Cinq Septs croissants were untouched, Misha Nonoo sold via Snapchat, Frances Valentine was all grown up, and Heron Preston cleaned up at NYFW.”>
Cinq Sept by Lizzie Crocker
New York City is always fashionable and frenetic, but it becomes a parody of itself when Fashion Week descends twice a year.
Manhattan turns into a runway for fancy, eccentrically dressed editors, stylists, bloggers and interlopers, all of them jostling to be snapped by street style photographers. Hailing taxis is a survival-of-the-sharpest-elbows ordeal. And security at Kanye Wests Yeezy show is stricter than the White House.
Its all fantastically absurdso it was nice that designer Jane Siskin eased us into the madness with a breakfast presentation for Cinq Sept Wednesday morning, serving up pain au chocolat with her Spring/Summer 2017 collection at Dirty French, a hip bistro inside the Ludlow Hotel on the Lower East Side.
The restaurants tables were outfitted with tiered trays of pastries and an elegant menu of looks from Cinq Septs new collection. The food was less for consumption than for aesthetic flourish: attendants Instagrammed photos of the table display in between exchanging air kisses, but most pastries were left untouched. As ever, it seemed the fashion crowd was on a coffee and green juice regime.
Cinq Sept shares its name with the French term for the liminal moment linking late afternoon and early evening, according to the brands website, and is dedicated to contemporary dressing that highlights an intriguing tension between day and night.
Indeed, the brands name also evokes the time of day sexually liberated French couples reserve for affairsthe 5-7 pm liaison with a paramour.
Fittingly, the latest collection featured boudoir-inspired, cool-girl separates that nodded to the 70s and 90s. There were leopard print slip dresses and kimonos cinched with corset belts; bell-sleeved silk and cotton blouses paired with denim flares and swingy silk skirts, including one ruffly fuchsia knockout. Choker shirt collars and neckties were embroidered with scripted messages like ce soir and dont think.
Every season we try to evoke that feeling of a new experience, Siskin told The Daily Beast. We took our heritage, which is the boudoir, and layered pieces on top of each other in a really fluid way.
Siskin, an industry veteran who has worked brands like Elizabeth & James and Seven for All Mankind, managed to reinterpret this seasons ubiquitous off-the-shoulder look in a way that made it novel again (an off-the-shoulder leather moto jacket lent edge to the flirty, feminine style). Each outfit was finished off with a pair of chunky, lace-up black booties.
We want to take what every cool girl wants in her closet and make it fresh and new, Siskin said, noting that while Cinq Sept is not a French brand, we like the sexiness of the French vibe.
Misha Nonoo by Allison McNearney
In a season of shake-ups, designer Misha Nonoo has staked out her place on the trendy, tech-savvy front lines.
Her renegade spirit first revealed itself last September, when Nonoo announced that she would show her Spring/Summer 2016 collection on Instagram (topped off with an industry-pleasing party) in lieu of a formal fashion week presentation. A few months later, she became one of the first designers to realign her collection debuts with their actual seasons, rather than the traditional five-to-six-month advance schedule that the fashion system favored.
The length of the rollout could get a bit tedious, with new posts popping up every 30 to 60 minutes, awarding the fashion patient rather than those who prefer the instant gratification of seeing the collection at once, in full. But once acclimated to this delayed pace, the Live Lookbook was a fashionably fun romp through some pretty spectacular Fall designs.
Embracing her favorite day-to-play mantra, Nonoo presented new looks that ranged from the fun and flirtybillowing red, white, and black striped pants, a flowing pleated skirt in red, maroon, and blue that appeared just before a matching shirt with expansive sleevesto the more sophisticated and preppy.
There were long-sleeved knit dresses with a touch of 70s, bell-sleeved fun and long black and white blazers with deep Vs that could be worn over shirts or buttoned up solo for that sexy secretary vibe.
A slew of mini dresses gave the collection a bit of an edge, some embracing generous peeps of sexy skin while others channeled short, tight, and leather. All looks could be dressed up for a more demure day at the office, or stripped down to be the hit of happy hour.
The playful vibe got a big boost from the medium itself.
