Robin Wright made for an engaging—okay, transfixing—seatmate at this Mugler show. She is in town until Monday, plans to catch a few shows, doesn’t get why they start so late either, and highly recommends Now: In the Wings on a World Stage, the documentary about Kevin Spacey’s experience staging Shakespeare’s Richard III from back when he was at the Old Vic. She was, of course, wearing Mugler—tight and white and corseted at the waist. “So, a little bondage,” she observed.
Once the runway started running its course, David Koma presented an opening pair of denim corsets over jeans and a skirt; both featured the turned-up silhouette of a giant folded hem at their respective waists. After some more sculptured denim, we saw another corset—shiny and black this time—over a black chiffon skirt. When a similarly skirted, wide-belted, and soft shirt–clad Yasmin Wijnaldum moved in every direction as she progressed down the runway (in a manner for which the correct verb has not yet been phrased), Wright commented: “Just look at her walk!”
Such looseness is rare for Koma, and more came later in a series of long, colored chiffon dresses cut through with fine metallic yarn. There was plenty of more conventionally Koma-esque-ness in tight dresses and bodies carved in cut-outs held together by hook and eyes. The dialectic of corsetry and flounce had come after watching Les Pétroleuses, the 1970s comedy-Western featuring Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale, Koma observed afterward. Thus also the riff on rattlesnakes in two striking looks fashioned in a mosaic of leather patches, plus a skirt in paillette snake pattern. It was good to see him broaden his vocabulary a bit while remaining true to his central message, so pithily summed up by Wright.
