Narciso Rodriguez is among those designers foregoing the traditional runway for spring 2018. “Shows are exciting, but you can start to feel like you’re getting lost in the shuffle,” he said during a morning appointment in his showroom. “Honestly, [my decision] came more from a place where I just wanted to explore new ways to look at the work.” Case in point: He took a precisely cut coat from his model to reveal its interior, detailed with white lining and graphic beige trim. “You can’t show this on the runway,” he said. And, he acknowledged, a runway sabbatical offered another advantage. By focusing on the clothes only, Rodriguez has been able to clock a little more at-home time with his infant twins than would have been possible if he were staging a show.
Rodriguez is no stranger to the talk-through/walk-through; it’s his preferred method for the pre-seasons, and one that beautifully showcases the subtle power of his clothes. This season marks his company’s 20th anniversary, a milestone he’s noting not with bells, whistles and an Instagram-frenzy fete, but by taking stock of the core elements of his work. “I went back went to things that I really love — tailoring, wool, embroidery.” And of course, a base of black and white, often in graphic combination.
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The result is a finely honed collection pulsing with a chic that registers as both bold and unselfconscious. To that point, Rodriguez is a master of sly juxtaposition, achieving his signature sensual attitude via lean but often fluid lines and intricate yet unfussy tailoring, along with provocative shows of skin: the aforementioned coat over a white geometrically constructed bra top with slightly low-slung black pants; a bare-on-top jumpsuit with pleated pants in the collection’s primary accent color, brick orange. While construction imparts much of the detail of Rodriguez’s work, he also showed a series of densely wrought, tone-on-tone embroideries that put a modernist spin on a classic evening trope.