,
tailored sheaths, and pencil skirts, Fulton applied her prints in a
painterly way, working with the garments' shapes. That made for some
knockout evening looks, such as a hot pink, butterfly-print sheath with a
crisscrossed, body-baring bodice, and a high-necked, frond-printed
turquoise minidress with a tasteful drip of crystal on the sleeve. There
were also a few looks with a hot rod placement print and shots of patent
leather that, however redolent of Spring '12 Prada, fit easily into the
Fulton idiom and just plain worked. Elsewhere, Fulton sent out some very convincing daywear, in
particular her artful intarsia-knit cardigans and sweaters. For all their
punch, the knits were really very accessible. Decorous, almost. Only the
most militant minimalist could hate them.
—Maya Singer
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David Koma
 The message from the first few looks out at David Koma seemed to be: Don't mess with me. The technical fabric looked bulletproof, and the sculpted greyhounds that formed the wedge heels of pointy shoes appeared ready to come to life and attack.
Koma had a handful of references: Louis Icart's Deco greyhound paintings, Boldini's paintings of Marchesa Casati, Thierry Poncelet's portraits of dogs in aristocratic attire, twenties-era menswear, and the minimal side of sixties fashion (a bit o' Courrèges, a touch of Rabanne). If that sounds like a lot, quite often it was. Alas, Koma's in growth mode—he debuted knits here with Hawick Cashmere—and bursting with ideas.
As the look evolved into something less ballistic, there came a flurry of body-contouring cutouts, peplums, specialized geometric jacquards, and rectangular silver buckles set into dresses and coats. You also saw the hardware on those high—almost canine and far from comfortable-looking—collars. Things lightened up slightly by the show's end, particularly with the appearance of a joyful candy-striped silk and a slightly mod pop bounce. You almost wished he would have developed those ideas into a full collection and perhaps achieved some of the sophisticated coherence he's shown before.
—Meenal Mistry
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Peter Jensen
 "Thelma" was the title on the invitation for Peter Jensen's latest presentation, and given his predilection for idiosyncratic muses, the imagination ran riot. A straw poll came up with a draw between Thelma of Thelma & Louise fame and the fifties character actress Thelma Ritter. But Jensen was actually looking much closer to home, at Thelma Speirs, who for the last three decades has been half of the formidable millinery duo Bernstock Speirs, and also a DJ girl about town. "I love being around her," Jensen said before the show. "She'll wear jeans and a mink coat during the day, then dress for dinner at night." She also posed naked for a magazine last year, so right away there was that subtext of subverted propriety that is Jensen's own specialty.
His muse was parked front-row center, so it was easy to compare his version with the real thing. All the models sported gray hair, like Thelma's. The first outfit was a cropped jacket worn with cuffed jeans, just like she was wearing. A sweater in Jensen's signature rabbit graphic paired with plaid pants also featured Speirs' non-gender-specific style of daywear. As far as dressing for dinner went, Thelma was very taken with the final dress, a column in cream and black crepe, accessorized with a "necklace" of flocked headphones attached by a string of pearls to the bodice of the dress. (The pink flocked loafers were a quintessential Jensen touch.) Bernstock Speirs—who else?—provided the rabbit-ear hats.
But where Thelma ended and Jensen began faded into unimportance as the show rolled on, simply because the aesthetic that the designer has so painstakingly evolved over his years just outside the spotlight was perfected here. Familiarity with it definitely helps. What might otherwise seem utilitarian (choose any smock-over-long-sleeve-shirt silhouette) and even schoolmarm-ish prim was continually undercut by an amused lightness of touch, surreal little flourishes (glittery belts; a gold fringe; a scatter of beading; a log cabin print; a beaded, flocked white shirt collar doing double duty as a necklace), and a twisted color palette that went deep on brown, chartreuse, and fuchsia.
Jensen is a generous designer, or at least kind. There has always been the sense that he might be dressing the girls no one else pays much attention to. No longer. Alexa Chung was at the presentation. She immediately picked an outfit—a black velvet dress with a beaded chiffon insert over a cream crepe blouse—to wear to the Brit Awards tonight. And she swore she'd be back for everything else.
