Entirely Dresses

If Vivienne Westwood and Celia Birtwell had a child, raised it in Japan, and reared it on a diet of manga cartoons and Disney films, that child would grow up to be Tsumori Chisato. With Pierrot dolls, gypsies, and circus performers all jostling in her latest collection as inspirations, resulting in a whirl of stripes, bright colors, and intricate illustrations, hers is not an aesthetic for the minimalist. But a glance at the very colorful audience attending Chisato’s show proved that there are plenty of people who are happy to think of their bodies as canvases for clothes, as opposed to thinking of clothes as canvases to flatter the body.In fact, like Birtwell and Westwood, Chisato can be deceptively restrained with her everything-and-the-kitchen-sink style. Well, mostly. If any woman out there felt that her life was lacking a double-layer ruffled mini cape in orange and purple, this gap is now filled in her wardrobe. Yet, these occasional slips into OTT-ness aside, Chisato almost always thinks carefully about the effect of the clothes on the onlooker. Thus, there were some terrific color combinations once the monochromatic opening section passed, such as a purple jacket with black frogging and a large brown cape with heavily stitched red pockets. A black velvet bolero crusted with gold trim looked particularly good over a paisley playsuit, with the former playing down the intensely patterned nature of the latter, and the latter adding some fun to the sober glamour of the former. Chisato’s skill with patterns has attracted the canny attention of Le Petit Bateau, and their collaboration will be in stores in November.The theme of the collection was circus, which must be up there with rockabilly and the film Belle de Jour as an overused fashion inspiration. But true to form, Chisato used her inspiration as a mere starting point, morphing quickly into hippie gypsies in paisley, and woodland fairies wearing long, luxe gowns. Aesthetically, it was a treat, and it left one grateful that Chisato had found fashion in which to channel her clearly abundant energy and imagination. If she had turned instead to, say, literature, she’d probably be churning out 2,000-page sci-fi fantasy novels.—Hadley Freeman
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Angelenos Cameron Silver and Susan Casden brought a bit of the Costume Institute’s The Model as Muse exhibition to the West Coast last night. The Philippe Starck-designed SLS Hotel was the site of a party in honor of the show’s co-curators, Harold Koda and Kohle Yohannan. “I wanted to get together fashionable people who would be thrilled to meet the two coolest guys from New York,” said Silver. Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, Monique Lhuillier, Marisa Tomei, Brigette Romanek, Richard Buckley, and Jenni Kayne more than fit the bill. After a wildly creative tapas-style dinner (foie gras cotton candy lollipops, anyone?), guests lined up to get their The Model as Muse books signed by the authors and Peggy Moffitt, who, of course, was a model-muse to designer Rudi Gernreich. “We saw some of the most glamorous women last week in New York,” remarked Koda. “But I have to say the women in this room really know how to dress.” Katie Holmes designed the ruched number that she paired with a leather jacket from The Row. Casden, for her part, was in Chanel Haute Couture, but she wasn’t thinking fashion. “Cameron,” she said, “you have to check the Lakers score for me on your BlackBerry.”—Victoria Namkung
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Here’s one that made Paris fashion sit upright on its little gold chairs: Brazilian designer Pedro Lourenço sending out a precociously accomplished, startlingly directional collection at the age of 19. Perhaps it was the power of public relations firm KCD, the endorsement of stylist Brana Wolf, and sheer incredulity over talk of the latest teen in fashion that brought a stellar professional front row to the Westin Hotel at 8 p.m., but the skeptics who walked in walked out genuinely amazed.Lourenço, it turned out, is working, with the complete conviction of youth, on the rigid shapes and geometries that are just beginning to make news. His paneled leather dresses in beige, black, and brown had high necks, long sleeves, and rows of stiff horizontal plastic slats and buttons, suggesting something between military frogging and venetian blinds. More of the same plastics—this time cut into triangles and vertically lodged, finlike, around the skirt of a dress—gave the illusion of a kilt or pleated skirt as it moved.And that was astonishing. Anyone with an eye to what’s going on in fashion—this year’s flippy miniskirt silhouette, or the fact that many designers are playing with latex and leather and pushing to create new volumes—would recognize Lourenço as creatively on the same sort of track as, say, the cohort just graduated from Central Saint Martins, or even some aspects of what Nicolas Ghesquière is producing at Balenciaga. Lourenço, post-show, described his inspiration as “Diana the Huntress, and the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.”Even more remarkable was the level of technical accomplishment in the color-blocked collection. That, it transpires, is because the designer has the help of his parents, Glória Coelho and Reinaldo Lourenço, who are both mainstay designers of São Paulo’s fashion community, and who own factories that can produce the boy’s clothes. Of course, all that puts him ahead of his peers in terms of access to everything from fabrics to the almost laughably grand setting of his debut—the room Yves Saint Laurent used for his couture shows. Yet no matter how young and how privileged he may be, the only test Lourenço actually faces is the one where insiders consider whether his clothes have genuine relevance and something new to say. As they left the room, the verdict was in: They do.—Sarah Mower
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