love letter

I think it was Washington Post writer Robin Givhans who once described one of Alber Elbaz's Lanvin collections as a love letter to women, and in the years of following his work and falling hopelessly in love almost everytime, I concur. That phrase as stayed with me, and I felt my love affirmed again, looking at the pictures of the fall collection. You feel that Mr Elbaz actually likes dressing women.

All the elements of classic women's clothing are there - the suits, the cocktail dresses - but it's like Mr Elbaz took everything and rumpled them and folded them anyhow and they look wonderfully dishevelled and somehow modern and timeless and refined at the same time. That navy suit right in the middle in the first picture just killed me. I was reminded of the Dior New Look looking at some of the peplum suits, but there was no daintiness, even with the elegance and femininity was still there.

(Also, no 80s' crap!)

Cathy Horyn of NYT noted in her review that the daywear was exceptional, and I agree. I loved a lot of the evening looks but when I was picking out what pictures I wanted to post, I found myself gravitating towards the awesome suits and daydresses - I love their simplicity. I want to try on everything, see how the jackets fall unbelted.

On a digressive note, I think they don't mesh with conventional ideas of minimalism, but that how some of these clothes felt to me - they were gorgeous in their plain-ness. I love clean lines and simplicity, but I dislike clothes that are too harsh, too stark, too severe, too austere, which is why I prefer the word "plain" rather than "minimal". Minimal suggests that the design is about the pursuit of purity, something extreme, which turns the whole idea of clothing into some kind of conceptual or idealogical argument. I'm not interested in that.

Images from style.com