Veronica Etro today delivered a sumptuous medley of house staples—the kaleidoscopic prints, the rich concentration of color, and the bohemian sensibility—in a collection that also melded European folk costume, Victorian Pre-Raphaelite nostalgia, haberdashery, Arts and Crafts, and a shot of Ballets Russes. It was pretty busy. Yet it was to Etro’s great credit that with so very much going on here, at first glance nothing on the runway ever seemed especially OTT. For while there was plenty of ruche and flounce and ruffle in her silhouettes, particularly on the soft undulations of her sleeves, these were never jarringly proportioned pieces. To get lost you had to stare into the clothes.
On one look alone, quilted printed cotton was shot against gridded twine run through with embroidered ribbons that were overlaid with ivory silk and hemmed with silver lace above a scalloped hem. Reversible bombers combined strata of ribbon and dévoré silk. A lace-fringed dress was a patchwork of floral-wrought paisley—patterns drawn from the Etro archive—overlaid with a hypnotic constellation of dots that recalled the antipodean psychedelia of Kean Etro’s most recent menswear show.
Backstage, Etro said that she had left some of the finishes rough in the wine-toned closing section to resist the sweetness and whimsy so much ornament might otherwise muster. There was friction and roughness and pain in this romance; just so, emotional perfection was not the objective. In a season that is betting heavy on 2010’s appropriations of kooked-up ’70s approximations (think Picnic at Hanging Rock) of Edwardian lady laciness, Etro’s analogue abandon was a cynicism-free take: Victoriana eminently incorporable into the cool-girl wardrobe.
