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Zero + Maria Cornejo goes bold on basics

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Local manufacturing. Eco-friendly fabrics. A sustainable design ethos. ApparelMagic client Maria Cornejo’s values reflect everything we want to see in the fashion industry. And more than that, they seem totally authentic to her.

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At her latest Zero+Maria Cornejo collection shown at New York Fashion Week, Cornejo pared back her designs to simple, elegant shapes. These are clothes that will last the test of time, with knockout draped gowns, cozy outerwear, and classic separates.

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Minimal doesn’t mean boring, however. A selection of garments from jumpsuit to coat in a tomato red corduroy were bold and camera ready, while her shearling trimmed leather coats are a street style snapper’s dream.

Nicole Miller’s girls are a little bit punk, a little bit rock and roll

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ApparelMagic client Nicole Miller keeps her finger on the pulse of the fashion. Hitting all the trends out of the ballpark at her New York Fashion Week show this week, she imbued her vision of the Nicole Miller girl with a hint of borrowed-from-the-boys style.

Her signature cool girls this season walked the runway with a more punkish vibe than usual. Wearing layered leathers, plaids, and sweats, these girls took these menswear standards and recombined them in nonchalantly with classic dresses and skirts.

Patches, a huge trend already making its way over from Europe, were well represented in Miller’s line, with stars and crests and text piled onto velour hoodies, leather jackets, and even eveningwear.

Florals, too, got an upgrade. Mixing multiple grungy flower prints together on the same dresses, she made the girly staple androgynous and edgy. Camo even got in the act when it was overprinted in metallic blossoms.

At New York Fashion Week, Eckhaus Latta puts out its most mature show yet

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Just as the fashion world is getting comfortable calling Eckhaus Latta the hot young thing, designers Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus showed they are capable of dressing not just über cool clubbers but now arty intelligentsia too.

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This season’s big ticket at New York Fashion Week, the ApparelMagic client showed in a huge industrial space deep in Brooklyn. Beginning their runway show with a cycle of professional wear in creamy eggshells and greys, it was clear this show would be the pair’s most successful foray into the big leagues.

A twenty first century Jackie O suit rendered in thick, color-blocked knitwear, was paired with sheer gloves and worn with just the right amount of irony.

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Another knitted pattern, this time in grey and orange, appeared on a male model in the form of a crew neck sweater in one look, and later showed up sewn as a cocktail dress on a female plus size model, demonstrating Eckhaus Latta’s inclusive philosophy with ease.

Indeed, in a climate where fashion is figuring out how it fits, Eckhaus Latta is disrupting the status quo and bringing the industry into 2018.

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Sea is reinventing stylish staples

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Always centered on the target and hitting the trends at the exact right moment, Sean Monahan and Monica Paolini’s brand Sea constantly puts out the kind of clothes that ahead-of-the-curve women want.

Never fussy or attention-hogging, the ApparelMagic client’s prefall collection stood out for the very items that made it blend it: classic styles with of-the-moment updates.

Sticking with a nipped waist and accentuating it with flared skirts and voluminous sleeves, the proportions were as sophisticated as they were flattering.

Balloon-leg pants were cropped at the ankle and hung off a wide waistband. A striped blouse turned professional dressing on its head with its leg o’ mutton sleeves.

Other looks were decorated with folk motifs, like a navy prairie dress banded with ribbons of trims. Worn open at the neck and with a pair of sandals, the look was less pioneer woman and more Greek-isle honeymooner.

The Sea girl, though, is no stranger to a bit of fun, and with pom poms and ruffles on lace tops with billowy sleeves and statement shoulders, she definitely got it.

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Jonathan Simkhai is Fashion’s Renaissance Man

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For his Pre-Fall 2018 lookbook, über-romantic Jonathan Simkhai went back to the source material and put out a collection deeply engaged with fashion history. While he might be known for his flamboyant uses of denim and silky lingeries, Simkhai is never confined with referencing just the recent past. Here, he went full-on renaissance with clothes that merged his brand’s glam girls with the aristocratic muses of the sixteenth century.

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Suiting was of the seventies double-breasted variety, but updated with cutouts and slashing not seen this masterful since maybe the Holbein the Younger back in 1540. The slashing, going down pantlegs, was inventively stapled together for a modern take on the decadent look.

Other highlights included a slip dress in an inky blue picked up the light like an oil painting. An ultra-covetable robe coat in rusty satin had sleeves ingeniously tucked into decadent folds like it was just ripped from a Michelangelo.