Throughout the show, Nonoos posts jumped from static photos of models posing in front of colorful backdrops to videos of ladies dancing across the screen or subtly bopping in their new ensembles.
All of the posts got an extra dose of pizzazz courtesy of artist Ana Stroumpf, who was on set adding decorative doodles to the images before they made their Snapchat debut. The effect was that of the artsy girls coolly jazzed-up yearbook.
The official collection reveal was paired with Nonoos own Snapchat feed, which gave glimpses of the behind the scenes funthe flurry of hair and make-up, the designer dancing around backstage, and an appearance from the sets biggest staran adorable white puppy.
In an industry that has struggled to integrate the explosive power of the digital world with the traditional world of fashion, Nonoo has proven she is a risk-taker, ready and willing to shake it all up to try a new business model (this season also introduces her shift to direct-to-consumer sales) or a new format, all in the service of reaching her most important audienceher customers.
Frances Valentine by Sarah Shears
In Kate Valentines temporary living room for her new brand, Frances Valentine, an air of country club class swept through, with lemonade cocktails and Upper East Side ladies chatting around the room.
Waiters, clean-cut young white men, were dressed in khakis, white button up shirts and collegiate striped ties, making you feel like you were closer to a Highland Park country club than in a studio space across the street from Bryant Park. Entering it was like invading a private party of longtime friends, instead of a fashion showcase, and indeed in some ways you had.
Kate, her husband and business partner Andy Spade and Elyce Arons, the co-founder of Kate Spade and partner at Valentine, have all been working together and friends for a very long time.
Weve all grown up, and the brand is more grown up. Evolved is the word Kate likes to use, said Arons.
Heron Preston by Lizzie Crocker
Rarely do New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) workers interact with the fashion world, unless they run into after party stragglers while cleaning the streets at dawn.
It was amusing, then, to see uniform-clad workers and their suited supervisors rubbing shoulders with hipsters in ironic T-shirts and birdlike women aloft on designer heels.
Theyd gathered at the DSNY Salt Shed in Lower Manhattan for the launch of designer Heron Prestons ready-to-wear collection made of repurposed DSNY uniforms and up-cycled clothing. Prices start at $60 for a T-shirt and run up to $1200 for oversized bags fashioned from reflective neon worker vests. Some 25 tickets to the presentation were available to the public for $2,030 each–proceeds of which will go toward the foundation honoring New York’s garbage workers and a museum of sanitation equipment.
Preston, who has worked with Nike and Kanye West in the past (he helped West launch Yeezy Season 1) and co-founded the DJ and art collective Been Trill, pitched a partnership to DSNY roughly a year ago in an effort to reduce landfill waste. The simply and appropriately titled Uniform collection is the first in a series of collaborations between Preston and DSNY that will be unveiled in the coming year.
The idea that under-appreciated sanitation workers would be spotlighted by his collection was as much an inspiration for Preston as raising awareness for New Yorks 0x30 initiative, which aims to send zero waste to landfills by 2030.
A friend once asked me if I was interested in applying art and fashion to art and fashion, or to something bigger like healthcare, and that really got the wheels turning, Preston told The Daily Beast on Wednesday night, standing in front of a moonscape of salt5,000 tons of it, to be precise, used to gum up slick city streets during snowstormsand several racks of see-now-by-now Uniform pieces. I started challenging myself to collaborate with people outside of my circle, to bring two worlds together.
Both the collection and the mlange of people who turned out on Wednesday night were proof that hed pulled it offsort of.
There wasnt that much actual shoulder-rubbing between DSNY workers and peacocking fashion types, the bagpipers drinking Budweiser and the Guest of a Guest fixtures (from actor and model Waris Ahluwahlia to tie designer-turned-cinema-founder Alexander Olch). This was no Radical Chic party at Leonard Bernsteins house. Instead, the two cultures admired each other at a distance.
This is not the crowd we normally mingle with, if you know what I mean, said Brian, one of the bagpipe players (the DSNY has a band) who retired seven years ago after working with the department for more than 20 years.
He went on in a heavy New York accent rarely heard anymore: Its definitely different but very enjoyable, and its nice that the 8,000 men and women working very, very hard out there on the front lines get some recognition.
