The Cushnie et Ochs girls are growing up. You wouldn't have necessarily guessed that from the reference Carly Cushnie and Michelle Ochs cited as inspiration this season—Leeloo from The Fifth Element heads off to boarding school—but that intriguing scenario wound up shaping this brand's most mature collection. "Mature" both in its refinement and in the sensibility of the audience it addressed. There was no stinting on the signature Cushnie et Ochs va-va-voom here, but the tone was fused with a generous helping of tact. That was particularly true of the collection's fantastic knits, a category Cushnie and Ochs are increasingly emphasizing: Pencil skirts and peplum tanks featured a kind of cabling that lowered the volume on their form-fitting shapes, while lightweight crop tops numbered among the collection's strong selection of mix-and-match and layering pieces. Elsewhere, riffing on gym class, the duo did well with their looks in waffled and sweatshirt-like jersey. There were other nods to school days, too—short flared and pleated skirts, a standby Cushnie et Ochs shape; some nods at shirt collars; and menswear elements like suiting wool and decorative lapels, such as the set that appeared on the back of a body-con dress. Some of the looks here were a little hackneyed, like the one-shoulder, lapel-detailed dress in white, and the designers demonstrated more confidence in tried-and-true items such as cutout jumpsuits and pencil dresses than they did in their wave-hemmed sculptured pieces. Overall, though, there was a realism at work in these clothes that signaled a genuine evolution in the Cushnie et Ochs vocabulary. Carly Cushnie and Michelle Ochs are still making sexy clothes; they're just growing into a new point of view on what is actually "sexy."
