NYFW Thursday: Jonathan Simkhai, Collina Strada, Love Shack Fancy

Thursday afternoon at New York Fashion Week witnessed three fashion statements by growing New York-based brands, Jonathan Simkhai, Love Shack Fancy and Collina Strada, where the last was the surprise star attraction.

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Collina Strada: Sunset fashion moment on East River

 
Thursday’s most interesting show in New York was by Collina Strada, staged with great gusto on 6 East River Piers, before a flotilla of boats and ships. 

All told, jet skis, Staten Island ferries, classic schooners, tugs and party boats sped around the East River, making a brilliant backdrop for this show.
 
Collina Strada’s founder Hillary Taymour is the reigning queen of fashionable recycling in New York, an eco-conscious innovator. This season she presented the collection in duets – each second look almost like a negative image of its partner.
 
Taymour is a courageous creator, who whips up barrel-leg wide denim jeans, paired with hyper ruffled satin blouses. Her shorts and culottes are craftily layered – street style with a couture twist. Gowns came in panels of fabric, often finished with askew mini trains.
 
The collection also included some great new Pro-Ked collab high-tops in pink kicking fabrics. Although most models wore Collina Strada’s signature sandals finished with shards of chopped up chiffon.
 
The mashed-up makeup of many ensembles was echoed in the brilliant soundtrack. Another mash-up of financial TV news casts and bulletins – riffing on neighbor Wall Street – and some great punchy rock songs, plus a track entitled Friendly Fascism by alternative industrial band Consolidation.
 
The show rose to a crescendo at the finale as the sun set on the distant Statue of Liberty. An apt image given how this show felt like a moment of liberation.
 

Jonathan Simkhai’s dude style disappoints

 
Jonathan Simkhai is one of New York’s hottest and most commercially successful young designers. His show this Thursday on Delancey Street was packed full of buyers – from Bergdorf and Selfridges to Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom.
 

This season Jonathan riffed on Californian street culture – specifically the cult 2005 movie Lords of Dogtown, which showed how surfers had morphed into skateboarders.
 
He paired dhotis and sarongs with lush leather blousons or cut rawhide suits in skateboard pants and aviator jackets for guys. While for women he dreamed of white sheaths in bands of lace, toweling and fringed bouclé. Before going way too far with Aran sweater corsets and Princess Leia tunics. Ending  with pale, sequined mini cocktails referencing a shimmering sea.
 
But while the notions were cool, the execution felt fumbled. 
 
Last November Jonathan won the 2015 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Award taking home $300,000 and a year’s worth of mentoring by major designers and industry execs. This collection, however, felt like a step back and nor forward.
 

Love Shack Fancy: Clothes that make women squeal

 
Love Shake Fancy makes clothes that encourage girls to squeal. Young best friends grab each other – and squeal — when they realize they’re both wearing Love Shack Fancy.

 
They did so scores of times at the latest presentation by the brand. The label’s founder and designer Rebecca Hessel Cohen doesn’t do shows. They’re more dance installations, where leggy models dance on platforms to classic rock.
 
Essentially, there are two looks at Love Shack Fancy: chiffon boudoir and sexy sequins. 
 
Chiffon boudoir often comes in layers of lace, using underwear fabrics as skimpy tanks or corsets, sexy pants or frilly wee smocks. 
 
Sexy sequins – which a good third of the guests wore – looked great when seen in tube tops or miniskirts worn by fit young women with good summer tans. Which, come to think of was true about a lot of the Love Shack Fancy crowd.
 
This season, Rebecca added in a Wild West twist – with posh hippie saloon gal looks, wearing some great new cowboy boots with spike or stiletto heels.
 
The cast joined in the squealing as they bopped around the mini stages on the rooftop of Nine Orchard, the former bank and now boutique hotel that is the nerve center of Dimes Square, the hippest neighborhood in today’s Manhattan.