—Tim Blanks
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Mary Katrantzou
 Mary Katrantzou's thank-yous today included a shout-out to Antony Price, the British fashion legend whose claims to fame included dressing Roxy Music and their cover girls. Price was a specialist in the dramatic silhouette, and Katrantzou had clearly been doing her homework, because she recaptured that drama. "I'd already done the peplum and hourglass," she said backstage. "So I was looking for different silhouettes to emphasize embroidery and embellishments." And, Katrantzou scarcely needed to add, to frame those extraordinary prints that have propelled her lickety-split to the top of the London fashion class. Hence a godet skirt, so difficult to engineer print-wise that she made only four of them. Or frothing torrents of chiffon. Or a strictly corseted shape she'd extracted from some historical research (specifically Elizabethan England) without, she was quick to add, "crossing into the territory of costume."
Katrantzou also extended her repertoire in other ways. For the first time, she focused on a single color top-to-toe, like the crayons on her invitation. And she'd chosen deliberately banal subject matter to match the colors. Green meant grass, for instance, rendered as an ornamental lawn working its way down a floor-length gown. Yellow was expressed in a mandala of No. 2 HB pencils, erasers attached. They were rendered in rubber by the Lesage embroidery atelier in Paris—not only the first time Lesage's artisans had worked with such stuff, but also their first collaboration with a London designer. Clocks, hedges, telephones, spoons, and forks also provided source material. The bodice of a rococo red velvet dress featured a red typewriter, its keys providing a coiling abstract geometry on the skirt.
The serial patterning was so intense at times that it made you feel like the one person who couldn't make out the 3-D image in those Magic Eye pictures that were a minor craze a few years back. As everyone else shouted, one after another, "Oh, yes, I see it now," you'd be chewing on your pen in a blind rage. But Katrantzou's conceits were so beautifully conceptualized—here never more so than with the bathtub that foamed with crystals and pearls—that her elevation of the quotidian to the sublime was, once again, easily one of the finest pieces of theater in London fashion week.
—Tim Blanks
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Osman
 Osman Yousefzada keeps barreling forward into uncharted territory. Last season, his rigorous shapes softened into something looser and sexier, and this time he allowed himself the high drama of highly decorative fabrics.
He started small. The first look out was a typically austere ensemble of a crisp white shirt and pants with mere glints of rich brocade in the collar and in a pair of lace-up booties. You imagine that the power woman who loves Yousefzada's talent for making precise, Philo-esque smart clothing might allow herself such a flourish, or perhaps the flash from the lining of a properly minimal crepe and leather pop-over dress. But credit the designer for keeping lines sharp even when he let fly from head to toe in the more baroque fare, such as a portrait-collar jacket or cape with chic little matching cropped pants.
Backstage, Yousefzada cited as inspiration the photographic collection of philanthropist Albert Kahn, who sent bands of photographers all around the globe between 1909 and 1931 to create a visual record of the world. But in a way, this brocade-centric collection mirrors Yousefzada's own story as a British-born son of Afghan immigrants, both traversing the same Silk Road. He pared everything away at the beginning of his career to give himself a fresh slate and avoid the ethnic pigeonhole. But this squaring of his East–West exchange is a welcome evolution.
—Meenal Mistry
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McQ
 Right away, a question presented itself at the McQ show this evening. Guests were still taking their seats, crunching the catwalk's carpet of faded autumn leaves underfoot, and suddenly the thought occurred: Hey, it's not fall anywhere right now. Where did those leaves come from? Did the Alexander McQueen team have them specially aged for the show in a gradually cooling greenhouse? Is there a prop house in London that keeps bags of leaves lying around for just this kind of event?
Backstage, after the show, the leaves question was posed to Alexander McQueen's creative director, Sarah Burton. She asked around, and got back the following answer: The leaves came from trees.
