The Council of Fashion Designers of America announced this year’s nominees for the CFDA Awards at an event Wednesday night at the New Museum in New York.

Included on the short list in the nominations presented by the CFDA’s Diane von Furstenberg and Nadja Swarovski was ApparelMagic client and veteran CFDA award-winner Thom Browne and his iconic shrunken grey flannel suits.

Browne has received this distinction twice in the past, having been named Menswear Designer of the Year by the CFDA in 2006 and 2013.

A post shared by Thom Browne (@thombrowneny) on Apr 24, 2017 at 9:49am PDT

The 2016 CFDA Awards will take place in New York on June 6. See the full list of CFDA nominees for 2016 here.

For over 30 years, ApparelMagic, the leading apparel management software, has been at the forefront of technology and the cutting edge of fashion in the industry, helping businesses manage styles, customers, sales, inventory and accounting.

Jill Stuart

– Whereas last season Jill Stuart went to Studio 54 via a retro helping of minimalism, this time around she went full-on glam maximalist.While definitely a departure for a label with a more classically feminine reputation, the show hit all the trends squarely on the head.

Shiny and sparkly, velvet and fishnets, ruffles and rhinestones: this collection has everything a 24/7 party girl could need. The sheer variety of garments to choose from was the first sign Stuart was onto something new. Pants alone varied from fitted and timeless all the way to midnight blue velvet gauchos with hems that looked as wide as circle skirts.

The cocktailwear, a Stuart signature, had the same wide range, with highlights including a leather button-front pencil skirt paired with a puff sleeve blouse in inky taffeta.

The most interesting looks, however, were a set of long ruffled garments that looked like wild west Victoriana by way of the 1970s. This was Jill Stuart at her most fashion forward, hitting all the right notes.

A photo posted by JILL STUART (@jillstuart) on Feb 17, 2016 at 6:21am PST

Hanley

Endlessly traveling the world, Nicole Hanley’s latest collection was inspired by a recent trip behind the scenes at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

The presentation during New York Fashion Week featured the models posed on pedestals like priceless artwork behind giant gilded frames For the Hanley customer, a wardrobe that translates seamlessly from winter in New York to an outdoor restaurant on the Riviera is an absolute must, and that seasonless quality shaped Hanley’s offerings.

A lightweight dress hits just high enough above the knee to work for a caribbean vacation, but paired with tall boots as it was in Hanley’s presentation, seems just right for a night out come winter in some faraway European capital.

A photo posted by HANLEY (@hanleynyc) on Feb 15, 2016 at 12:58pm PST

Hood By Air

While new ideas at fashion week are generally limited to new ways to cut a dress or wear a hairstyle, some designers go above and beyond with their concepts, skirting the line between art and apparel. Shayne Olivier at Hood By Air showed he is one of those designers as he presented a follow up to his men’s couture show in January.

Imbued with political subtexts, his clothes were aggressively androgynous and undoubtably avant garde. Styled with airport accoutrements like baggage tags, luggage straps, and a roll of bright red shrink-wrap, there was a definite undercurrent of movement, with critics drawing a comparison to the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, where Oliver is finding more and more success.

Several looks were anchored with bulky Wellington boots, ready for all weather, and puffer jackets, while in another a model lifted a full-length puffer jacket over his head as if he an athlete hoisting his country’s flag after a winning goal.

A photo posted by Kaltblut Magazine (@kaltblut_magazine) on Feb 18, 2016 at 7:43am PST

by Ian Laughead

Thom Browne

Set in New York City between the wars, Thom Browne’s fall show was a veritable piece of theatre. Models slowly wandered down pathways in a set built up as a city park surrounded by canvas-fronted rowhouses.

A photo posted by Thom Browne (@thombrowneny) on Feb 15, 2016 at 3:43pm PST

Moving from the deconstruction of his men’s collection for fall, Browne turned to reconstruction. Coats were sewn together to look as if they are falling off one another, and shirts and jackets were hybridized into single, asymmetrical pieces. The finale wedding dress combined a tea-length dress with a half dozen pieces of sheer outerwear trailing behind.

Much like his recent men’s show, Browne used a variety of dog motifs, from opening the show with a male model walking a mechanical toy version, to a gossamer duster jacket with the canines woven into the jacquard.

Collaborating with milliner Stephen Jones, windblown ties on each model turned into inventive fascinators.
Zero + Maria Cornejo

Maria Cornejo’s latest collection was as jet-set as they come, but with none of the glossy overtness other designers propose.

A photo posted by PR Consulting (@prconsulting) on Feb 15, 2016 at 4:47pm PST

Seamlessly assembling a set of international inspirations, Cornejo put outerwear down the runway in the form of belted blankets, leather kimono vests, and pieced-cowhide ponchos.

Well-traveled prints of unclear provenance and layers both cozy and diaphanous filled the collection, and for each furry cape there was an equally exciting–and equally wearable–silky caftan to go with it.

The event, shown back-to-front with the finale at the beginning and the individual looks shown after, could feel like a shock value tactic in less able hands, but with Cornejo’s subtle design sensibilities, it served more to instill the spirit of the collection from the outset.

Closing Paris Men’s Fashion Week for the fall/winter 2016 season were Thom Browne and Hood By Air, both ApparelMagic clients. These two avant-garde labels chose very different routes for their events: Browne, an unstoppable showman, staged a spectacle in a giant event space, while Shayne Oliver showed his Hood By Air collection to an intimate group, reportedly blocking even cell phone snapshots from being taken.

If one can expect anything from a Hood By Air collection, it’s that everything will be an experiment. The time slot was positioned so close to the following Haute Couture shows that even Vogue is calling Oliver’s effort couture. The garments actually on the runway are somehow at once fit for both an underground hip-hop music video and a esoteric museum exhibit. Androgynous in the extreme, the looks were shown were voluminous streetwear staples atop stiletto-heeled boots, some in patent leather. Puffer jacket hybrids topped fishnets, a snorkel-hooded jacket had its own train, and one look paired baggy trousers with a bright yellow pleated skirt. With all these ideas, Oliver was able to flex his design muscles in Paris. For the upcoming New York Fashion week, however, he’ll have a new Hood By Air collection. One that has that same HBA cool factor with a more wearable point of view.

A photo posted by Thom Browne (@thombrowneny) on Jan 24, 2016 at 3:00pm PST

Thom Browne, a multiple-time CFDA winner, took a characteristically theatrical take on traditional dressing that enthralled audiences as they took to Instagram posting shots of a chandelier-dominated theatre-in-the-round. Browne’s models were grouped in sets of three, each in matching suiting and outerwear, but each in a difference stage of decay: from moth eaten and destroyed to brand new and immaculate.

With almost Magritte-esque bowler hats strapped to their faces, the models slowly orbited the room, some toting furry bags in the shape of small dogs. Amongst the pieces in the literally rags-to-riches collection, there were suits fully quilted in the shape of chevrons, furs pieced into complicated plaid patterns, and a final look that included a cape fully embroidered in pearls.

As fashion week continues on from New York to Europe, we take a moment to look at ApparelMagic clients’ hard-won victories during spring 2016’s edition of New York Fashion Week.

Hood By Air

It’s not often that a designer like Shayne Oliver, creative director of ApparelMagic client Hood By Air, can give his subversive take on both Jennifer Aniston’s hair and Kim Kardashian’s makeup and still end up impressing his audience with capital-F fashion, but as usual, Oliver’s done it again. The hair, based on the zig-zag center part of Aniston’s “Friends” character, and the makeup, a reference to the Kardashian clan by way of unblended, half-done conturing makeup, make up only the headline to the collection’s deconstructed assemblage of cutaway jeans, floor length dress shirts, and cropped takes on uniform dressing.

Never a stranger to outsize runway statements, Oliver emblazoned his HBA logo across school blazers and even tied several models’ arms behind their backs. The experimental shapes and angles he threw at the clothing bridge any divide that might be left today between streetwear and haute couture, and the clothes themselves are nearly androgynous, being showcased equally well on both men and women. Hood By Air might be a young brand, but its appeal–and its influence–are growing faster than ever.

Badgley Mischka

Held in this season’s favorite Fashion Week venue, Skylight at Moynihan Station, Mark Badgley and James Mischka showed their spring collection for ApparelMagic client Badgley Mischka infused with a new, airy elegance. The first look out was a buttery yellow jacket in a chunky tweed, paired with matching kicky shorts – a business suit for a Hamptons lawn rather than a stuffy board meeting.

In the audience, the designers’ famous friends including Dame Helen Mirren watched as embellished, pale looks filed past, each garment flowing or glinting with sparkle. Badgley Mischka played to their consistent strengths: feminine, easy daywear and goddess-style gowns with just the right amount of drama. The gowns, toward the end of the défilé, ranged from lingerie-inspired draperies in rose pink to dresses with slits-up-to-there in the best taste of 40’s Hollywood glamour. These are clothes that are never too fussy, but instead timelessly classic and flattering.

