Lauren Manoogian’s fall collection is as popping as her NoLIta showroom was hopping the day I visited. This is a diverse offering in which newness is balanced by continuity. “I feel like this season is a culmination of a lot of things that I’ve been working on for a long time that were kind of difficult and kept getting pushed [off that] somehow all kind of came into fruition,” the designer said.
The tying and wrapping that Manoogian has been playing with the past few seasons was back and more refined. Though not the stated reference, a hand-tacked twisted blouse in a crisp woven looked like a take on the Korean art of bottari; those made in the softest knits flowed in a pattern similar to the eternity symbol. Elsewhere the traditional twist was reimagined as a “gestural cable” which was executed as a stand-alone technique or in rows.
A “come undone” feeling was also created through carefully laddered knits. These have made the rounds of fashion for a while now; more interesting were the frayed edges of sweater hems and collars. To achieve such natural looking aging was a challenge: “We had to figure out the right way to do it so it wouldn’t actually unravel,” noted the designer.
This is the first lookbook that contains menswear; these are pieces created for sale in the brand’s new store and modeled by Manoogian and Chris Fireoved’s friends. Adding a celebratory feeling was the introduction of color (gasp!) in the form of a warm merlot. A many-seamed bias-cut slip had a touch of shimmer to it, as did a hand-quilted smoking-style robe coat that someone just has to wear to the Met Gala.
Most interesting of all was the way that Manoogian revealed the depth of her talent through garments that looked flat; looks 2 and 43 are good examples of this. Both are made of a double-knit with exposed seams that gives them a contradictory supple and almost paper-doll feeling. Lighter knits with white seams looked sort of like work-in-progress drawings, and indeed these garments were designed to be customized by the wearer, open or closed, or buttoned in an orderly or off-kilter manner.
