After exercising extreme restraint by working in black and white, Carmen March craved color. A found scrap of lilac paper became the starting point of her summer collection.
With the Eighties as her seminal decade, for the “fabulous female empowerment” she looked up to while growing up, March continued to toy with the vestments and idea of a power woman, albeit one who got “stuck in an office all summer, quite alone and surrounded by the hostile city.”
Working with those square-shouldered looks — cropped blazers cut from Italian suiting, dresses belted from double-breasted suit jackets, unboned belted bustiers — brought into focus the discards of modern life, which she revisited in Japanese silk (reworked to look like an old plastic bag), or metallic cotton lace (for tinfoil). Elsewhere, ruffles at the shoulder were the by-product of a sleeve’s construction, soft folds stemmed from fabric lefts in darts.
Where the Spanish designer earns points — and the continued loyalty of retailers — is that her inventive cuts balance statement with fit. “It’s about being wearable, because that’s how you get attached to clothes and end up wearing them again,” she said, pointing out a waistline positioned high for comfortable movement, or curve-skimming, flattering butter-soft leather trousers. Pretty simple, but in her hands, also simply pretty.