Let’s Face It, There’s Always Something Else To Shop For, And It’s Target Time

I don’t know about you, but I have a had to institute a moratorium on spending on spring clothing and accessories.  I have no reasonable excuse for buying anything else.  So, trying to steer clear of my favorite websites, I thought it was time to check out the Shops at Target.  Without question, my favorite is the Privet House shop (I’m not a dog owner, and after my dear friend was awoken on Mother’s Day by a poop covered dog who had been sick in his crate the night before and let out by a mischievous five year old, I have no interest in becoming one — so I have an aversion to the Polka Dog Bakery shop without even checking it out so it could be just lovely but I wouldn’t know).  The Webster shop is a little preppy for my taste, but there is some nice merchandise if you go for that kind of thing.

Not surprisingly, many of the Privet House items have sold out, but there are still some cute pieces left.  The dishes, napkins and glasses are very pretty.  Admittedly, at this point nice melamine dishes are a dime a dozen, except that they aren’t remotely a dime a dozen so the Target prices for these dishes makes them pretty hard to resist.  $15.99 for a set of four dinner plates isn’t half bad given that comparable French Bull melamine dishes, while beautiful, retail for  $11.00 each.  The bad news is out of four styles of printed melamine dinner plates, only one is still available online.  Truth be told, it’s my favorite of the four.

Privet House at Target Brown Toile Dinner Plates

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With This Springs Jackets What Is Old Is New Again

We’ve discussed shoes, printed jeans and floral dresses, but the other key item this season — the one that’s almost the easiest to wear — is the floral print jacket.  Personally, I’m a fan of the light weight bomber jacket.  There is also the cousin style of the pseudo letterman jacket, but the idea is pretty consistent either way.  And if you ask me, they’re beyond cute.  They are a little young looking, but I think that designers have tweaked the style to come up with jackets that really anyone can wear.

Sportmax Stefy Floral Print Jacket $756.00

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Dress It Up, Call It What You Will, It’s Still Marc Jacobs

Isn’t it kind of intriguing how a designer can design multiple collections simultaneously?  It is one thing to create nice clothes.  It is altogether another talent to be able to distill the essence of a design house, in the absence of the founding visionary, and to design consistently with the feeling and aesthetic of the house, and at the same time completely shift gears and create a distinct vision for your namesake collection which is utterly separate.

In this context, Marc Jacobs’ relationship with Louis Vuitton is somewhat unusual.  Although Louis Vuitton had long since established itself in the world of luggage and leather goods, Marc Jacobs was Artistic Director for the first ready-to-wear collection.  So there is, in essence, no Louis Vuitton ready-to-wear style separate from Jacobs.  Yet somehow, over the years, he has managed to weave a fairly distinctive look for the brand.  Sometimes it is more distinct from the collection he puts out under his namesake label, sometimes less so.  Looking ahead to Fall 2012 I’m having an awfully hard time telling the two apart.  To a great extent it may have to do with styling.  Styling plays a not insignificant role in giving an identity to a collection.  But, however you look at it, I find the choices that Jacobs made in presenting these collections surprising.

Louis Vuitton Fall 2012

  
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Spring Dresses, Look Like Costumes From Mad Men, But Are Utterly Modern

As spring gets into full swing, and the stores are starting to hold spring sales, it seems like must have item this spring and summer is not in fact floral jeans (although they’re still great, so don’t worry if you followed my earlier advice and got a pair), but the floral dress.  As a certain kind of over the top Monet floral print becomes ubiquitous, it seems like everywhere I turn Erdem has suddenly become “the” brand.  It may be that I only recently became aware of it and others have known the label for a while.  But it suddenly seems to be in every magazine, on every celebrity, in every boutique ….  And Erdem’s forte, as it turns out, is a certain style of floral print constructed into garments that seem almost sweet (kind of Mad Men style) but is tailored with a modern edge that tempers what could easily come across as awfully saccharine.  Is Erdem popular because the floral thing is such a big trend right now, or did the line play any kind of a role in shaping the trend?  That’s deep, right?

Erdem Spring 2012 Collection

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Wear Your Heart On Your Sleeve, Or Your Profile On Your Dress

Confirming the notion that the most interesting and creative ideas often come from the most unexpected places (yeah, I don’t know if that’s particularly a notion people have, but it sounds like a good truism), Romania is currently home to some of the more intriguing emerging designers on the fashion scene.  The end of years of repression, and a capitalist economy in its early stages of growth, provide the perfect breeding ground for a flourishing fashion avant-garde.

Lana Dumitru is one of the more exciting members of this front.  “Fashion in Romania is fresh and I can compare it with a newborn — we are starting to discover things and grow,” Dumitru says. “But I can compare it with an old man as well — everything is going really slow.”   Marie Claire magazine offers an eloquent profile of the designer:

However, Lana’s success as an innovative designer is anything but sluggish. Even though she’s still a student at the Design Institute of Italy, she has already become internationally recognized for her collections that fuse camouflage, technology, and old-world traditions together. Her graduation collection at the Bucharest Institute of Art tracked the evolution of women, much through the animalistic and technological interpretations of the female body. In many of the pieces, Lana did not settle for the gimmicks of fancy screen-printing: She altered the proportions of the fabric to give a three-dimensional form to the image portrayed.

