RESORT WEAR

Resort wear is a specialized clothing style, as well as a year-round fashion "season". Sometimes known as "cruise wear", it was originally marketed by "upscale" stores and collections only to very affluent customers who were expected to spend the post-Christmas/New Year's weeks in warm-weather climates.

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Chloé / Resort 2015

Chloé

Photo: Courtesy of Chloé

by Mark Holgate

Fashion loves to talk about architectural lines, and in the case of Chloé’s Clare Waight Keller, she’s thinking about them too, in very specific terms. Waight Keller’s resort collection for the 62-year-old house was heavily influenced by the work of architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, who famously redefined architecture so that it was denuded of fuss and ornamentation in favor of the rigor and geometry of the early twentieth-century machine age. OK, so maybe it’s a teeny bit of a stretch to say that’s what she was doing here. This is fashion we’re talking about, after all, built on the ephemeral and the ever-changing; Le Corbusier and his ilk were heavy on philosphical theories and building for posterity. Still, there’s a parallel to be drawn. As part of her laying down of her ownership of Chloé, Waight Keller has been busy stripping away the frilliness and the frou-frou associated with the house in favor of a pared-down, cleaned-up sense of urbanity.

Consider, for instance, her take on patchwork, that tried-and-tested Chloé-ism. What was once folksy and homespun has become graphic, almost industrial; windowpane panels of sky-blue poplin shirting and denim (another tried-and-tested Chloé-ism) rendered as a loose blouse worn with a billowing skirt, accessorized with peep-toe boots sawn off at just above the ankle, and Chloé’s latest bag, the Everston, a capacious structured purse which can be worn across the body.

Elsewhere, Waight Keller was thinking how to construct a leaner look but imbue it with softness. There were sinuous dresses that finished above the knee layered over flared skirts in the likes of striped cotton with a hand-painted effect, sometimes mixed with bold flowers. That look turned up for evening too. Nighttime dressing this resort season has been big on separates, and Chloé was no exception, what with a stark white one-shouldered wrap-effect dress over a black underskirt, or a feathery jacquard appliqué oversize tee atop cropped tux pants, the side seams of the legs etched with jeweling.

RESORT 2015

Giambattista Valli

Photo: Courtesy of Giambattista Valli

by Alessandra Codinha

“What can I say? I’m feeling very ‘peace and love,’ ” Giambattista Valli said by phone on Thursday morning from his Paris atelier, hard at work on both his couture collection and his recently announced ready-to-wear line for spring 2015, Giamba. At his New York showroom, his resort collection was on view in a quixotic swirl of delicate floral prints and maxi skirts, jacquard evening coats embossed in a geometric pattern, generous diaphanous blouses and kicky short pleats, peplum-waist tops and the sheath dresses with nipped waists that have won him a devoted following amongst the young and chic—now accented at the waist or collar in an embroidered lip motif. While here and there a garment bloomed with embroidered paillettes exquisitely molded into small lustrous blossoms—a technique borrowed from his last couture showing—the collection felt like a bit of a departure for Valli, with more of an emphasis on longer hemlines and flared printed trousers. (Either way, it was enough to make this reviewer regret being born a few decades too late for the love generation.)

The collection began, the designer noted, like most great romances: with flowers—more specifically, Valli’s idea of “flower power,” expressed through neon accents and a fresh palette of bright yellow, mint green, jasmine, tangerine, coral, and white. “It’s a ‘hippie deluxe,’ Jimi Hendrix sort of mood; really free and confident,” Valli said. “That spontaneity to grab from your wardrobe without thinking too much.” And while the collection likely best serves the free-wheeling "Gypset" types among us (those maxi skirts and dresses are best tossed in a suitcase and worn from breakfast to beach and out at night), even those in more urban environments will benefit from a little of Valli’s wanderlust.

RESORT 2015

Roksanda Ilincic

Photo: Courtesy of Roksanda Ilincic

By Maya Singer

This was a big week for Roksanda Ilincic On Monday, the London designer opened her first shop, on tony Mount Street in Mayfair. And, as she explained at an appointment today, the preparations for opening the store had a profound influence on the design of her new collection. In essence, Ilincic said, she treated this season as a kind of retrospective, repeating—in the most emphatic possible way—all the key signatures of her brand. Foremost among those? Color. This was an eye-popping collection, to say the least, but it also demonstrated Ilincic's interests in sculptural shapes and innovative textiles, like this season's silk-nylon jacquard, which had a quilted effect but was actually super-lightweight. The dresses with a very cool hand-embroidered PVC thread, meanwhile, looked like they weighed a ton. Elsewhere, Ilincic extended the industrial theme to her print, which was based on a photo of melted plastic capsules. From a distance, it looked like confetti.

