Jess Cartner-Morley on the 2004 autumn shows




The challenge with New York fashion week is that it has a lot of to live around. A lot more than London, Milan and even Paris, it is a city steeped in their own fashion mythology. Everywhere you turn include the most stylish of urban ghosts: Katherine hepburn outside Tiffany, Annie Hall in Central Park, Bianca Jagger at Studio 54, Carrie Bradshaw at Pastis. To us visitors, Manhattan streets feel as if a collage of half-remembered movie sets, so your simplest of activities - ordering a coffee, hailing a cab - becomes a silver-screen moment. The vitality for which The big apple may be known is significantly in evidence in the hoopla that surrounds fashion week. Witness the paparazzi buzzing around Sex along with the City front-rowers Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis, or hilarious, unashamedly self-referential daily gossip rags which dish the dirt on which editor has worn a similar coat all fashion week and who invented the dumbest red-carpet quote But too often, the spark fizzles on the catwalk. Few for the fashion show circuit would disagree that regarding some fashion capitals, Ny has the most boring shows. You will find acres of beige and camel separates, tasty as a possible egg-white omelette, and endless creepily forelock-tugging collections geared towards the rich and "social", but precious no other. Decidedly un-cosmopolitan, through the town that invented that very cocktail. Donna Karan has risen higher than the pack, and stayed there, because instead of running away from these Manhattan ghosts she grabs them, adds a bit blush plus a cute clutch bag and sends them right back down the catwalk. Her latest collection for DKNY, her cheaper line,louis vuitton shoulder bags, was entitled New York Fantasy; the setting on the catwalk would be a sepia-toned scene of your snowy Central Park. The garments hit a pleasing balance between an idealised along with a real Nyc woman, with delicate champagne- and biscuit-toned silk and sequinned skirts worn with chunky sweaters and opaque tights in moss green or chocolate brown. Calvin Klein, on the other hand, rolling around in its second post-Calvin-himself season, took its trademark understatement to new levels. So low-key was the endless drift of mocha satin and oyster silk that you might do decent business selling the playback quality as being a sleep aid. There is certainly simple chic, then there is dull. Part of the latest York fashion week's malaise is the top rank - Donna, Calvin and Ralph - continues to be static for some time. So it's nice thing about it that two designers emerged now as credible candidates to include some sparkle inside not too distant future. Michael Kors, that's gonna leave his Paris post at Celine, is beefing up his own-name label with the aid of new backers; Narciso Rodriguez may soon secure sometimes a profile-boosting gig at Gucci or a sizeable purchase of his New York-based own label. For a very long time, the best thing about Michael Kors may be his fabulously over-the-top soundbites. His over-the-top aesthetic I find less amusing. But, fur overload aside, this collection - a kind of haute-Woodstock luxury weekend wardrobe for the modern Carly Simon - was one of the highlights, by having an irresistable energy. Narciso Rodriguez is in stark contrast for the wisecracking Kors. He or she is a phenomenally skilled tailor but I take a look at his clothes - a clean-lined and knee-length, high-necked coat, or possibly a black dress wear cut tight and severe - and I go to a man who must reduce and have a little fun. Let's hope fame and fortune turn his head a bit. Marc Jacobs is definitely an old hand at channelling Nyc cool. His can be the favoured label of each and every hip young actress in the united states, from Scarlett Johansson to Kirsten Dunst to Maggie Gyllenhaal. His shows invariably start one hour . 5 late, to be able to allow a pre-catwalk catwalk show of celebs arriving to adopt their seats - a scene so pressured and bitchy, it's a wonder Joan Rivers doesn't commentate. Jacobs' clothing is always deliberately off-kilter, this coming year inside your. These were clothes for the very thin, very rich, and very old-fashioned . It struck me as perverse to deliver Gisele Bundchen in a tweed skirt, frumpy blouse and flat, kirbigripped hair; in order that it made sense to locate that Jacobs had taken inspiration from John Currin's purposefully unsettling paintings of his wife, Rachel Feinstein. It was, however, a superb season for Marc by Marc Jacobs, the younger line that Jacobs oversees, which finally shifted - well, a bit - in the 1970s childrenswear aesthetic. Dungarees were there, but alongside gor- geous skirt suits in gunmetal velvet and black wool, and elegant teal velvet wide-legged trousers. You will likely be surprised to know that young flibbertigibbet upstarts are not really the only preserve of London fashion week. Ny features a couple too. Proenza Schouler's young design pair, Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCullough, are actually taken underneath the bony wing of Anna Wintour, but even this is inadequate to shield them through the beginnings of the backlash this year. Women's Wear Daily damned with faint praise - "They are endeavoring to discover and develop what's going to become their voice." However in an uneven collection there are some beautiful pieces: cocktail dresses using signature bold-yet-intricate patchwork seaming mixed a fashion-junkie's worship of construction with the uptown, streamlined, body-conscious aesthetic. In sophistication, Proenza Schouler was streets before Esteban Cortazar. His enthusiastic homage to Chelsea Girl - silver leather skirts, crack-glaze patent trenchcoats, one-shouldered pink satin dresses, black coats trimmed with blue fur - was excusable only as they is but 19. Prince of the young guns is Zac Posen. He can't do all of it yet - not wild in regards to the black satin bloomer suits - but he constitutes a mean dress yourself in the clean-lined mould of his idol, Tom Ford. The ruched silver floorlength gown could hold its very own on any red carpet. New York is often a tough town, however it seems to are very effective for British designers. The title of Luella Bartley's collection - Danger Danger Sloane Ranger - established that her points of reference have never shifted much from her much-hyped first collection five-years ago, Daddy I Want a Pony. This is familiar ground for Bartley: her muse is "at Granny's castle and stealing the heirloom tweed jackets and jewels to use to her next gig in the Brixton Academy". In London, a restless industry would've grown impatient for something new in Ny, her kooky style - jumpers with leather elbow patches, coats with primary-coloured smiley-face buttons - remains considered adorable. The vision of English chic which Matthew Williamson gives New York is pure Kate Moss: the jewelled Ugg boots will be great for Primrose Hill,louis vuitton outlet, while boho-luxe dragonfly-print chiffon babydoll cocktail dresses will definitely be Ibiza essentials. Long velvet skirts and patchwork fur and suede jackets dovetailed with Kors' haute-Woodstock look - could this be autumn's big fashion story? London-based Roland Mouret also rooted his New York catwalk collection firmly on our side of the Atlantic, finding inspiration in "Hitchcock's vision of the dynamic from a man along with a woman; Francis Bacon's twisting of perception; as well as the mysticism in the Scottish lochs". It was a deceptively simple collection that displayed Mouret's strengths - sexy dresses and chic coats - perfectly. For day, tailored leather in Hermès orange and chic wool-felt coat dresses; for evening, languidly sexy draped dresses in gunmetal or olive, held in addition to ripples of gleaming bronze sequins. "It's great being last New York", Mouret's show notes say. Playing towards the crowd, yes - but why not, since they love him correctly. And also you determine what people say - if you're able to allow it to be here...