The Antonio Berardi woman is usually a femme fatale, fitted or zipped into the kind of dress that promises to turn every girl into an Italian bombshell—or Christina Hendricks. For his pre-collection, the designer also offered some knitted tank dresses that raised the body-con thermostat. But he expanded his periphery to include experiments with new volumes, especially a pleated bubble (though it still came attached to a fitted tank top) and skirts with a slight flare. There was a slight clunk to the bubble, which also came through in a jacket sleeve set under a shoulder pad, or a jacket body that was folded into itself (although that could be considered a topical Inception-like effect).
More pleasing was the virginal Catholicism of a dress that was composed from layers of white handkerchief cotton and lace with lace hankies sewn on top. It illuminated a hard/soft dichotomy in the collection, as in a shirt/jacket hybrid where the top half of the piece was sheer lace and chiffon and the bottom half was a solid crepe peplum. Same thing with the colors—the rigor of black and white, the flyaway ice-creaminess of fuchsia, mango, peppermint. The overall feel was that Berardi was toying with contrasting ideas that he will resolve more fully in his Spring collection. In the meantime, a spirit of perverse whimsy dictated that his yellow chiffon caftan summoned from the graveyard of camp the specter of Elizabeth Taylor in Boom! —Tim Blanks
Big Spenders: Seventh on Sale Gala Attracts an A-list Crowd
Kitted out like the courtyard of a medieval castle, complete with fake torches, the 69th Regiment Armory was filled to bursting with deeply discounted designer merchandise and eager shoppers in the form of Valentino, Ralph Lauren, Giambattista Valli, Iman, Eve, and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
Comparison Shopping: We pit two much-hyped new style guides against a classic of the genre
With Victoria Beckham and Rachel Zoe's new style guides hitting the bookstores, we decided to test the authors' fashion sense against that of designer Anne Fogarty's 50-year-old gem, Wife Dressing.
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