Simkhai’s jeans were not totally absent however—here he just did it with a nod to the past, like a stand-out denim jacket with puff sleeves. Renaissance man indeed.

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ApparelMagic clients wear white at New York Bridal Fashion Week

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New York Bridal Fashion Week designers, including ApparelMagic clients, showed that wedding gowns don’t have to be simple white strapless dresses anymore. In fact, sometimes they don’t have to be white, or even dresses.

Sachin & Babi tried out a range of silhouette options, from classic ballgowns to a white silk track jacket with flared pants. The real excitement, however, was a sequined T-shirt thrown over a simple tulle skirt. Unpretentious and nowhere near fussy, it is the perfect combination for the modern bride.

The eveningwear extraordinaires at Badgley Mischka know how to do a mermaid dress like no one else. They played with this shape in nearly every permutation, ranging from bias-cut shifts from the golden age of Hollywood to versions with long lace trains dripping with embroidery.

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Naeem Khan, undoubtably a maximalist at heart, isn’t afraid of anything. With a luxurious variety of silhouettes on display, any bride who finds traditions stuffy can find a beaded jumpsuit, a marabou feather hem, or gowns in blush and pale pink that will suit her fancy.

Public School knows what’s cool

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Public School designers Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne have their fingers on the pulse of culture. For these two, it’s not just about clothes. Public School, an ApparelMagic client, is their laboratory for testing advanced fashion and sharing it with the world. This season, that meant midriffs, sheer outerwear, and harnesses everywhere.

Starting with the first look down the runway, an oversize plaid shirt with one side covered over with convenience store plastic bag prints like “Come Again” and safety disclaimers, you could tell this was another of their bids to combine scene-stealing fashion with a political message. The designers combined the fabrics (denim, nylon, and cotton jersey) of utilitarian workwear with the shapes (baggy pants, hoodies, and crop tops) of streetwear and came up with everything great about fashion today.

Heavy on the proletariat vibes, even Public School’s latest collaboration, seen in the collection’s blinding white activewear, was with Air Jordan, much more accessible than the European luxury brands some of their peers have teamed up with. That’s not to say that anything was lacking on the glamorous side of things, however. You can find in the collection a leather corset belt and a green ruffled cocktail dress, but in true Public School fashion, they were styled with a denim Canadian tuxedo and a sweatshirt, respectively.

Robert Rodriguez is seeing stripes for spring

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Ten years after the first iPhone was released and in a time when the thought of dial-up internet is positively nostalgic, it seems like the time is just right to have a fond look back at recent history. Robert Rodriguez’s spring collection, presented at New York Fashion Week, was full of allusions to artist and stripe aficionado Daniel Buren’s body of work, but in the millennial mind, it reads as an homage to all the stripes, dots, and gradient fills of a circa 1990 Macintosh Classic.

More Apple Watch than vintage Mac though, Rodriguez, an ApparelMagic client, used many of the graphics Buren is famous for, making them totally up to date by adding them to classic sportswear shapes. Simple shirts were updated with mismatched stripes that went vertical on one side and horizontal on the other. White-on-black polka dots covered a shirtdress with a daring slit. The suiting went a similar route, like the oversize white plastic buttons sewn across an indigo double-breasted jacket. This is the eighties through a very flattering filter.

Rodriguez’s vision for the season kept the shapes simple and direct, but these artful mashups made for visual statements much stronger than each idea on its own. In one look, a simple dotted slip dress was worn casually over cropped pants. Another dress deftly combined a harsh yellow-green with black stripes. These elements should not go together, but with Rodriguez’s eye for juxtaposition, they look spot on for spring.

Thom Browne’s dreams come true in Paris

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It’s only a pipe dream for many fashion designers to show a collection in Paris, the undisputed capital of fashion, but for New York-based ApparelMagic client Thom Browne, it’s now reality. Relocating his seasonal presentations to the French capital gives his inventive designs the creative context they deserve, and, if his first collection is any indication, catapults his brand even farther into the land of pure imagination.

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Showing in the opulent reception hall of the Paris Hôtel de Ville, Browne orchestrated a nighttime fantasy that he imagined takes place in young girls’ heads as they nod off. This was dreaming in the very literal sense, with discordant images of fantasy creatures flittering through the subconscious, from a trio of interpretive dancers dressed like Venuses of Willendorf in voluptuous suits of latex and lace, to a mermaid dress taken at its word, with the skirt parting at the feet to form two scaly flippers in periwinkle tulle. Another look cocooned the wearer and framed her face like a deep-sea cephalopod colored in by Gustav Klimt.

