Womenswear gets more mature for fall 2010

Womenswear gets more mature for fall 2010: Collections by Som, Jacobs, Karan by Robin Givhan

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 17, 2010

NEW YORK, FEB. 16 -- The most difficult thing to be in the women's ready-to-wear industry -- aside from a size 16 -- is a grown-up.

The fashion business reveres nothing quite like it worships youthfulness. As a culture, both men and women are forever chasing their youth, but the fashion industry's pursuit of an adolescent past is aggressive, unrelenting and, at times, desperate. Youth represents modernity and the next new thing, and if the fashion industry loses its ability to predict customers' desires long before they can even articulate them, then fashion loses its profit center.

But forever lunging toward the pink-cheeked and gangly can be particularly self-destructive -- and that's not merely a reference to the distressing sight of mutton dressed as lamb. Designers who willfully choose 15-year-old girls as emblematic of their ideal woman alienate the mature women who can actually afford their clothes and who lead the power-brokering, jet-setting lives that so often fuel fantasies in the atelier.

Fashion adores an enfant terrible, as well. Indeed, there are few other industries that use the term so liberally and with such enthusiasm. These young designers, known for their subversive attitude toward authority and tradition, provide the creative energy that fuels fashion. But they can also come across as the kids who refuse to grow up, forever building collections that are more self-indulgent than self-aware.

So it's worth pausing to admire a designer like Peter Som, who after taking a break from the runway, returned with a fall collection that perfectly blended a mature, uptown attitude with a psychedelic freewheeling joy. His explosion of stripes and abstract watercolor prints in a single ensemble, his playful manipulation of fur -- tie-dyed mink! -- and his exuberant use of color are welcome pronouncements that adults can be giddy. Indeed, they need a bit of silliness in their day-to-day.

One wants to applaud Jason Wu for his choice of inspiration: the fashion photography of Irving Penn. Those languid, black and white photographs of Penn's wife and model Lisa Fonssagrives are the epitome of urbane maturity. But once Wu strayed beyond his menswear-inspired tweedy daywear into cocktail and evening dresses, his silhouettes went awry. Women in the 1950s knew how to sit and walk with a big crinoline swishing about their legs, and more importantly, designers knew how to manipulate the crinoline underskirts so they wouldn't rise up and smother the daylights out of the poor sap who thought wearing it to dinner would be a grand idea. Wu's bell-shaped dresses inflated by thick crinolines called to mind floats -- of the Rose Bowl variety -- rather than soignee elegance. Grown-up clothes demand that a designer have grown-up skills.