MY SS13 FAVORITES

Chai

"Light" was the first word Richard Chai used to describe his collections this season. The question is, what kind of light? There were many kinds on the runway today. There was the glassy lightness of sheer nylon, deployed effectively throughout both his menswear and his Richard Chai Love womenswear collections. There was also the gossamer lightness of digitally printed floral silk fil coupé inserted into halter tops, and the anti-gravitational lightness of the designer's abbreviated fit-and-flare skirts, a key item for Spring 2013. And there was the pastel lightness of the palette, at its best in the opening section of icy lavenders and powder blues, and the light play of lamé and holographic sequins. But maybe the most important reading of "light" for Richard Chai this season had to do with tone: There was a winning lightness of spirit to these clothes. They looked fun to wear.

Katrantzou

There was once a certain kind of child who would collect stamps, or gather the money that relatives brought back from foreign travel, and dream about what each piece of paper represented, where it might have been, who had touched it on its journey round the world. For that child, a stamp, a banknote were small passports to an exotic otherness. Or maybe they were instruments connecting cultures. That's how Mary Katrantzou thought of them. She loved the stories they told. As borders changed and currencies became obsolete, stamps and banknotes lingered as tokens of the past, literal souvenirs of the values of other, lost cultures.

All the romance, melancholy, and beauty of those ideas were swept up in Katrantzou's latest collection, an absolute fashion tour de force. She's already proved she can make a ravishing print out of almost anything, and she has applied those prints to some extraordinary silhouettes, but form and content blended so effortlessly today that this felt like the point she'd been aspiring to since she started. It helped that stamps and banknotes have an innate two-dimensional symmetry that loans itself to abstraction in accessible shapes. And Katrantzou's shapes today were noticeably direct: A-lines, shirtdresses, shifts, and sheaths, offering ideal canvases. A stamp's serrated edges, for instance, provided a striking geometric border down the leg of slimline trousers. And the whorls and spirals of a banknote provided a luxurious pattern for a pantsuit in midnight blue brocade, especially when shot through with darkly sparkling Lurex.

Klein

Francisco Costa closed New York fashion week with a collection that delivered a strong sexual charge. Backstage he said, "It's erotic again, a continuation of last Fall and Spring," and cited as references the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, the artist Carsten Nicolai, and the power and precision of cars. The Calvin Klein girl may be a pinup next season, but she's an intellectual too. Costa opened with a black satin conical bustier dress, the model's belle poitrine outlined in silver. All signs pointed to the bust as this collection's erogenous zone. But Costa didn't ignore the waist or the legs, either. Peplums played a starring role, and narrow belts accented most of the looks. A pair of putty-colored silk gazar numbers might go down as the shortest dresses this designer has ever put on a runway.

As we said, though, this show had brains as well as beauty. What made it trademark Costa was the interesting fabric play. Adding a white lining to the black mesh he used for a skirtsuit produced a vibrating moiré effect, as did the parabolas of what looked like leather embroidery on a pair of dresses. These weren't just experiments for experimentation's sake. They were great looking. Another provocative idea, this one inspired by cars: draping a strapless cocktail dress from a gold metal frame. Ladies, rev your engines.

Rodriguez

The designer has been going from success to success lately, but this collection really got the blood pumping. And it wasn't just the girls in the crowd whose pulses were racing. Yes, there were pantsuits and beaded muscle tees and trousers that all nailed the way we want to look at work right now. But those slipdresses with the sheer mesh backs that plunged all the way to there—those were people-pleasers, and by "people" we mean those of the male variety. Satisfying both a woman's wardrobe needs and a man's eye, that's the whole package. And that's why this was the most successful lineup of Rodriguez's career. One high-profile retailer was so gobsmacked she said, "There's no reason why anybody should dress any other way."

How'd he do it? Backstage he played it modest. "I love my work," he shrugged, then added, "it's a good time in my life." It showed. Rodriguez dug into color for Spring: a blood orange sheath was bisected down the front and across the waist in brick; a teal and moss green crepe dress came with laminated-wood paillette embroidery; and one of those muscle tees was embellished with dense swirls of brick, marigold, and black beads. And then there was the sex. Rodriguez spliced shirts all the way down to the navel, and cropped the underpinning below the bust to reveal several provocative inches of midriff. He placed an arrowhead-shaped cutout at the solar plexus of an otherwise demure ivory silk sleeveless shift. 

Wu

"I want to do everything forbidden, everything you don't do." Helmut Newton said that. Surprisingly perhaps, the sentiment also fits for Jason Wu's new collection, which was influenced by the Newton retrospective that ran at the Grand Palais in Paris earlier this year. Provocation isn't traditionally part of Wu's arsenal; we don't need to remind you that this is the young man who dressed Michelle Obama for the Inauguration Ball. 

Lace and leather predominated and often came together, as they did on a backless black apron dress with laser-cut flowers at the hem and a fitted nude sheath with a point d'esprit bodice and tulle insets zigzagging down the torso. Lillian Bassman was another reference point, and her signature black and white images provided an x-rayed floral motif that was its own innuendo. A collaboration with the lingerie maker La Perla provided ample cause for all the sheer chiffons Wu used. Another time, a tanned and taut midriff was on full display between a lace bandeau top and kicky leather skirt.

Wang

"After last season's austerity," he explained, "I wanted to pull garments apart, experiment with volumes." Wang's is a precise kind of deconstruction. The clothes were all right angles—no asymmetries here—and the scalpel-sharp slices that separated the graphic panels of everything from a clinical white cotton shirtdress to a sand-dune-colored leather jacket were hand-tacked like sutures. As the show progressed, the splices became cutouts in wavy zebra stripes. The experiment reached its culmination in a series of sexy dresses that seemed to float on the body thanks to the invisible fish-line embroidery holding them together. The designer called the effect Tron-like. Fun fact: The first fishing line they tried melted under the heat of the irons used to press the samples, so team Wang had to devise a new one of their own.

Function often suffers when designers put so much emphasis on form, but that wasn't an issue here. Wang smartly stuck close to traditional American sportswear design. Spongy leather T-shirt dresses were modeled after baseball uniforms. Liberty Ross, a catwalker whose star appears to be on the rise after her husband's cheating scandal with Kristen Stewart, modeled a simple windbreaker. The black-light moment will be what people talk about and remember, but even without it, this was a powerful performance.