"Resort," Alber Elbaz said over the cello accompanying his presentation this morning, "is about solutions." It's a notion we've actually been hearing a lot about this season; designers are putting the focus on real clothes, not runway fantasies. Elbaz, though, is a dreamer through and through. So as practical and forgiving and easy as his clothes for Lanvin are, there's always a frisson of something extra.
Often today, that something extra was the piles of necklaces and armfuls of bangles that accompanied so many of the looks. Other times it was the bags. "I heard that bags are very important in fashion," he said, announcing that he's been focusing a lot of attention on them lately.
But it was the clothes that seduced, be it an emerald green crinkled silk pajama top and pants with the unconstructed, elasticized waistband of a simple slip, or an emerald green cocktail number made from a tech fabric used in the construction of bras that has the sucking-everything-in properties of a new pair of Spanx. The color palette was as bold as ever. For every loose-fitting silhouette, there was another body-conscious one. In the former category, a strapless palm tree-printed lamé dress that slouched off the body thanks to clever inner corsetry looked great, and in the latter: a sporty orange racer-back tank dress caught the eye. Dreamy, all around.