Read more: Lana Dumitru Interview – Romanian Fashion Designer Lana Dumitru – Marie Claire

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No Need To Run For The Hills … The Sneakers Are All City

It’s fun to discover, once in a while, that you’ve been ahead of the trends, spotting the next-big-thing before it was the next-big-thing. I’m sure I am not actually ahead of the trends, just a part of the first or second wave, but I allow myself to imagine that I got hooked on whatever it is before it was a thing. So my big thing, starting last summer, has been sneakers.

Generally I’m a high heel kind of a girl. It comes in part of having short, stocky legs desperately in need of elongating, and in part of having friends who are several inches taller than I am. But it had been years since I had left the house without the added boost of a 2″-4″ heel. That is, up until last spring. For a number of reasons, the primary one being the popularity of jeans cuffed up to capri length, I decided to give flats a go. In addition to flat sandals and flip flops, in a store one day I picked up a pair of Bensimon sneakers on a whim. Admittedly, I had seen them in magazines enough times to think that if you wanted to look well dressed while wearing sneakers, they were a good bet. They are incredibly cute, garment dyed in a wide array of interesting colors. But more than that, they are the most comfortable shoes I have ever had the privilege of putting on my feet. Like bare feet. They’re amazing.  It was instant love.

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Don’t Miss Vera Wang’s Fabulous Fall

I absolutely appreciate the value of the runway as a place to make a statement, to express concepts, in forms that might be completely outrageous, and then those ideas get toned down and translated for the market.  But it does make me a little sad — I think often the brilliance gets lost in translation.  I don’t know if it is an idea on the part of the industry about what the general consumer will buy — i.e. conservative — or the reflection of an actual tentativeness and hesitancy on the part of consumers to go outside of a limited safety zone.

The general image of Vera Wang as a designer, based on the styles which are brought to market, is one of beautiful, graceful, modern, understated elegance.  She is, no doubt, incredible at that. She drapes like no one else.  It is definitely not, however, the whole story.  Her Pre-Fall 2012 collection is edgy and exciting and open to taking risks, without remotely pushing it so far that it should be inaccessible.  I’ll be interested to see which pieces ultimately wind up in stores.

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Fashion Star May Have Style And Not Just Celebrity And Sales

Fashion Star may prove me wrong yet.  Love this dress!

Nikki's High End Maxi Dress - Episode 4 - Bought by H&M

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Head Over To H&M Before You Hit The Red Carpet … No One Will Know

If you can easily afford designer prices, hell, go for it.  The clothes are generally exquisite.  If you find a designer piece on an unbelievable sale, go for that too.  But in terms of jumping onboard with spring’s fabulous designer trends, the fact is it’s really not necessary to shell out for the real thing.  That is, after all, what fast fashion is about — the fact that trends are changing constantly, so the clothing may as well be disposable and be priced accordingly.  Beyond that, however, H&M does an absolutely unbelievable job of reproducing the designer trends.  At times, it can be hard to distinguish the H&M version from the real thing.

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Designers Who Could Make You Love My Little Pony

This spring season is a tough one for me.  Oddly, I absolutely love it — I can barely contain my desire to own every article of clothing I see.  Yet it challenges almost all of my preconceptions about what I do not like when it comes to all areas of style and aesthetics.  Prabal Gurung put me in my place with regards to large doses of the color purple.  Right up there with my aversion to purple, is my discomfort with anything rainbow (already put to the test yesterday in ….’s photograph).  My only explanation is that both are part of the same aesthetic for me.  It includes rainbows, clouds, unicorns, angels and the color purple.   And “My Little Pony”, which for some reason the tweenage kids seem to be really into now in a tongue-in-cheek retro kind of way.  That was once my world.  Picture, if you will, a bedroom.  The walls are light blue.  The ceiling is covered in wallpaper that is light blue with clouds (a la Kramer vs. Kramer).  From hooks in the ceiling, there hang various puffy and satin objects:  a unicorn, a naked little angel figure, a cloud with a rainbow of ribbons hanging down from it.  On the wall above the bed there is an enormous puffy rainbow, three feet long, emerging from a cloud.  This is my bedroom, I’m going to guess maybe age 11 or so.  The saccharine sweet of it is so intense it almost burns.

And yet, two of my favorite designers — Mary Katrantzou and Christopher Kane — have taken the rainbow motif to the extreme, Kane with his resort collection and Katrantzou with her spring collection.  I still can’t quite envision myself walking down the street in one of Christopher Kane’s little rainbow dresses.  It seems like it would make such a ridiculous spectacle.  But I’m tempted.  It just might happen.

Christopher Kane Resort 2012 collection via Style.com

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