The other big themes of this collection were Ilincic's Constructivist-esque color-blocking, effected through patchwork or bonding, and her sculptural folding and draping, which occasionally took on a Serra-ish monumentality. The monumentality ought to evolve, or be put away after this season, though—the looks that hewed closer to the body felt fresher. To wit, Ilincic had a terrific pale pink patchwork dress with a soft, sculptural side drape, a shape she repeated in a few other materials and colorways. She knows when she's onto something—which she definitely was in her new range of lightweight knits. They packed a lot of punch, those sweaters, and they could be dressed up or dressed down. Ilincic will sell a ton of them on Mount Street.

Hugo Boss

Photo: Courtesy of Hugo Boss

by Nick Remsen

Here’s a novel idea: Instead of traipsing the globe’s far-flung locales for inspiration, why not take a spin, literally, around the office? In Jason Wu’s sophomore collection for Hugo Boss, the designer did just that: Much of his lineup takes cues from the expansive, glass-clad lines of the company’s Metzingen, Germany, headquarters.

It was enticing to see Wu’s take on femininity against–or more like enmeshed with–nods from the arguably more masculine aesthetics of corporate architecture. Case in point: A finely pleated maxi skirt, its grooves long and slender, and a gridded, fitted, and knitted jumper evinced his ultimately simpatico vision. Ditto for the perpendicularity of tailored accents on a dove-gray gown, which Diane Kruger premiered earlier this year at the 2014 Met Gala.

However, you can’t have Boss without some obvious boyishness, which Wu realized in a clip-closure blazer, its collars turned in, and tailored suit trousers throughout. All in all, a well-struck balance.

RESORT 2015

Preen

Photo: Courtesy of Preen

by Sarah Mower

“We’ve really had a phenomenal season!” Justin Thornton was smiling broadly as he leafed through the collection he and Thea Bregazzi have put together for resort. The couple are on a roll—and no wonder. Their knack of merging punchy colors and original prints into easy-but-special clothes is reliable, intelligent, and constantly developing. When they take a risk—like putting a bias-cut lemon dévoré dress into their pre-fall collection—it pays off. “It’s really funny about that”, says Thornton. “The buyers were a bit ‘Ooh, not too sure about that,” when they first saw it. But then Yasmin Sewell wore it during London Fashion Week. Then Naomi Watts wore it. And suddenly it flew.” He beamed. “So here we are: We’ve got more bias-cut, floaty dresses, the same feel, but with an ikat-inspired pattern and completely different colors.”

Part of the label’s attraction (it is now called Preen by Thornton Bregazzi) comes from the implicit generational understanding underlying the design. This pair grew up in the nineties—ergo the smartened-up grunge-era bias-cut dress reference—and they can riff around the era in the way that speaks in their contemporaries’ inner ear. That’s why there’s a nineties-ish sportswear thread in this collection, too—the red sweatpant-trousers, the acid-yellow nylon hoodie, the flashes of flouro tape on the cuffs of roomy trenchcoats. Still, this memory lane is one that leads forward. Clothes adapted to modern life, to fat and thin days, to meetings and maternity, to weddings and weekends are Thornton and Bregazzi’s business. No surprise that some of fashion’s best dressers are so into it.

RESORT 2015

Altuzarra

Photo: Paul Maffi

by Alessandra Codinha

The day after adding yet another hotly coveted prize—that would be theCFDA Womenswear Designer of the Year—to his ever-growing CV (which, by the way, will also include "Target capsule collection creator” come September 14th), Joseph Altuzarra was hard at work presenting his resort collection and solidifying what we have come to recognize as his design signatures. Consider: It is a truth universally acknowledged that the designer knows his way around a pencil skirt (lean, mean, and packing one heck of a chic slit).

With this latest collection, the skirts were still there (occasionally in chain-printed silk twill or languid crepe) but the focus had shifted, both to longer-than-usual hemlines—drawing the eye toward the designer’s first in-house shoe collection, black bow-topped or rope-accented pumps, water-snakeskin sandals and flats—and up the body: a pair of perfectly tailored light cotton peacoats in navy and white heralded high detachable collars in contrasting red and black, while the designer’s light silk caftan-shaped tops and intricately thread-embroidered peasant blouses were embellished with gold sequins for evening.

Sleek crepe dresses in cream, black, and crimson came with hand-braided silk tassels hanging across the sternum or shoulder blades in a variety of iterations: here a cowl or the retreating flap of a sailor suit, there at the end of a natty silk lapel, mimicking a scarf tossed atop a tuxedo. One standout blazer’s strong shoulder and swinging, fringed hem had a modern Talitha Getty–via-the-boardroom look, and while Altuzarra began his presentation by citing inspiration from both the marauding mariners of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder movie Querelle and the coastal towns of North Africa, the mood and spirit—one of a sophisticated, well-traveled allure—was all his own.