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In easier to digest, but no less ingenious propositions, Browne’s signature suiting showed up for a turn down the runway, but only after being filtered in a somnambulant haze, like his traditionally wool pleated skirt here in fuzzy Mongolian lamb or a colorful madras jacket here sparkling with rows of sequins. An exploded check topcoat sat over a zippered button-down in another look, proving that Browne is a master of putting a spin on a staple.

By the end of the show though, the message was clear. Browne is a fantasist first and foremost, and he closed on a high note: a life-size unicorn puppet, lead by three attendants in head-to-toe sheer organza.

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Zero + Maria Cornejo experiments at New York Fashion Week

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For ApparelMagic client Zero + Maria Cornejo’s show at New York Fashion Week, the conversation is squarely on the body. How do we cover ourselves? Should our clothes encase us tightly, following every muscle and curve, or should they sit around us, forming silhouettes entirely separate?

Cornejo played with both of these ideas, finding a happy medium as she is seemingly able to do with all things. With opening numbers mixing pink, red, and tangerine satins, she made loose volumes that generously encircled the body like the folds of an Indian sari. A jacket in an off-white neoprene seemed to rigidly float on top of the body when at rest, but in motion it creased gently at every limb’s movement.

Using black and white natural fibers in other looks, Cornejo and her team moved between these two ideas seamlessly. Some dresses stayed taut against the front of the body but in the back hung in deflated ovoid shapes.

Beyond contours, the designer used surface decoration to her advantage too. Words were scrawled in indigo across dresses and draped diagonally across the body. Candy stripes in red or blue covered some of the looks, like a long column dress with a band of ruching from shoulder to ankle.

Commanding in her implementation of all of these ideas, Cornejo knows what women want from her. Luckily her brand, now in its twentieth year, knows exactly how to do it with aplomb.

Nicole Miller on Safari

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After last season’s nineties grunge theme, Nicole Miller took on something totally different for spring. Under a moody canopy of tropical flora, her collection at New York Fashion Week was a vision of a jungle paradise where the ground is hard enough for heels and the heat bearable enough to layer a cute leather jacket. In short, less Tarzan and more Jane.

Miller’s models looked like explorers in their many-pocketed jackets and utilitarian belts. Rendered in traditional olive drab and khaki gabardines, these safari separates were refreshed with peplums and well-tailored shorts. Beyond the cargo pockets there were palm-print dresses and a black lace take on Yves Saint Laurent’s famous “Saharienne” dress.

Other looks stole the bright colors of exotic rainforest blooms, like an orchid print in eighties laser show pink and teal. Another paired those orchids with leopard’s spots, parrots, and a resist-dyed border in a knowing mashup of rainforest clichés.

Perhaps the most interesting of Miller’s garments were her cocktail dresses, like one in sheer white chiffon with macrame overlays or another that was covered in what looked like stripes but turned out to be many grosgrain ribbons cinched with expedition style D-rings. Miller designs clothes to make the perfect statement at any event, even when it’s a jungle jamboree.

Jill Stuart celebrates 25 years

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2018 is going to be a year of reflection for ApparelMagic client Jill Stuart. Since her line’s inception in 1993, it has been a consistent power player at New York Fashion Week.

For the label’s 25th anniversary, Stuart took a look back at the archives. Stuart has plenty of material to draw from, with iconic looks like Alicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash’s unforgettable plaid school-girl looks in the 1995’s Clueless movie.

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But as tempting as referencing that cultural touchstone must have been, the designer came at her previous work from another angle, creating a collection that looks like it was pulled from some paradise of a vintage store where they sell only the hits.

Using much of the spring ’18 line to play with opacity and layering, Stuart combined sheer shirtwaist dresses with floral shirts and accessorized lacy cocktail wear with clear plastic belts.

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Sticking to a very seventies theme, the prairie dresses harkened back to Picnic at Hanging Rock, and the suiting was Annie Hall perfection. With polka-dotted pussy bow shirts and wide-leg trousers looser than we saw in years, spring’s looks are a throwback in the best possible way.

If Jill Stuart’s first 25 years in the industry are any indication, she’ll still be moving fashion forward 25 years from now.

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