Having chosen to stage her pre-fall presentation at Hollywood’s rock ’n’ roll mecca Amoeba Records, Stella McCartney took some of her own greatest hits — sophisticated, sporty and romantic themes — and mashed them up in the same masterful way music producers remix disco hooks and layer them over rap songs.
“I want women to wear my clothes ultimately but I also want to inspire them to wear my clothes differently, so this season that is what I was trying to do, to look at what I do and try to twist it and layer it a little bit more,” she said.
For example, the designer, long a proponent of day-into-evening dresses, worked navy and camel-colored silk in exaggerated stripes and dots in ways that made it at once casual and fancy. One long-sleeve dot dress set with a diagonal panel at the waist was particularly pretty, while a pair of long A-line eyelet dresses in black and dove-gray felt edgy with the addition of spiraling zippers at the seams.
You May Also Like
She also flipped the lingerie-inspired dress on its ear, layering boned and seamed slips underneath diaphanous tulle dresses. And instead of pink feathered mules, she paired the boudoir-inspired looks with flat open-backed slippers in masculine “Alter Croc.”
For outerwear, McCartney combined classic wool bodies with sweater sleeves and continued her use of Fur Free Fur, this time in tiger and leopard prints. She paired one tiger bomber jacket over a leopard jacquard knit onesie — probably the only time such an item ever looked so chic. Ever the playful modernist, she took the cat prints in an even more literal direction, with artistically drawn feline faces printed on white silk, which she used for silk trousers and slipdresses.
Even more cheeky was the cat-face motif rendered in an autumnal-hued tapestry jacquard, bringing to mind the sort of needlepoint pillows grannies make to honor their house pets. McCartney balanced one such skirt with a luxe gray cable knit sweater. If her goal was to get women to wear her designs differently, she offered many good suggestions amidst the aisles of records and CDs.