Wide-Eyed and Blind: Some highlights for A/W 2012

Sunday 10 June 2012

Some highlights for A/W 2012

Looking ahead to next season, I'm quite excited. There's a lot of suits being presented by a multitude of houses from Louis Vuitton to Hermes, as well as masculine cuts to jackets and coats. I love me some androgyny so this is a total yay moment. However, I do worry that this trend might be bastardised by the high street. These types of looks only work if the fit and tailoring are perfect and cheaper knock-offs could lead to a lot of hideousness. All the same, I'm not too worried about this as mainstream fashion seems to overlook the sexiness of androgyny in favour of more overt, traditional modes of dress.

Another exciting factor is the amount of colour, especially the pretty, powdery pastels that were seen at Oscar de la Renta and others. While I love black (and it did abound, a staple of A/W) I enjoyed the vast spectrum of colours on display on catwalks; from sixties prints to super-brights and pops of hot pink all over the place (Thakoon, Betsey Johnson, Celine, etc)

Collars are everywhere.

So is the a-line skirt.

Gloves, particularly elbow-length ones, brought a touch of glamour to the kookier collections and made elegant collections even more timeless.

Coats are oversize but everything else is quite fitted or stream-line.

Carven, Isabel Marant, Dior, Jil Sander, Sonia Rykiel and Valentino were some stand-out favourites and will all, no doubt, warrant their own posts at some stage. They were all achingly beautiful and some of them surprised me. I'm usually more attracted to the younger, more hip brands like Alexander Wang and 3.1 Philip Lim but some of the older, bastions of the industry really caught my attention and captured my imagination this year.

I loved:

Art prints at Carven.