"Austere, not austerity." Giles Deacon has a way with words, and his description of his pre-fall collection summed up the strict, even severe quality of an offering that was so tightly edited it bordered on tense. If other designers are expanding their pre-fall collections as a response to the share of the business they're coming to represent, Deacon wound his down to a handful of elements. The print was the result of something called data bending. His explanation was much too complex for a late afternoon on a frantic fashion day in Milan. Suffice to say, it looked like reptile scales. The color scheme veered between black and fuchsia, and the silhouette was somehow evocative of haute couture in the early sixties, particularly a coat of lacquered, textured wool that felt like raffia. The ever charming Deacon cheerfully confided his appetite for the fake as he pointed to the perforated pleather trim on a skirt, or the pleather chain link that ran round the waist of a black shift. Nothing about his ingredients was appetizing in the abstract, but once the finished dish was donned by a model, it made curiously alluring sense. Tough and uncompromising, yes, but also molto sexy.
