Interview

Saturday

Looks from VPL; Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer

Valentines Day, in a way, is the perfect day to launch Fashion Week, and for me it started off with the runway show of VPL (which stands for Visible Panty Line) by Victoria Bartlett, a former fashion editor at Interview and one of the top stylists in the business. It was a great show of modern clothes for progressive young ladies. There was something slightly Battlestar Galactica about it for me, and that's a compliment. The clothes are modernist but sensible, space age and kind of nomadic. They reveal enough sport influence that a girl could catch a cab or hop a turnstile in most of these looks. I could see Battlestar's bombshell Cylon, Number Six, in the architectural zip front coat. An off-duty in the silkscreened bodysuits with shadowy faces resembled Warhol's Rorschachs. If there's one designer who captures the casual glamour of art world zeitgeist, it's Vicky.

I think the last time I was at Roseland Ballroom was some years earlier, to see Bob Dylan. He was great. So was Alexander Wang, in a different medium. But this guy is a sort of pop star-young and cute, and he doesn't make sexy music, but he makes very sexy clothes that strut their stuff perfectly, to the tune of state of the art rock. Wang started out, as many designers would this season, with a procession of black. (Are they mourning all those dead dollars?) But this was cool black, the kind creatives and nocturnals wear as a uniform. Kawakubo black. Midnight camo. And Wang flatters lithe bodies with figure hugging pieces cut away to accentuate the shoulders, the neck or the belly. There were clever recut takes on the oversized man shirt, worn all wrong-used asymmetrically as a jacket off the shoulders or head and shoulder through the neck. The collection was about black and white, but rooted in black leather and all that it connotes, and executed in many ways, from coolly cruel boots to studded bags big enough for looting, to tights/pants and souped-up motorcycle jackets. I don't recall any actual color, but the black was all about black on black, with shiny on matte, wool against leather, velvet against gauze, and black fur used dramatically against leather, or as a faux dreadlocks head covering. There were lots of glamour girls at the show and they gave Wang a wild ovation at the end. (Of course the designer did serve margaritas during the fairly long wait for the show.)

ThreeAsFour did a presentation this year instead of a show, which created an anarchic first-come-first-serve situation as hundreds of the designers' friends vied with the press and buyers in a massive scrum for the freight elevators in a Chelsea gallery and studio building. The more fainthearted of the press simply left. I was tipped off that it was possible to enter next door and I managed to get in to the upstairs scrum, where the taller members of the press were able to observe another meditation on black and white. But where Wang flirted with severity in black and white, this collection was thick with phantasm and ethereal evocation. The clothes were cut in crystalline layers, with white numbers floating aura like in bejeweled layers of varying opacity. The black also teased with transparency, and shimmered and reflected. As usual, ThreeAsFour delivered something beautiful and entirely original.

After that I dropped in on Elise Overland's show. It was a hipster party where I knew almost everyone, but conversation slowed when the runway promenade began. The models who periodically strutted out on the raised runway all seemed NBA height, thanks to their platform spike heels. The Norwegian Overland is known for making leathers that rock star-type gals favor, but she's extended her esthetic through a whole line of clothes that look slim, tall, and tough in an appealing way, using leather as well as shimmering metallics that catch available night light. The clothes are cool, like the kind of thing Milla's character in Resident Evil should wear at night when she's not saving the planet, or the thing a modern day Emma Peel would just love. And the whole thing was topped off nicely by jewelry by Alexander Calder, the real stuff, which made the collection appear to be just what a modernist fox would wear to cocktails at a Case Study House. (Photo: Overland, with Alexander Calder jewelry)