Daily Front Row

2011 September 30

Spring 2012: Roland Mouret, Hussein Chalayan

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Roland Mouret Spring 2012
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(PARIS) Roland Mouret
The master of the angular, nipped, tucked, knee-grazing sheath silhouette favored by lunching ladies with fabulous figures, Mouret turned out fresh takes on his perfected frock adeptness. A series of subdued B&W patterns were trotted out avec reined-in dolman sleeves and a flirty eye-shaped cutout at the waist on one look, taking the form of blouson wrap tops and dresses in other iterations. A fitted pencil skirt in robin’s egg blue got sauced up with a vampy crisscrossed noir crop top, while roomy suiting in shades of ivory, and handsome hues of midnight squared off with shapely shoulder epaulets in black. Besides the recurrent, slightly cheeky riff on an evil eye, Mouret peppered slinky day dresses in navy and coral with a scattering of contrastive tulip blooms, culminating his wearable, if not wild, latest with a bit of day-to-night in bone-accented black. All in all? Wearable and polished, if not wild or particularly adventurous, with a whiff of restrained sexiness. 

Hussein Chalayan
A master of high-concept, occasionally maximalist fashion has gone minimal—to brilliant results. For the first "story" in his collection, anyway, Chalayan went with angular, ultra-lean jackets (in the shades of white and blush that have made Stella Stella McCartney a wealthy woman), and the occasional Calvin-esque t-shirt style dress. As usual, his take on flora and fauna prints was the major message, with a blurred wallpaper motif showing up in both slip and shirtdresses. He also played with the idea of absence by removing large roughly geometric shapes of sheath dresses and tunics, and letting a printed piece show through underneath. Novel? For sure. But not quite as rainmaking.