tabloid! at NYFW: Beckham’s quiet aesthetics

Children should be seen and not heard at fashion shows. Or should they be seen at all? Isn’t it like doing take-your-child-to-work day on the same day as your biggest client presentation? Over the last two days, the fashion conversation has been as much about hemlines as about high-pitched screams, due to little North West’s inability to watch a fashion show quietly (well, she’s two).

Employee of the month Harper Beckham got the memo, however, and behaved impeccably, sitting with dad David at her mother Victoria’s show on a crisp Sunday morning in lower Manhattan that was not as terrifyingly freezing as meteorologists had threatened.

Beckham’s show, as can be expected from fashion’s ice queen, was super chilled, but not cold.

Guests at the intimate show at the beautiful old Cipriani building, with a soaring dome painted with maps of old colonial treasures and ships, sipped hot tea before taking their seats around a pale peach carpeted catwalk.

Her designs have always slanted towards sleek dresses and this collection carries that forward, in what Beckham described in show notes as an attempt to evolve and translate dresses; in that, her achievement was in incorporating the look of having a sweater tied around your waist, without looking bulky.

Knits and woollen fabrics were draped, buttoned and tucked around the body. A waist on a sweater was formed by bringing flaps around and fastening with two large buttons; a masculine waistcoat folded on itself and turned into a dainty dress.

Waistlines hit at the natural waist or were dropped to the hips, where those large buttons caught a fold at the top of culottes.

Trousers were wide and cropped, so Beckham’s boots — her second footwear collection, the first hitting UAE stores now — reached up to the calf to meet the hems. The boots, in tan, black and navy, were worn throughout, with dresses and skirts.

Bottoms were slim a-lines or Beckham’s ever present long-line pencil, here with a slit at the front.

Coats were shown in both slim and wide and boxy shapes — a boon for frozen New Yorkers looking to pile on the layers when winter rolls around again.