Jill Stuart

Jill Stuart’s spring collection felt like a love letter to the 1970’s, celebrating and exaggerating the decade’s most iconic–and somehow incredibly relevant–looks. There were some updated peasant tops with high necks and blousey sleeves here and some sleek statement flares there. The front row was full of A list celebrities like Solange Knowles, who would be stunning in Stuart’s pale pink ruffled crop tops, and teenage sensation Bella Thorne, who could step right onto the red carpet in one of the collection’s creamy satin one-shoulder cocktail dresses.

It wasn’t an unconsidered blast from the past though, as each time Stuart plucked a trend from the seventies, she masterfully remixed it into something that looked poised to step down to the dance floor at some 2015 downtown version of New York’s famed Studio 54. Caftans, for instance, aren’t used as an exotic reference as they pass through Stuart’s hands, ending up on the runway in black spangled in stars over a blush-toned trouser. Indeed, the entire collection felt perfectly at home in both 1977 and 2015.

Thom Browne

Another season, another outrageous spectacle from New York’s resident king of theatrics. This time around, the audience sat in a theater-in-the-round formation around a raw, timber-framed schoolhouse complete with desks. If that’s too simple there, Browne added disco floor lighting to the ceiling, and hung a few bushes and a picket fence around the perimeter, all upside down. Instead of turning fashion on its head, he rotated the whole world around it.

The clothes themselves are typical Browne inventiveness, all with origins in his trademark grey suit, but twisted in nearly unrecognizable ways. Models slowly strutted around the schoolhouse in pastel layers of topcoats, skirts, and shirts, each layered so that the shirt hem hung far below the bottom of skirt, in some cases all the way to the ankles. Each topcoat and jacket was painstakingly pieced together with Japanese-inspired motifs, some with bonsai crawling up the sleeves and another with a pastel geisha appliqué going from jacket lapel to skirt hem. This collection was one more hit in Thom Browne’s growing line of unforgettable shows.

Hanley

Though based in New York, ApparelMagic client Hanley is a brand of a thousand destinations, each one more nuanced and glamorous than the last. Nicole Hanley’s jetsetting inspiration this season took her collection to the city of Havana, Cuba. Materializing in a bright, diverse mix of separates, the line seems like it was brought home from her travels by an impossibly tasteful student during her gap year, and meticulously styled to this season’s sense of effortless perfection.

Rich mustard tones are paired with crisp poplin in some looks, and others include shorts or a vest in a luxuriously textured stripe inspired by Hanley’s travel to Cuba. Each look of the collection sits well with the others, but it will look even better on its own when a street style star inevitably snaps up one of the pieces–especially that suede pullover primed and ready to travel anywhere in the world and wherever Hanley takes it next.

Zero + Maria Cornejo

Maria Cornejo is a New York Fashion Week stalwart. Season in and season out, her line, Zero + Maria Cornejo, is always there, preaching its signature brand of conceptual minimalism. The clothes always hit those perfect balances between daydreamy beauty and urban utility, between flattering and interesting. This spring, she proposes oversized, draped volumes that wrap around the body softly and generously in her ever present neutrals. While in a few garments she takes on a bright, painterly print in yellow and blue, even that is set against serene monochromatic greys.

The rest of the collection sticks to a mostly black-and-white palette, each color keeping to itself in most cases until the last looks down the runway, when Cornejo’s fabric research skills really shine through a couple of dresses each with lasercut grids of black or white, sections rustling and peeling back as models moved through the space. Fashion week might be the busiest nine days on the calendar, but this ApparelMagic client is always there to slow time down with her ethereal creations.

An ApparelMagic client took home an awards at the 2015 CFDA Fashion Awards presented in New York City at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center.

Hood By Air’s creative director, Shane Oliver, received the Swarovski Award for Menswear. The brand’s signature mix of high fashion and streetwear continues to be a critical hit among the fashion press. The clothing has been featured in everything from the pages to vogue to the rails of influential retailer Dover Street Market.

For over 30 years, ApparelMagic, the leading apparel management software, has been at the forefront of technology and the cutting edge of fashion in the industry, helping businesses manage styles, customers, sales, inventory and accounting.

ApparelMagic Cloud gives its users the power of a fully integrated PLM/ERP/CRM system with optional accounting and manufacturing with the convenience and ease of a browser based solution. Accessible from Windows, Mac, iPad and Android, ApparelMagic Cloud is the future of apparel management.