Menswear shirting—oversize, bastardized, pulled apart then put together again—has become such an ongoing riff in womenswear that I firmly believe that any master of the original, say, Hilditch & Key (where Lagerfeld gets his shirts) or Turnbull & Asser, could make hay with the right collaboration. To their credit, Aquilano.Rimondi has been focusing on this area for longer than most in womenswear, apart from Commes des Garçons, and again today we saw a collection that unbuttoned that garment.
You could see the thought that had gone into the pieces, absolutely, but it wasn’t clear what such convoluted assemblages necessarily signified. Cotton and silk white shirts and shirt dresses were volumized and oversize and often, very often, cut away at the back. There was that extension of the cuff we keep seeing. A blue pinstripe skirt, asymmetric, on which the designers had left the gold embroidery or the fabric house’s name (or possibly their own; it went past too fast to read) was a pleasing piece, and their scholarly denim jacket and wide pants with top stitched seam details were fine too. Chainlet overdresses of Swarovski and metal lifted two looks.
But it was often a bit po-facedly elaborate, bureaucratic, and wan. Happily, this show fluttered to life at the end with a series of asymmetrically hemmed dresses in sequins and a great stretch Lurex on silk fabrication that bled one color into another. These were just as thoughtfully assembled as the rest of the designers' menswear-inspired pieces but, crucially, felt like they’d fire true desire to put them on.
