The weather never seems to cooperate with New York Fashion Week. In February it’s freezing and icy, and in September it seems to get even hotter than the summer that just ended.
On this steamy day in Manhattan, Prabal Gurung took his guests on a cool Himalayan trek, evoking snow-capped mountains and mossy hills in his Nepal-inspired designs.
A night earlier there was heat, too. Lady Gaga got a little steamed when the crowd at a Harper’s Bazaar party talked through some of her jazz tunes, and stopped singing to admonish the offenders.
And Gaga wasn’t the only prominent singer to grace a Fashion Week event: Pharrell was there too, in his signature hat of course, leading a dozen models as he displayed his RAW for the Oceans spring-summer collection.
Among the highlights:
ALEXANDER WANG
Looking for inspiration for his spring collection, Alexander Wang had to search no further than, well, his feet.
“Sneakers!” Wang said when asked, in backstage interview after his runway show on Saturday, what his overarching design theme had been.
Wang is always a big Fashion Week draw, and this show, in a huge pier by the Hudson River, was no exception — the designer had Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and former model Lauren Hutton all sitting together in the front row.
“He doesn’t necessarily have a colourful, crazy style, but it’s his own thing and he kind of coins his own sort of image and I love it,” Minaj said.
But back to those sneakers: Wang said he takes no stock in trend reports he’s seen saying there’s a backlash against the sneaker.
“Sneakers for me have always been part of my uniform,” Wang said. “It’s something that’s iconic in my generation — you know, a cult of sneakers.”
What that meant was that some outfits, like tight black mini-dresses with stripes around the waist that looked like the bottom part of a sneaker, looked futuristic, and others — in gray knit, for example — looked subtler, more classic.
Rihanna, too, expressed admiration for Wang.
“He designs stuff that’s cool, young, edgy, easy to wear,” she said. “It’s everything that I believe in.”
LADY GAGA PERFORMS
When a loud crowd still chatted at the Plaza Hotel where Lady Gaga was performing jazz tunes on Friday night, she stopped in the middle of her second song because of the noise.
Gaga sang at the New York Fashion Week party by Harper’s Bazaar, where attendees included Donatella Versace, Liberty Ross, Brooke Shields and R&B singers Maxwell and Miguel, and Linda Evangelista, Shields and Gaga were honoured.
The 28-year-old pop star sang songs from her collaborative jazz album with Tony Bennett called Cheek to Cheek, to be released September 23.
RAW FOR THE OCEANS
Designers usually wait to show their faces after the models hit the runway. Not Pharrell.
The pop star led a dozen models on Friday during New York Fashion Week for his RAW for the Oceans spring-summer collection.
He sported his signature hat and denim was a staple for the line, a collaboration with G-Star and Bionic Yarn, which produces fabrics made by fibres collected from recycled plastic bottles.
“It’s very easy to forget we live on this planet,” Pharrell told the crowd. “We don’t want to just talk about it, but we actually wanted to put it in practice.”
PRABAL GURUNG
Some of the garments at Prabal Gurung’s show on Saturday seemed to come straight from nature, like a strapless dress with a rhododendron print, ostrich feathers and hand-cut organza flowers on the skirt.
On the sportier side, there were mountain jackets and expedition vests; on the daintier side, there were silky ruffled dresses. As for colours, Gurung looked to evoke the changing Himalayan sky, from dawn to sunset.
“Up in the mountains are colours that you don’t even know or see ‘til you go up there,” said Gurung, who was born and raised in Nepal, in a backstage interview. “It’s this beautiful amethyst to this coral, ivory, white and then teal and turquoise, and this opal. It’s a visual feast. I wanted to bring it here.”
Gurung has dressed a host of famous women, including first lady Michelle Obama, who’s worn his designs a number of times, most recently last month at a White House dinner for African leaders. Kate Middleton also surprised the designer by wearing one of his dresses on an official trip to Asia.
Also notable in Gurung’s new collection: His first complete footwear line under his own label. The multi-coloured, strappy stilettos were inspired, he said, by artists he loves, including Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo, and Cindy Sherman.
