You can tell how well a designer’s doing by the number of women who turn up at a show decked out in his or her current collection. By that measure, Jonathan Saunders’s subtly Art-Nouveau printed dresses, and shirts and pencil skirts in hues of cranberry, teal, emerald, and red, have won the popular female vote this fall. They’re clothes which work as professional daywear, but aren’t too serious to take out to an early evening event—exactly right, in fact, for something like a seven o’clock fashion show.
Saunders is beginning to design in sync with the way women think—and that, when we get down to what matters in fashion, counts for just as much as ‘concept’ and ‘inspiration.’ Arguably more. For spring, he traveled even further along that trajectory of understanding, sending out a collection of beautiful color; outstanding but not trendily raucous prints in sequences of shapes with a completely modern validity about them. There was a time when Saunders would quote art and architecture as sources, but could seem to lose the thread when it came to applying his research to cutting clothes with a purpose in life. Not now.
This season, his translation of Miami Deco pastels and fifties full-skirted silhouettes moved effortlessly through separates, brilliantly subtle two-tone waffle knits, and silk dresses with curved, slit skirts. The whole impression was of a dynamic mobility, both in the believability of the clothes and their semi-fitted ease. It all made sense, right through to a lingerie-influenced evening section of crewelwork embroidery on tulle. “Floaty but not fussy,” said one woman outside. And another, “You know what? That man just gets it.”
With appropriately single-minded rigor, Costa paired the sandals with everything from a white silk crepe de Chine double-breasted jacket devoid of detail save for a tiny belt worn over a matching skirt with micro-pleated folds that allowed the fabric to undulate in a fluid yet controlled way and fell to a few inches above the ankles to an elegant black silk/wool long dress suspended from sculptural metal straps that traced their way all around to the back.
It’s not, to be honest, that it truly lacked for one before. Pringle has been going since 1815 and is renowned for its way with argyle patterns and cable-knit twinsets. Yet the challenge is how to update that past so it looks like the company has a meaningful future, which also entails not being afraid to embrace what went before. What made Carr’s presentation look so refreshing was that rather than trying to offer a lot of runway drama, he simply took pleasure in showing looks built around the beautiful sweaters the company has been making for nearly two centuries—only rigorously modernized.
For pre-fall, he solved the belt conundrum by simply attaching them to the coats. And what coats they were, particularly the charcoal felted flannel with a crisscross lapel that buckled, harness-like, and the cleanly cut, pony-hair balmacaan in a black-and-white oil-splattered pattern that was inspired by Richard Avedon’s landmark work, In the American West. Kors’s other major influence was the spectacular Ann Bonfoey Taylor exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum. The result was a collection that fused a cowboy sense of romance with Taylor’s equestrian chic: a long ruffle skirt with a cutaway hem in a graphic check, devoré silk dresses in turquoise and crimson, the most delicate peasant top in Chantilly 
Given that the guys had just scaled Everest, those references were as carefully placed as a clamp on a rock face, so they didn’t look overdone—rip-cord drawstrings at the neck and waist of the dresses, or belts fashioned out of climbing rope. Elsewhere, they rendered the tweeds that have become their trademark in brilliant (in both senses of the word) color (vivid orange, emerald green) for looser-cut, round-shouldered coats and jackets, worn with tapered pants and nylon shirts. And there was a cool new sporty variant for evening, what they called “mountain jacquard” in that same green or deep purple-blue, for skirts that wrap round the body like bath towels, worn with either a bra top or a chunky sweater. Hernandez and McCollough showed how simple it was to wrap and unwrap that skirt, as quick as the Velcro fastenings on a mountaineering parka. But here, like everything else, it was evident just how much work had gone into these clothes to make them look that good, that easy, and that effortless.