Sometimes the answer to a seemingly knotty question is staring you right in the face. So it is with McQ, a brand that has coexisted uneasily with Alexander McQueen since its launch not quite six years ago. Tonight, showing McQ on the catwalk for the first time ever, Burton resolved everything that had been vexing about it: As she explained, the way to make McQ work was to start with the assumption that clothes should be beautiful, at any price. The clothes on the leafy runway were indeed beautiful; Burton shook out the key elements of the McQueen aesthetic—the romance, the dark glamour, the mind-blowing tailoring—and, rather than dumbing them down, expressed them in an accessible way. The showstoppers were the nipped-waist evening dresses, appliquéd with multicolor flowers and floating on a sea of tulle, but even the simplest pieces were refined in their construction and felt luxe in their details. To wit, in the collection's group of military-inspired menswear, a Persian lamb collar on a trench gave the coat a sense of specificity and richness, while the battered knit of an army crewneck provided the sweater with that McQueen grace note, a sense of time.
Unsurprisingly, the women's looks were more fanciful. The show started on a note of plainness, with felted wool outerwear in blocked combinations of tan and hunter green. But the drama in the womenswear amped up quickly, with heavily embroidered sculpted skirts and coats giving on to bustier-chested evening dresses topped with gothic black lace. Even the outerwear silhouettes became more vivid: One excellent look was the precisely tailored coat in Black Watch plaid with its dramatic flare. Finally, the last look appeared: a New Look-style dress in white, which nearly matched the pallor of the model wearing it. That model was Kristen McMenamy, and she proceeded to give a little dumb play, seizing a rope from under the leaves and pulling it to lead her to the slowly illuminated forest that had been created at the back of the runway. There was a small building set amid the trees—a woodshed perhaps? Or a mausoleum?—and McMenamy followed the rope all the way into it and disappeared. Just when you were thinking this was some kind of metaphor for death, a neon light flipped on in the cabin: the Core Club. A four-on-the-floor dance beat picked up. Are they raving in heaven? A question for another day.
—Maya Singer
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Fashion East
 As is widely acknowledged, the London fashion industry is second to none when it comes to supporting and developing new talent. Fashion East, among all the local programs for emerging designers, remains the keenest talent spotter; director Lulu Kennedy has excellent, eclectic taste. The trio of designers on the Fashion East runway this evening certainly represented a motley crew: First up was Maarten van der Horst, an accomplished tailor and a bit of a ham; next down the runway was Marques'Almeida, a brand almost dirgelike in its grunginess; the final act was Fashion East veteran James Long, a menswear designer and knitwear specialist who has definitely earned a solo spot on the London fashion week calendar next season.
Van der Horst brings a lot of wit to his clothes, and a great deal of technical know-how. For this collection, his second, he put a sexy spin on menswear shirting, turning crisp poplins and striped cottons into tailored bodysuits, and setting them off with cheesy satin florals. The bodysuits weren't altogether convincing, but the satin stuff worked, in particular the collection's quilted blazer-style jackets in white-on-white and red printed florals. Van der Horst definitely has a strong point of view, but he's still in the process of fleshing it out.
Marques'Almeida doesn't lack for point of view, either: Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida distress denim with a single-minded gloominess. The look is striking; this season's skate-inspired black and yellow clothes, all oversized and ripped to hell, had a kind of desolate grandeur. The collection was a little one-dimensional, but these pieces will be pulled a lot by fashion editors, and some of the more circumspect looks, like the frayed skate shorts and decayed knits and leathers, will attract shoppers. (Pieces from the debut Marques'Almeida collection for Spring 2012 were picked up by Opening Ceremony—a store that's no slouch at seeing a niche market.)
James Long was taking his third, and final, turn on the Fashion East runway this evening, and the collection he showed was proof that he's used his tenancy to hone his womenswear to a fine point. This was a strong, well-made, distinctive collection, commencing with a series of hugely appealing intarsia knit dresses limbed with gold. Long showed that he can do more than just knits: His printed velvet pieces were knockouts, and the quilted leather jackets with hand-knit sleeves were both beautifully executed and a lot of fun. Onward and upward.
—Maya Singer
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Giles
 The tale Giles Deacon began to spin for Fall was that of a stately country home accidentally ablaze on an arctic winter's night. "I just had this idea of someone rushing out of a beautiful house," Deacon said backstage before the show. "It's burning down, and what are you going to take?"
