Ten minutes after this Nehera show was due to start, perhaps 80% of the audience stood sardine-style in the dank and gloomy entryway of the Bastille Design Center. When you’re a bit zonked with an IQOS cough and fresh off a plane from Milan, such a milieu is a perfect petri dish for paranoid fantasies that you are fashion’s equivalent of Gwyneth Paltrow in Contagion. Every few minutes, however, a few more supplicants would be granted access into the attractive wooden-cobbled show space, and it slowly filled up. This tortuously counterproductive exercise in crowd control was a buzzkill.
The Nehera collection that followed was not worth the eventual 35-minute wait, but it was fine-to-good. Autumnal and as stolid as the heavy vulcanized boots that made the models descend the stairs with great caution, it featured handsomely oat-y wool coats with pronounced collars, some pleasing patched shearlings, and skirts and jackets in softly colored, vertically arranged velvet strips. There was a considered conversation between shirting: striped-yellow silk, a flecked fine-gauge gray suiting fabric, and white cotton poplin. This was not a show you’d want to spend your last day on earth attending, but the door policy apart, it was fine enough.
