“It was based on the idea that if you walk down Bond Street in London, or Via Della Spiga in Milan, or Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, you might see these beautiful women, or characters of style. And [what] you’re feeling is that they are really put together, but that there is also something a little bit challenging.” What Karl Templer was getting at here was that this was a bourgeois lady dressing with a twist. That is no fresh concept, but here the twist was as carefully considered as the pussy-bowed scarfs knotted around each model’s neck.
The pieces in this collection were often classic on first glance, second glance less so. The square-toed boots were slouchily wide and sometimes featured a double-take addition in the raised outline of a slingback sandal. The large-buttoned, frogging-fronted black and navy outerwear, also later in Prince of Wales check, flared out south of the waist to create a kicky and attractively unusual silhouette. Asymmetric Aran knit dresses and irregularly printed white-on-black silk windowpane check dresses were patterned and textured to brushstroke ergonomically across the form within. Shirred-midriff full-length dresses mixed patches of plain and floral fabric, and foulard dresses counterpointed multi-sized polka dots. The deconstructed houndstooth check-knit throws and coats and car-wash-pleated skirt under a Breton sweater ticked two highly present boxes in the collections this season.
Dresses and a trench coat featuring hand-drawn illustrations of finely coiffed women were perhaps a figurative personification of the women Templer was imagining in these garments. He all but closed this show with some adroitly made and deeply tailored looks in charcoal wool, before calling time on his highly cultivated luxury passeggiata with Kaia Gerber in a billowing white-piped wrap dress and those slouchy look-twice boots.
