Isaac Hindin Miller reports from the style metropolis on the latest in autumn fashions.
Thom Browne showed his men's collection inside a grand old ballroom at the Westin Hotel in Paris last month: A turn-of-the-century dinner party was in progress, complete with piles of steaming food, taxidermy animals and models who actually ate. His women's collection was presented tonight in New York - also in a grand old ballroom - on the third floor of New York Public Library. This time however, food was not on the menu.
Walking in, we were greeted by two kneeling altar boys in signature shrunken grey Thom Browne suits, bowing their heads in prayer as Latin choral music reverberated around the room. When all were present, they moved around the altar and stood facing the crowd. In walked 40 nuns in dark, floor-length capes, with severe, white, winged veils covering their faces.
If it wasn't for the eyes, which were framed by ludicrously long false lashes, they would have looked exactly like the doomed women in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel A Handmaid's Tale.
One by one, each model walked up to the altar boys, stood as they undressed her, then circled the room.
Beneath the gowns, Browne's aesthetic appeared. It started with his classic cropped suits in gingham checks and plaids, with striped shirts and college ties.
The sense of repression continued with capes featuring zip-open armholes, only accessible from the outside, and fur cummerbunds that pinned the girls' arms to their bodies.
But Browne also showed his talent for shape and proportion, in sculpted tops with curved necks and lobster sleeves, and tulip skirts - the perfect hour glass figure.
Asked if he had intended to suggest a sinister world where women should be seen but not heard, Browne shook his head.
"I grew up Catholic and it was a beautiful visual image. There was a bit of playing with convention, but I was mainly just trying to capture that beautiful image."
Hallelujah.
KAREN WALKER
Karen Walker is New Zealand's sole designer to consistently show her collections on a catwalk beyond the Pacific Rim, and her international fan base loves her for it. But there was no pastoral Aotearoa inspiration for autumn 2011: The kids of famed northern soul disco Wigan Casino formed the basis; manual-labourers who dropped their tools at the whistle and escaped their blue collar realities by dancing all night long.
That sense of rough and ready teens came through in fisherman's sweaters, or a blazer paired with layered tee shirts and drawstring pants. A shift dress was tarted up with vinyl panels and sleeves, and a woollen coat had double reinforced leather shoulders - perfect for a backspin on the dirty dance floor.
The Wigan Castle uniform was a combination of workwear, sportswear and Sunday-best, a mashup that Walker translated literally on the catwalk: a crisp white tee shirt tucked into suit pants or a singlet with a floaty white skirt, or a pretty floral dress with white socks and men's leather shoes.
Little known fact: those Northerners had a thing for Girl Guides and their patches.
"Every time they'd do an all-nighter they'd sew one on as a badge of honour," said Walker after the show.
In a self-referential twist, Walker's badges were tee shirt prints from her own previous seasons - the smoking cat, the fly, the owl and the Runaway girl's boots.
"When you've been around this long you have a certain amount of iconography you can dip into," she said.
And one can only imagine how many all-nighters have been pulled in the process.
* For more from Isaac, see isaaclikes.com.
