Monastic-quirky with a neutral twist, this Nehera collection sometimes resembled uniforms. The priestly collared dresses with three buttons at the left shoulder that came in white cotton, blue cotton, and mustard satin looked like the staff attire of some Goop-y, clean-eating spa. If the padded, notched-collared, patch-pocketed blue overcoat with a matching blue shirt had come with one of the little bycokets that peppered the rest of this collection, it would have been 100 percent airline uniform—even without the hat, it was pretty cross-check, doors to manual. The woven rectangular checkerboard and striped pieces were based on the work of Anni Albers, whose name was misspelled in the press release (bad), and whose patterns pleasingly complemented a cast of diversely aged models (good). Some of the quirk felt forced and futile: A wraparound trench that sat twisted high on the right shoulder and low on the left looked like its wearer had rushed out of the house without noticing her button-to-buttonhole arrangement was entirely wrong. While it was interesting to learn that the hand-sketched prints were by award-winning graphic designer Ondrej Rudavsky, without that context, they looked like garments scrawled with doodles that signified little in themselves.
The most winning pieces here were the most subtle: a white rib-knit sweater and dress with a pretty, overlapping effect on the chest, and a version in beige whose softness pleasingly wrestled with the hardness of the pocketed and back-buttoned cotton drill skirt below. A pair of black leather pants worn under a nipped-waist tailored jacket was gorgeously cut. An otherwise irreproachable oversize suit in soft gray cotton was scuppered by a pointless strap hanging from the jacket. It was just one scissor snip away from being highly snap-up-able.
