Nicole Miller has been in the fashion business long enough to see trends come, go, and come back again. That puts her in the special position of being able to mine her own archive as the fashion pendulum swings back to the late ’80s and early ’90s. For Pre-Fall, Miller looked at silhouettes and prints she made in those decades, giving them just the right amount of modernization. Among the styles she revived is a short, Cindy Crawford–worthy slip dress in black with oversize patches throughout. The original version had smaller NASCAR patches; today’s comes with larger emoji-like yin and yangs and snakes. The good news is that much like the year 1986, 2016 has a Crawford on the rise to wear it: Cindy’s daughter, Kaia Gerber. The irony of this, of course, is that the girls who will be enthralled by such slips and pouf-sleeved leather jackets weren’t there to try out the look the first time around. (And maybe if they had been, they’d be less inclined to shop the reboot.) Elsewhere in the collection were prints of all strokes: safety pins, neon signs, grungy tartan, and a floral with trompe l’oeil tears.
The harder edge this season might feel slightly jarring in the continuum of Miller’s recent offerings, which have veered toward the pretty and flitty, but you have to commend her for knowing when to move on. “I’m done with boho!” she said with a laugh at her lookbook shoot at Daredevil Tattoo on the Lower East Side. Around the corner from the garment racks was an artist warming up his tattoo gun. “Do you want to get a tattoo or a piercing?” inquired the PR. For this millennial, a tattoo-print skirt would do just fine, thank you.
