Favorite of the Day: Yves Saint Laurent

This season, like almost every season he has worked there, the rumors about Stefano Pilati's ouster from Yves Saint Laurent bled through the industry. I ignored them for the most part since no matter how rabid the sources have been over the years, his demise never materialized. I hoped that the rumors would stay what they had always been. Rumors.

Unfortunately for him, and for us, that was not the case. Yesterday's show was his last. All of the colors, as well as any hint of lightness, present during the previous season were drained away and replaced by a hard sensuality.

The mood fell in line with that of the season, but there was something else (possibly the chain mail dresses) that made the YSL woman seem as if she were ready for battle.


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Favorite of the Day: Haider Ackermann

This season, Haider Ackermann continued his usual stunning work. His clothes are always obviously of his hand, and yet his vision never stands still.

He played with some of the prominent shapes of the season but in that way that only he can.


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Favorite of the Day: Chalayan

After three weeks of muted colors even I, as devoted to neutrals as I am, lusted for something different. Yesterday in Paris that need was fulfilled by the Chalayan show.

It wasn't just that there was color. It was the way in which they were combined. Minty green with gray. Tangerine with a mustard like yellow.

Color combinations that don't come to mind naturally but that you can't believe lived without.


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Favorite of the Day: Balenciaga

Designers spend a lot of time looking to the past and to the future. The present doesn't seem to interest them. I don't find this fact all that surprising. When one thinks about it, the present is fleeting and almost impossible to grasp. The past and the future, however, stretch on endlessly.

When fashion looks forward, often the result is filled with kitsch and cliché. A Jetsons mashup that verges on costume. At the Balenciaga show on March 1st, the target was the future without the costume. It was a future filled with new shapes and garments made of multiple fabrics.

But of course, Nicolas Ghesquière is always looking ahead even as so many others look back.


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Favorite of the Day: Gareth Pugh

If my memory is correct, and it usually is, a color that does not live somewhere on the spectrum between black and white has never made its way down a Gareth Pugh runway.

For some designers such devotion to a set of colors or a type of print would devolve into both a gimmick and a crutch. The product would be clothes that said "this is what I'm known for because I can't do anything else". But that has never been the feeling one gets from Pugh's collections.

Instead of playing up the supple, soft side of leather like so many others have this season, he shredded it into small strips or cut it into rectangular blocks before reforming it into sculptural pieces.

In a season all about toughness, he was right on the mark.


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