One very acceptable answer to that could be these clothes. This collection yielded some truly beautiful things, romantic with macabre bite, pumped up by a couturier's eye for detail. What's impressive is how they fit Deacon's new direction of well-made clothes for women of means, while still nestled comfortably into the narrative at hand.
Deacon set the darkly enchanted tone with the first exit: a high club-collared tuxedo accessorized by a menacing black plumed scarecrowlike helmet—this season's version of Spring's swan headpieces, also made by Stephen Jones. He quickly segued from governess strictness to lady-of-the-house softness. A painterly print echoed a burnt tapestry; it was cut into a chiffon blouse, tucked into a matching skirt of sharply razored organza ruffles that spilled dyed-to-match feathers at its hem. The thorns from Deacon's frozen garden were transformed into laser-cut satins and a rich metallic lace. And in this fairy tale an icy blue brocade tapestry—populated, if you looked closely, with unicorns and other mythical creatures—seemed to have been ripped from the wall and transformed, through some sort of fashion wizardry, into a strapless mullet-skirted dress or an evening jacket to elegantly cover up a burnt and water-stained tulle gown. Catastrophe was rarely so chic. And though the collection might have skewed a bit prim and proper for those who love Deacon's antic side, inside it still burned with a magical and mischievous spirit.
—Meenal Mistry
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Burberry Prorsum
 For Christopher Bailey, the title of his latest Burberry show, Town and Field, signified two worlds whose codes didn't match. And he wanted to try and make them. It was a kind of metaphor for Bailey's big challenge of the moment—merging Burberry's physical and digital aspects—which sounds like a much more daunting task than sticking herringbone bellows pockets on a tweed pencil skirt, one of the ways field met town in today's show. Another striking match was the brown corduroy jacket belted over a burgundy lace skirt with a substantial peplum.
The peplum and nipped waist were vintage details Bailey carried over from pre-fall, with its echoes of the thirties and forties, but where that collection tended more to the austerity of the war years, this one had a little more flounce. Another key piece was a pencil skirt with a big diagonal ruffle. It had some shimmy to counterbalance the peplum's occasional clunk. And it said "town" whatever piece of cropped outerwear it was paired with. So did floral-print faille and the tiers of fringes on Jourdan Dunn's cocktail dress. "Field" was represented by a herringbone jacket lined in shearling, a waxed cotton parka, and country critters like sparrows, owls, and doggies naïvely embroidered on shirts, and printed or appliquéd on oversize striped tees. A capacious bottle green cardigan was comfy enough for country life, but its stylish swing back gave it some urban smarts.
Such an item suggested that, Bailey's reservations aside, the division between city and country was really somewhat artificial in a collection that wove a story out of Burberry's outerwear expertise and Bailey's ongoing fascination with casually gilded youth. There's something almost melancholy about such an idea. Gilded youth will inevitably tarnish. Maybe that's why rain is a recurrent motif in Burberry-world. Today's show climaxed with an artful thundershower beating down on the transparent tent, while faux rain fell inside on the brolly-bearing models. Then again, perhaps the rain was just another metaphor, this time for all the money showering down on Burberry.
—Tim Blanks
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Mark Fast
 Mark Fast's show today represented a welcome return to form for the designer. Put simply, the clothes here were realistic: Though Fast didn't stint on the skintight, barely there dresses for which he's best known, and though he did allow himself a few oddball embellishments, he also sent out a plethora of pieces that had universal appeal. Chief among these were the many knit garments in Fast's variegated stripes. The crop tops and fitted skirts had a sporty mien that lent a new dimension to his signature sexiness; meanwhile, the stripes added a graphic edge to the cozy, oversize wool cardigans and jackets. Elsewhere, the designer asserted some discipline over his feral fringes, saving the look for cool, hairlike shrugs and a few voluminous coats. Despite all the layers, this collection had a cleaner look than that of recent Fast seasons, and the clothes appeared better fitted and finished. The trademark hedonism remained intact, but it was expressed with a nice sense of refinement.
—Maya Singer
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