When David Koma was 13 years old, he religiously taped every Thierry Mugler show he could find in flashback on the fashion channel that cable TV piped into his home. "It was the first brand that inspired me," he said today, after his second collection for Mugler (Resort was Koma's debut for the house). "Surreal" was his understandable summation of this turn of events.
So it was a shame that Koma didn't manage to translate that degree of personal engagement into something more potent. Putting it bluntly, he played it very safe, "clean and easy," in his own words. The tangiest element of the collection was the "omega" metal chain that snakily accented keyhole cutouts. (On the hip of a sinuous white gown, the cutout was a ringing echo of the Georgina Grenville Dress, one of Tom Ford's more epochal Gucci moments.) Otherwise, Koma kept things Bond-girl-sleek, monochrome and minimal. There was an undoubted athleticism to his interpretation of the Mugler aesthetic—zippers and slits and tank tops—and perhaps that added up to a commercial take on the legacy. But it was hard not to conclude that when the "Thierry" was deleted from the label, the personality went with it.
