Oh, what a difference a season makes. Where the unapologetic ruffles and shirred flou of Alessandra Rich’s runaway bride from Spring felt, at times, a little too over the top, her femme fatale for Fall 2016 ran away to Asia in search of some trouble, and ended up arriving right at the zeitgeist of bad-taste-good-taste garments that girls want to wear right now.
The collection, called Bye Bye Kitty (as in not Hello Kitty) was shown at Lapérouse, the famed one-time house of ill-repute, and was all about the loss of innocence that occurs between girlhood and full-blown womanhood. Before you crack an inevitable joke about Britney Spears’s lyrics, Rich beat you to it, with show notes that began with a verse by Miley Cyrus:
Decision, between a family or a porn star / Humble life or sports cars, liver or the whole bar / Headache for my management, gossip columns resident / Your mom and dad might hate me but in 5 years I'm the president.
(That is from a song called “Decisions,” by the way.)
And so from the inspiration of an imaginary girl Rich described as a “hot mess” came a collection that was anything but. Super-short velvet dresses with lace hems lifted from the lingerie drawer hung next to transparent cheongsam-inspired gowns, frilly lace frocks with ruffled skirts, and a clutch of chubby patchworked faux-fur coats. Alongside the ultra-desirable party dresses, a smattering of tasseled minaudières in tweed, suede, and snakeskin—sling-it-on-and-don’t-think-twice party necessities—were a stroke of genius. Long pleated dresses with velvet collars and Chinese button knots (most appealing in floral print) and a few brightly colored tweed trench coats should please more conservative customers, but above all, this was fun, sexy, and the right kind of young.
