NEW YORK – Loose, billowy dresses and short skirts are among the trends emerging in the early days of New York Fashion Week. Metallics still have a presence on the runway, and the favorite colors all seem to be a variation of sand.
Gold was seen throughout Nicole Miller's collection, as well as newcomer Sabyasachi Mukherjee's designs, while Alice Roi's palette included cream, tan and white.
But the true bellwether collections that could indicate where fashion will go for spring 2007 — including Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein and Vera Wang — are still to come. When things wrap up Friday, some 100 designers will have shown their upcoming styles.
Alice Roi: Roi presented a collection of crisp wearable dresses, shirts and skirts Saturday, layering a tan dress with a navy cardigan and another with a rib knit vest. Accents included double belts and zippers. Roi showed a blue Austrian paisley dress and white pinpoint shirt paired with a black jacket and a black zipper dress over a blue paisley pinpoint shirt. The collection also included a striped green dress worn with a cream jacket.
Nicole Miller: Miller dug deep for this collection — and found gold.
The theme at the Friday-night show was Mayan culture, which was translated into loose tops and dresses with metallic embroidery and tight stretch metallic skirts. There also was a lovely strapless gown in an exotic print that mixed brown and cream with touches of periwinkle and light purple. (The same print was also featured on a short, sassy sundress.)
All the colors, including a brownish-red dubbed "clay," seemed to be softened just a bit by the sun.
There were clothes for work — a tiered blouse paired with an embroidered skirt — and even more for play, including a smock-style dress with a gold embroidered neck, a square-neck sundress and an ivory crocheted dress to cover a Mayan-print swimsuit.
Baby Phat: The good news from Baby Phat is that one could picture the young hipsters who go to city clubs wearing many of the outfits previewed on the catwalk. The bad news is that the emphasis was on everything but the clothes at Kimora Lee Simmons' filled-to-capacity show Friday night.
First, there were the celebrities in the audience, including 50 Cent and "The Sopranos" stars Lorraine Bracco and Jamie-Lynn Sigler; then the hour-long wait for the first model to step onto the runway. And what was she wearing? A jeweled grill over her teeth, imaginably to give her street cred.
It would have been OK to distract attention away from that first look — a sparkly red-and-purple cowl top with denim shorts — but the loose white tunic tops that came next could have stood on their own. The same could be said for the jersey dresses, the scarf-style dresses and a gray denim suit with cigarette pants.
But Simmons went too far with some outfits, including a sequined bikini bottom topped with jeweled fanny packs and a short jumpsuit in red with brown leather trim.
Sabyasachi: Sabyasachi Mukherjee is among the newcomers showing at New York Fashion Week, and distinctive fabrics are a hallmark of his collections. At Saturday's runway show, Mukherjee's designs featured a patchwork of colors, fabrics and embellishments including gold sequins and hand embroidery. Many of his dresses were loose and flowing, in a variety of lengths, featuring colors of green, red and gold.
Tom Julian, director of trends for McCann-Erickson, said, "This Indian designer has shown us the hand-woven look with rich fabrics and modern embellishments, but more importantly, has taken Western silhouettes — the blouson, the cowl back and the A-line — and is making a strong signature for a young designer."
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox