Cacharel is not where you look for directional clothes. But it's obvious that the brand's design team has been studying and adapting various au courant ideas taking hold in high fashion's playground. While classic-cut poplin shirts will always be a part of the mix, you can now also find blouses with bows and breezy caped backs. For covering up, there's a molded gray, chevron-patterned neoprene coat; for baring skin tactfully, a jersey dress with side rib cutouts. The standout trench is actually an A-line gabardine coat that better resembles a stiff, oversize shirt.
Like neologisms that become part of the conversation, all of these looks have settled smoothly into the Cacharel canon. Flip back a few chapters, and you can see that floral prints are a perennial standby. This season, they once again formed the collection's strongest message. Hydrangea, sunflower, iris, rose—they were all here, yet rendered to entirely different effect, from graphic and simplified to hyperreal. It's almost as if the team broke off into small groups and submitted their designs, like for an architectural competition.
Toward the end there was a dress in geometric lace that bore little relation to anything else, but deserved to stay. So many trend fragments confirmed that this collection was largely created by external influences. Not having a figurehead may be part of it. Still, to take fault with any one element would be akin to criticizing an iris for its yellow pistil. The collection was inoffensive from start to finish.
