September 25, 2009
FW Runway Report: Michael Kors, 3.1 Phillip Lim
The one-two uptown/downtown punch of Michael Kors, followed a few hours later by 3.1 Phillip Lim, has become one of my favorite parts of fashion week. Both bring out a who’s who of the fashion industry (Michael Douglas, Melania Knauss Trump, Aerin Lauder at Kors; hip gals-about-fash-week Leighton Meester, Alexa Chung, Lauren Conrad at Lim); both pull out all the energetic stops and put on truly standout runway shows. In the last batch of shows (for the great stuff that’s in stores now), both blew me away with perfectly capturing — in a time when most designers are painfully struggling — what women right now want to wear.
For spring, it was just as exciting, if with a few missteps. At Kors, the frenetic pace (thanks in part to a Lady Gaga-heavy soundtrack) set the stage for some really beautiful pieces: Super-sheer sweaters (that, ahem, should be worn with a cami in real life), silverly sequins, huge lucite-ball chokers, peeks of skin through strategically placed slashes, zippers and transparent panels. It was a softer, sorbet-colored take on Kors’ amazingly architectural fall collection, out now — and there were plenty of things (except, perhaps, for those see-through swaths circling the midriff of sleek sheaths) that will move well from the runway to real life.
Despite the economy, Phillip Lim has enjoyed much of the same success as Michael Kors (save for the regular Project Runway stint, of course, and with a decidedly more downtown audience). Lim — and the growing number of retailers that stock him — has displayed utter confidence in his business growth, which might explain why his prices keep creeping higher while most of the industry is marking down.
The spring collection had plenty of hits — notably, plenty of the slouchy, cropped pants that every editor seemed to wear to the tents at least once this week; by spring, that trend should have fully trickled down to the masses — but also a few missteps (an overabundance of mustard and chartreuse, two colors that don’t look so great on about 90 percent of women, come to mind).
Lim at his best was clean-lined and streamlined — a two-tone leather jacket, slim-cut sleeveless tux jackets, pretty pleated frocks — and at his worst, overdone and overadorned (knife pleats plus color-blocked panels plus silvery studs, oh my!). Standouts toward the end of the show included a batch of dresses with three-dimensional fabric swirls, prompting one fash editor in the crowd to tweet “Holy Rodarte, Lim!”. But, even if slightly derivative, the looks were far more retail-friendly, generally wearable — and, we suspect — affordable than any Mulleavy creation. And that, of course, is the hallmark of a Lim design. —Betsy Lowther
