Photo

Thom Browne, spring 2016.Credit Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

One of the weirder coincidences of New York Fashion Week is that it starts, almost exactly, on the first day of school in most of the city. The parallels of children going back to class and fashion going back to shows are hard to ignore. There’s something about the beginning of the season that feels like a continuing education course: The subjects, broadly, are the same, but the curriculum has been updated. It’s a week of cramming.

So it was apropos that Thom Browne decided to build an actual schoolroom for his show — or at least the idea of a schoolroom: skeletal walls filled with rows of old wooden desks, a composition notebook on each — the better to offer a course in uniform dressing, Eastern semiology and the myriad iterations of both. (Though the pair of lace-up-clad feet jutting from beneath the structure, suggesting a teacher that had been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, was a little unnerving.)

Using a strict set of constants (the Crombie coat, the schoolboy jacket, the button shirt, the pleated skirt) and a specific family of variables (classic student fabrics, from seersucker to oxford tweed, gingham and wool; classic Japanese decoration, including dragons, chrysanthemums and cranes), he produced evermore intricate and involved equations. An oxford-cloth geisha face was hand-pieced into wool and chiffon in varying shades of gray; mink, mohair and neoprene cut into cherry blossoms and set into tweed; silk shantung and mohair collaged into cotton seersucker.

Photo

Thom Browne built his own schoolroom and filled it with his riffs on a uniform.Credit Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

By the time the bride appeared in a pastel-tinted astrakhan overcoat over a tiered white linen skirt and jacket gleaming with translucent sequins, the whole had added up to not only counterintuitively alluring clothes (you wanted to get close to parse their components) but also evidence that the axiom that equates uniformity and monotony may be incorrect.

It was a master class in imagination and rigor, and an argument for the value of independent study. Not to mention the benefits, sometimes, of choosing depth over breadth.

Many of the usual fashion essentials, after all, were missing: There was no denim, no knitwear, no athleisure. No trousers. Did it matter? Not a whit.

Continue reading the main storySlide Show

Thom Browne: Spring 2016 RTW

CreditGio Staiano/NOWFASHION

Still, like most pedagogues, Mr. Browne is very sure of his own conclusions. Sometimes it’s useful to let a little air and uncertainty into the discussion, to leave room for personal interpretation. When it comes time for real-life application (real-woman application), there’s no such a thing as a universal right answer. That’s what makes fashion worth studying.

It’s also a basic principle of Maria Cornejo, where sweeping dusters in bonded canvas over flowing trousers, a plissé leather strapless tunic layered over a tone-on-tone leather skirt, and off-the-shoulder bias knits offered a free-floating discourse on texture and form. Broad brush strokes in shades of blue, yellow and gray formed a print on asymmetric silk columns, and bristling black and white “Cubist” squares were cut into coats and dresses.

It sounds arty, and was, a bit, but it was also broadly considered, unlike Vera Wang’s combination of deconstructed men’s tailoring, workout undies and Vegas-pole-dancer glitz. Ms. Wang had “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Belle de Jour” on her syllabus … sorry, in her show notes, but on the runway that translated as tailored hot pants and crystal bandeaus under wool trench coats; sheer gazar shirts with stretch sports bras; and blinding petroleum paillette dresses. Despite some very good tailoring, as a cross-disciplinary experiment, it didn’t make sense.

Slide ShowVera Wang: Spring 2016 RTWCreditRegis Colin Berthelier/Nowfashion

Unlike what appeared to be the mixed-up California files of Rodarte, but which turned out to have an internal logic all their own. Sparkling glam-rock trouser suits with Mongolian lamb chubbies in lavender and silver and teal followed lace-layered, velvet inset, paisley patchworked Stevie Nicks Gypsy frocks followed beaded handkerchief-hem fringed disco dresses, with some high-waist, silk-cuffed tweed trousers and matching cropped suede jackets thrown in for day-wear measure — though really, these were all clothes for the morning-after-the-festival-before.

And because enough is rarely enough for the Rodarte designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy, there were also tatted lace tights, trailing scarves and metallic hair jewels, and it was all kind of trashy and entirely over-the-top and replete with the romance of once-upon-a-time on the West Coast.

At least the CliffsNotes version.

Read more http://rss.nytimes.com/c/34625/f/640350/s/49e20ec9/sc/14/l/0L0Snytimes0N0C20A150C0A90C160Cfashion0Cnew0Eyork0Efashion0Eweek0Evera0Ewang0Ethom0Ebrowne0Erodarte0Bhtml0Dpartner0Frss0Gemc0Frss/story01.htm