At Lafayette 148, Emily Smith usually comes up with a concept which her team then begins exploring and deconstructing, finding novel ways to interpret it through their fabric and their crafts. This season, she decided to cut to the chase and base the collection around the very idea of fabric and craft. “A lot of times people don’t realize that it’s not just about sketches; we start with the fabric,” she explained at a presentation held in a Chelsea gallery. “We design a lot of our own fabrics with Italian mills, and work on new embellishments, new stitching… we really wanted to take this moment to celebrate that.”
The star of the collection also happened to open the lookbook; a leather skirt, handwoven in a herringbone pattern to the mid-thigh, with the rest of the leather strips fringing all the way to the ground, worn with a cashmere short-sleeve sweater that mimicked the pattern of the skirt. Fringe and texture are emerging as a mini-trend of sorts in New York so far, and Smith and her team indulged in these whimsical, yet no less luxurious details. A dress and a skirt that seemed to be embellished with feathers were instead made from small strips of grosgrain ribbon, hand cut and hand sewn onto the garments; a kicky little blouse and skirt combo were handwoven from thick knit strips in a basketweave pattern, the extra-long strips left to hang over the arms and the legs. A knit sweater and wrap skirt were embroidered with all manners of fringe, tassels, and interesting textures. A trompe l’oeil effect was used to great effect on a minimal silver shift dress printed with images of the grosgrain ribbon fringe.
Elsewhere, more classic pieces had an element of surprise. A gray jacket worn over a gray suit on look 14 is not brushed wool but the thinnest calfskin, ditto the satin-y, velvet-looking jacket on the look that follows. A cropped trench coat in hunter green was ponte leather—not coated nylon as was the first impression. Every piece in the collection asked to be touched and investigated, nothing was exactly what it seemed, nothing was ever boring.
