"The name of the collection is Tautology," David Delfin said backstage before the show. "It's a word I only learned a few months ago, but it relates very much to what I'm doing." Tautology, saying the same thing in different ways, may only recently have been added to the Spanish designer's English vocabulary, but it's long been part of his design lexicon.
As in the past, repetition was his central story today—and, coupled with the somewhat glacial pace of the proceedings, it got old quickly. Delfin experimented with nylon straps—the workaday kind you find on camping gear and in your dad's garage—in non-workaday brights: caution-tape yellow, punchy orange, and electric green. These were the accent colors in a rigid palette of black, white, and royal blue. Delfin worked the straps as belts and on the shoulders of a gown. He also did a lot of cutting, shearing shirts off at one sleeve or, in some instances, leaving little more than the placket of a shirt front (there, the nylon acted as both a belt and a sort of suspender, holding the piece in place on the torso). There wasn't enough news here to hold the viewer's interest for long. Repeating something in different ways is one thing; saying the same thing over and over is quite another.
