Angela Missoni had a long, lovely family-filled summer vacation she reported at a preview of her Spring collection, and during it she saw a lot: “A lot, a lot. So much, that I only wanted to see very simple things as a result.” Missoni was not that far out of step with Miuccia Prada, who, as she told Sarah Mower earlier this week, had chosen this season and all its myriad economic, environmental, and cultural woes as a time to "take care of now, the present." So, the moment calls for a breather, or so says two matriarchs of Italian fashion. In Missoni's telling, that makes Spring a moment for paring back your wardrobe. The only problem there being, of course, that while the house is many things—a historic purveyor of knits, the originator of the iconic zigzag—it is most definitely not minimal. Not now, not ever. So what’s a designer to do?
Missoni went to the heart of it all: color. Some, like the patterns made to replicate malachite or tiger’s-eye, came from nature. Others—a bright, clean blue with tangerine; a dully glimmering pistachio with blush and gold—came from her own innately good sense of what women want to wear. The silhouettes were what she’d promised: uncomplicated. Dresses were long and fluid, or “very, very short.” (And holy hot pants, folks, she’s not kidding.)
There was a layering-as-color-blocking maneuver employed in some looks, like the long-sleeved polo shirt and wrap worn under a sort of tube top turned torso cincher, which sounds a little weird, but worked. Though, it, like the eye patch–size bikinis, may work best on the small chested. Those bikinis, glittery and gold or swirling with earth-toned patterns, have bottoms that are made to be worn yanked up high on the hips (à la early 1990s Sports Illustrated), which would make no sense to a modern woman if not for the fact that legions of the Instagram-famous already do it. They seem to have been the unanimous recipients of the same memo in re: how well that particular technique lengthens the legs.
Here, the clearest successes were the classics, which tended to fall straight from the shoulders: a gold column dress; a green short-sleeved open-weave number; a tank dress in robin’s-egg blue, burgundy, and ochre; a flowing jumpsuit. Clean and bright, though not exactly minimal, but who cares—it was a palette cleanser, nonetheless.
