Missoni is specializing in surprises at the moment. First, there was last Spring's collection. It polarized the critics, mesmerized the public when it hit the stores. Then there was the collaboration with Target, where a week's worth of pop-up shop sold out in a day during New York fashion week. Now there's this Spring's show, which, in its own way, was as startling as the one a year ago that marked a definitive shift in the Missoni ether. In other words, it will divide opinion.
Angela Missoni has earned herself the luxury of a little experimentation. It's in the family's design genes, after all. She spent the summer in Sardinia watching her daughters arriving home at dawn after a night out dancing, and she got thinking about the kind of clothes that best suited such a situation: something spontaneous, improvised, mobile. And out of that came a collection that dipped and swooped in ruffled tiers, fringed here, patched there, asymmetrical to a dizzy fault, but always in motion.
Maybe that's why it was less classic Missoni than an animal spirit that prevailed in the collection. Lots of zebra, for one thing. It manifested itself in bias-cut ruffles; it snuck under an openwork knit dress. If this was Angela trying to convey the beast within, she captured it in spades.
