Antonio Berardi is on the side of women rather than girls. He's known for cutting a shapely dress; he's great at curvaceous paneling and emphasizing a bosom; and he uses excellent fabrics. For Fall, he worked a Mad Men-ish knee-length hourglass silhouette, with a strong salute toward the Saint Laurent seventies: sheer tops, fur chubbies, and all.
Those choices meant the bulk of Berardi's collection didn't seem totally up to speed with fashion's headlong dash to reinvent itself. Invoking YSL is one of the most overworked clichés in the book, and hobbling models with un-walkable stilettos on a slippery floor reduced the erotic intentions of those passages to near fiasco. It was the ones that got away—the pieces that somehow fell outside the show's themes—that seemed more cogent to the season's developing ideas. A jacket-coat-dress hybrid tailored in gray menswear fabric and the sinuous long red-velvet dresses, one with a deep cowl back revealing sparkle embroidery on nude, were standouts.
