COLLECTIONS

RICHARD CHAI – NEW YORK FASHION WEEK SS12/ 09.09.11

Richard Chai presented his menswear and womenswear collections side by side this season. Similar palettes – washed out taupes and desert beiges, dark olive greens and bolts of terracotta, yellow and cobalt – and repeating prints (slimline geometric repeats and smoky, casually floral silhouettes) repeated across both halves of the show, and should by rights have made for a cohesive, synchronised blend.

Instead, what we saw at the Lincoln Center’s blissfully air-conditioned Stage show space, was an intriguing walk-off between two very different agendas and aesthetics, utilising a common family of shapes and silhouettes. The menswear, as always with Chai, was effortlessly executed, with relaxed proportion plays – wide-legged shorts and loose baseball shirts over slimfit knits and lean trouser shapes. Even the more extreme elements – sheer over-layers, unexpectedly dandy pin-striped jackets and jagged-panelled bombers – were marshalled together with a sense of cool, understated confidence.

The other half of the show, however, was an altogether more complex proposition. Where the menswear’s layers casually overlapped like scales of skin, his womenswear pieces collided and clashed. Fluid column dresses were reined in with buckled half-kilts, while simple short-suits were spliced with graphically contoured tunics. It all looked desirably, richly complicated – almost as though reinforcing the fact that androgyny and gender are a far less straightforward proposition than we might have thought. The tiny, rhythmic lines of evenly-spaced metallic studs which the designer used to outline and emphasise some of his key womenswear pieces only served to highlight this sensation, providing an unambiguously hard, almost aggressive edge to Chai’s luminously-coloured, softly-elegant vision.

Posted by John-Michael O’Sullivan

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