Hear Saab's name trumpeted at an awards show and you can be guaranteed a few things: sequins, curves, a fair bit of skin. And he didn't stray from the program in his overlong show for Spring. He had dresses for all sorts of Hollywood types: fifties fit-and-flare in large-scale florals for starlets, silvery Art Deco sequins for sirens, floor-sweeping chiffon for grandes dames. And he had them, to borrow an expression from garmento parlance, in many different colorways: red, green, purple, blue, yellow, straight out of the Crayola box.
If it sounds a bit all over the place, it was. At 60 looks, the collection needed a major edit. You would've expected that if Saab had learned anything that fateful night when Halle Berry wore his nude-torsoed, leaf-scattered, russet gown to win her Oscar, it would be that the leading ladies he's outfitting demand something unique. As it was, this felt more like a tour through a garment-district wholesaler than a glimpse of precious one-offs bound for the Kodak Theatre.
