Every Fashion Week, we ask buyers from various boutiques what they liked from the collections. After all, whatever they snap up will soon hang from racks next season. Today, Joanna Baum from Brooklyn’s Sir boutiques clues us in on her picks. So far, she ranks A Détacher’s silk dresses as her favorite, loved Gary Graham’s use of plaids, and felt Karen Walker’s collection was inspiring. See more of Joanna’s picks after the jump.
A Détacher
This collection feels so sophisticated and Parisian, yet very relaxed and wearable. Overall, the collection runs with a soft but strong palette of tans, blues, violets, and black. The floral printed dresses with soft pleating at the neckline are a standout. The black crocheted styles add a nice amount of effortless drama and seem to be the perfect pieces to punch up any spirit or outfit. But the nude silk dresses are my favorite — subtly but expertly twisted, with asymmetrical necklines draped beautifully into incredibly flattering dress silhouettes that are perfectly accented with black sashes.
See a slideshow of the A Détacher collection.
Gary Graham
Gary Graham always seems to do an amazing job of creating clothes that feel like you’ve owned and loved them for years, all the while passing as completely chic and modern. As usual, the washed cotton and silk pieces look stunning (and perfectly layered), but this time they are even more fun to discover under sheer boyfriend jackets and shirts. I love the use of the sun-bleached plaids over wispy silk dresses (what I want to live in), and the sexy shrunken jackets over voluminous gauzy shirts. There’s a lot of style throughout the ages here, but what’s incredible is how the designer’s vision and loving treatments of the fabrics override one specific reference of the past and instead evoke a feeling of timeless elegance along with the allure of masculine meets feminine.
Karen Walker
This collection illustrates the beauty of storytelling in fashion. Apparently Walker was inspired by the sixties cult television series The Prisoner, in which a British secret agent is held prisoner in a seaside village. The series is fascinating, suspenseful, and often surreal (we’re talking ominous plastic floating balls that roll onto shore to attack people). So, too, is Karen Walker’s collection, which seems to take the aspects of the TV show and have a blast with them. My favorite pieces are puffed up to inspire, but they have more user-friendly counterparts in the mix, too: There’s the windbreakers strategically paper-bagged with oversize tunnels and drawstrings, and then translated into a swingy black dress with big outerwear-size pockets (most practical!). Classic nautical stripes also appear in multiple forms, swinging from easy just-got-off-the-boat shapes to slashed and draped dresses where the stripes bend their sea legs more toward jailhouse (in the most exquisite and gorgeous way). Throw into the mix some Technicolor patterns, and all in all you have a collection that takes prisoner of its inspiration but easily breaks free in its interpretation.
See a slideshow of the Karen Walker collection.
