Evelyne Chétrite traveled here, there, and everywhere to gather source material for a collection that was more expansive than the lookbook pictures here suggest. What you see here are probably the most polite, classic French girl ingredients in the this-season Sandro bouillabaisse: the caramel paneled-leather miniskirt matched with a short-sleeved striped menswear shirt, the tailored linen suit, the efficiently wafty and romantic poly-silk foulard-print ruffle dresses and shirts, the wide-cut washed-denim Canadian tuxedo over a dad sneaker.
One element that didn’t really make the cut—a bastardized cotton track top worn above a python-print mini aside—was a rave-y sub-story purportedly inspired by the Dutch techno subgenre Gabber, which turned up the BPMs so high they blended into a near-solid wall of noise. There were smiley T-shirts and cardigans printed with loved-up slogans and declarations of commitment to acid house a full 30 years after the fact. A way-too-fitted, naval-style blue knit minidress buried in the rail was an especially cool piece, lost among a huge array of hits and misses whose status as either will depend on your taste. Sandro is like a shotgun, imprecise but effective—it covers so many bases that some of them are bound to resonate.
