It's the season of wispy fabric, ivory and ecru, off-pastels, and fraying edges. At Fendi, all that was going on, with an added Parisian lingerie twist. It looked as if Karl Lagerfeld had drawn from his French vocabulary to make a cream silk high-necked playsuit (part classic blouse, part romper) and a dotted tulle shirt with a frilled triangle bra beneath. Thankfully, it didn't slip completely into the clichés of boudoir (hypersexy is not the mood). That's because of the more rough-hewn elements—say, a pale blue linen sarong, wrapped like a simple piece of raw-edged fabric around the body—and the incredibly luxurious Fendi craftsmanship.
The latter was apparent in a couple of pairs of chamois-fine pants and the puffy, feathery collages of leather on the shoulders of a tulle jacket. As for bags? There were a lot of wood-handled ones that came with the odd device of a snap-on fabric cover—could be linen with a flower-embroidered edge, could be needlepoint. If it was hard to see the utilitarian value in those, that's nothing to the two evening clutches made of completely transparent Perspex, with beveled edges. They were, of course, empty, because it would ruin their beauty to carry anything in them. Nevertheless, they were almost the most eye-catching thing in the show.
