Women Images: Regina Feokstitova

Natasha Poly at Joseph Altuzarra fall 2010 show:

from today's New York Times:

February 14, 2010

Three Nominees for Who’s ‘Next’

By CATHY HORYN

Joseph Altuzarra is a Swarthmore-educated Paris-bred son of an American mother and a French father. Prabal Gurung grew up in Katmandu and trained at Bill Blass. At 25, Alexander Wang is the hitmaker of contemporary urban fashion, his $25-million business already surpassing that of many established designers.

If fashion didn’t routinely select a new group of designers to acclaim, it wouldn’t be fashion. There must always be someone waiting in the wings, the “next” one. These three designers now appear to be the leading candidates.

It is clear that Mr. Wang has managed to give his collections the properties of high fashion — top models; coveted accessories; a cool, insolent sensibility — while making affordable clothes that many women, not just skinny hipsters, can wear. His show again achieved the illusion of being something more than a contemporary-priced collection. With their matted hair and vacant gazes, the models, led by Natalia Vodianova, looked possessed by zombies, but you can bet that people will wonder when they can get their hands on the elephant-belled thigh-high tights that Mr. Wang showed with his miniskirts and platform boots. Like an old-fashioned merchant, Mr. Wang knows how to get value out of a single item.

The collection drew heavily on deconstructed tailoring: pinstripe blazers and vests lopped off at the midriff, blended with a furry layer or a broken lace top and a pair of boy trousers with part of the waistband snipped away. If it sounds a little tricky, with many extra parts, it was. Traditional garments of power and formality were the sources for swallowtail minidresses and camel wool clergy capes, and the general gloominess. Still, the collection was an ambitious step up for Mr. Wang, and despite the moving parts, it looked polished.

Mr. Gurung has a knack for the languid, jazzy tailoring of a Blass or a Saint Laurent, his spiritual mentors, and that feeling was captured in a fresh way in his first show last February. He also demonstrated in the next season that he could do chic dresses in double-silk satin with pleats and peplums.

So he didn’t need to repeat himself this time. While most of the day clothes were fairly solid — two-tone coats and suits in cashmere with curvilinear lines, boxy metallic tweed blazers — the ruffled evening looks didn’t seem new and indeed looked a bit tortured. A lanky jacket, shown with pants, that combined fox, mink and broadtail captured the lighter, offhand attitude that Mr. Gurung first conveyed, and to which he should return.

What gives Mr. Altuzarra an edge over virtually all the new young designers in New York is that he has a masterfully light hand with couture materials. His admiration for Tom Ford’s ability to give familiar shapes an extra kick of design and urgency was evident in this collection, his fourth. And the sexy fierceness of the mostly black clothes was incredibly appealing.

A number of designers this season are showing jackets that combine two or three different materials — fur and wool, say. In their straightforward collection, rich in texture, Alexa Adams and Flora Gill of the label Ohne Titel mixed suede with what appeared to be knitted fur, or black leather and a softer ribbed fabric.

But the motive in this collection and others seems to be to lend novelty to an otherwise basic garment. Nothing new or interesting is being proposed. And in some cases the contrasting textures come together in a lumpy way.

The difference with Mr. Altuzarra’s clothes — belted, close-to-the-body suits in black boiled wool with shoulders or fronts of glossy black goat hair — is that the choices feel more considered. He’s not just making a collage. Also, the workmanship on rather tough-looking materials, like leather and the glazed wool of a dress with laced vents, is consistently delicate.

Mr. Altuzarra used Frankenstein stitching on many of the pieces, in part to suggest the feeling of things coming apart, but the stitches are fine and random in length. As much as the big showy gestures, like the goat hair or the raised storm collars or the wool coats shaped by rows of buckled straps, the sutures play their part in an excellent collection.

The news at Preen, which is designed by Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi, was a bold, dark floral print used for blouses and dresses with articulated bra cups. There were a lot of familiar plays on transparency (dresses cut with random holes, sheer yokes). What looked fresh was a straight-line charcoal pantsuit over that blue-gray print.

Regina Feoktistova at Alexander Wang fall 2010 show:

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