While many designers at New York Fashion Week showed relaxed, toned-down looks for next spring, Marchesa designers Georgina Chapman and Keren Craig were among a group who would have none of that.
The duo's fairy tale collection, shown at the ornate St. Regis Hotel before a celebrity crowd that comprised of producer Harvey Weinstein (Chapman's husband), Bette Midler and daughter Sophie von Haselberg, Christina Hendricks, Jennifer Hudson, and Julianne Hough, included a number of entrance-making gowns with voluminous tiered skirts and long trains in dip-dyed tulle pastel shades.
If you're going to walk into a room, make sure everyone notices.
The duo's theme — “a botanical menagerie of caged birds and cascading florals placed under a captivating midnight sky” — appears at first in sheer, lace-beaded corseted gowns lined in black resembling the outlines of a bird cage but more suited for the boudoir.
Other gowns more suitable to charity balls and red-carpet affairs are adorned with feathers, jeweled crystal birds, laser-cut mirrored fragments, and gilded thread work, keeping with the enchanted, ethereal theme of the collection.
Column gowns with strategically placed hand-cut 3-D petals sculpt the body while strapless ball gowns with billowing skirts, each with a train so long that the models had to maneuver around each other during the final runway bow, are the real statement makers.
A number of short cocktail dresses and "high-low" gowns, with the front hem higher than the back, showcased the new Marchesa footwear collection that's just as glittery as the gowns. The Italian-made shoes, in laser-cut suede and detailed with glittery beading, will arrive in stores in January.
Alas, there's no glass slipper — yet.
Marchesa pastel ombre ball gown with fine thread work, flying bird, and botanical blouson, and all over dip-dyed hand-cut petal textured skirt.
