Houses often treat collections between marquee designers with a sort of coy standoffishness, almost embarrassment: some awkward gap in the room with a wine stain on the carpet between two prize pieces of furniture. At today’s Carven presentation, the earnest and heavily committed-to-Carven designer who explained the rationale behind the clothes was not to be named (let’s call him Anonymous). Models were in situ, but there was certainly no runway.
That was rather a shame. For as Carven awaits Serge Ruffieux to step into the spotlight in time for next season, Anonymous and his three colleagues in the house studio rustled up a fine interim offering. The conceit was excellent: This was a modern, Parisian version of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, darting around the city before an evening party while internally interrogating her life choices—had they gone wrong or right? This allowed Anonymous and co. to flash backward and forward on the girly-to-womanly index. “Mrs. Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself,” is the first line of Woolf’s novel, and it provided further spur to Anonymous and his team to incorporate florals in magnolia prints and lily-furl necklines on black double-crepe shirts and dresses. Gingham tailoring, cotton shirting, a deep teal velvet skirt, pale violet or peach velvet track tops, and crepe dresses were cutely cinched and gathered by golden studs. There was a super-cute graphic T-shirt—the illustration was just a rouged lip silhouette and a nostril—that reminded me powerfully of a lovely (but tragically cracked) painted Carven glass advertisement I inherited from my mother, and there were two cracking faux-shearling coats in rosewood and green. Shoe-wise, the ankle-strapped loafers with more golden studs were handsome, too. Ruffieux is fortunate to inherit a team that so cutely intuits the Carven heritage of lightly expressed Parisian free-spirited femininity—a 1940s-rooted precursor to Chloé’s prêt-à-porter retelling—which has handled this interregnum with such aplomb.
