Many husbands promise the sun and the moon, but it almost seems within Reinaldo Herrera's grasp to give them to his wife. At the very least, he offered Carolina a placeholder: a gilded compact inlaid with jewels, the sun on one side, the crescent moon on the other. She used it as inspiration for her pre-fall collection, which looked to the heavens for celestial prints, inky dusk blues, and embroidered whorls of jacquard that put you in mind of van Gogh's Starry Night. "I'm very superstitious," Mrs. Herrera warned, and so a scarf, wrapped around a model's neck, unscrolled to reveal the astrological constellations, with CAROLINA HERRERA picked out in stars next to Capricorn, her sign. From there, it was a jump to the tarot deck, which made one of the season's novelty prints, and then to a playing card print for pussy bow blouses. Those came with a pair of eye-popping houndstooth suits in lipstick red with shrunken, peak-lapeled jackets and wide-legged pants—Redford in The Sting sent through the looking glass and back. "There and back" could've been the tagline for this pretty, loosely structured collection. "From the heavens to the earth" is how Herrera preferred to put it. After the starry gowns, with their diaphanous layers of chiffon and crystal brooches, there were showstoppers very much of the earth, in jacquards of garden rose.
