Textures were the focus of Gabriele Colangelo’s Fall collection. On his mood board backstage, swaths of fringed fabrics, laser-cut leathers, and alpaca yarns achieved what looked like a mosaic. Actually, there was nothing else in sight, no carefully pasted tableaux referencing some cutting-edge, obscure design movement; just an artistic composition of quite unusual fabric samples. “Textiles are what I like most,” declared the designer. “And clarity of shapes, purity of volumes.” It sounded like an honest manifesto.
Colangelo definitely indulged his cerebral approach in the collection, working on minimalistic lines and letting the elaborate surfaces do the talking. He just added a few folding, paneling, and draping plays, giving a sense of movement to an otherwise geometric, linear silhouette.
When fashion design has such an abstract bent, there’s always the risk of the female body being concealed and almost forgotten in conceptual, abstruse stylistic exercises. Here, Colangelo rose to the challenge, working at shapes with a deft hand, smoothing the edges of excessive severity, and letting his sensual side emerge. He did it through the use of color, which gave light and brilliance to the elongated lines of his modernist outerwear. A dense shade of cobalt blue added a jolt to a beautiful, quirky fringed coat made of an oscillating, floating yarn; it looked like a bizarre, luxurious fur.
