Sit through a month of collections and you see a lot of Phoebe Philo-isms. It’s no understatement to say that the Céline creative director is the most referenced designer working in fashion today. There have been other big touchstones in 2015—Martin Margiela, first and foremost—but they aren’t making clothes in real time like Philo is. To click through the photos of her Resort collection, which was shown at Céline headquarters back in July but hasn’t been posted online until now, is to get a picture of what the runways will look like next February and beyond.
Resort found Philo revisiting some of the ideas about deconstruction she began exploring in her Fall show and experimenting with bold, new proportions. Bows were the only thing that connected gauntlet sleeves to the shoulders of mismatched tops, and buttonholes lined the waistband, hem, and side seams of slightly padded skirts, like a duvet that had come undone. There was an audacity to those looks that her die-hard followers will find hard to resist. Simpler pieces like a slightly boxy button-down tucked into paper-bag-waist trousers could have more widespread appeal, but Philo was committed to extremes here. Super-wide-leg pants pooled at the ankle, and skirts looked as if they were made from shirts tied nonchalantly from the hips. Another case in point: the collection’s extended, pointy-toed, babouche-style flats. They looked even stranger than Philo’s glove-leather pumps did when they hit the runway a few seasons ago, but we expect these will become “a thing” in much the same way, coveted by her fans and copied by nearly everyone else.
