After working through modern art and robots in recent collections, Andrew Gn felt ready for something fresh and familiar: flowers. And they were very pretty flowers at that, blossoming off bodices as dimensional guipure lace appliqués and rendered in lush brocade. He referred to the collection as his English garden—and even flower novices could pick out the pansies and hydrangea amid the Impressionist palettes. Gn separated out the strongest colors—namely, Kelly green, aqua, crimson, and citron—and showed them as easy-chic blouses and skirts, smartly betting that florals aren't every woman's cup of tea. But because he married the motifs with pastel-flecked, polychrome tweed (as usual, from Malhia Kent) or hedged in the blooms with black borders, they remained mostly tamed.
Indeed, Gn realizes that there will always be a ready need for black and white, and in stripping the color, he drew the eye to asymmetrical placements of lace directly along hemlines, and used hot pants and city shorts as a natural balance for the fluid, vaguely petal-shaped tops. Waists were often defined by bows as if—perhaps too literally—he'd gathered his flowers into bouquets. And Gn did manage to let them grow wild across a full-length, full-skirted gown or two. Whether your eye delights at these creations will depend on whether you are a maximalist with a soft spot for the Belle Époque or a minimalist who prefers ease of movement. As any André Le Nôtre or William Kent enthusiast will agree, garden styles are deeply subjective.
