Disciplined. Rigorous. Precise. Google Jil Sander and those three adjectives come up more than any others. Fashion, at this moment, is moving in a different direction; Spring is looking decidedly deshabille. What’s Rodolfo Paglialunga, installed at Jil Sander one year ago, to do? Remain faithful to the house codes, even as memories of the founder grow fuzzy? Go with the current flow? It’s a conundrum that all designers charged with heading up old labels must face. After a couple runway shows that hewed to Sander’s clean lines, Paglialunga tried option two.
An otherwise straightforward two-button blazer was sliced at the shoulder seams, another jacket was cut away in the back, and a third was deconstructed to look more like a pinafore than your standard double-breasted fare, but the tailoring wasn’t so radical as to be alienating. The Sander-classic crisp white shirt got a revamp, too, in crinkly, slinky sky blue silk with an au courant cutout at the midriff. Rounding things out were the sort of slip dresses and wispy bits of silk that have been multiplying on other runways this season. Straps spilled off shoulders, and asymmetric necklines dipped to reveal the upper arm. Cutouts proliferated, not just at the waist, but near the hem of a sheath, or sliced vertically front and back on looser-fitting dresses. Paglialunga is a talented guy, but this collection gave you a twinge of the familiar. It made you miss Sander’s hard edges a bit.
