Prep Shine

I know I know, of all the shows to be posting about when I haven't actually bunged up a lot of shows here and I go for Diesel Black Gold.  It happened to be my last show that I saw in New York as I have now arrived in Paris for the big catwalk extravaganza at Galeries Lafayette (for whom I've been blogging for‚Ķ). 

It was a weird high note to end on.  I always will myself to like a Diesel Black Gold collection for the pure reason that Sophia Kokosalaki was one of those designers that really captured my imagination in my secondary stage of getting into fashion.  She had and still has a sublime sense of draping fabrics and how they can be manipulated.  It's a shame that her own line is no more but her gig at Diesel Black Gold seems to have given her a different outlet that I've found in the past few seasons to bee a little one noteish, a terse to and fro relationship between her own design sensibility and the commercial pressures of a denim superbrand. 

It finally did it for me yesterday.  I was most likely slayed by the styling but still the potent combination of a crisp shirt and a plethora of metallic treated fabrics was enough to have me snapping away.  The idea was a simple one – a mirror shattering and taking that print and transferring it to foil which was then bonded to leather in some instances for for a different take on the leatherwear that often features in DBG shows.

It was the pairing of all this shine with what Kokosalaki described as 'preppiness',  such as shirt tails poking through foil shorts (surely an evolution of pocket linings revealed by denim cut-off short shorts) and the cuffs rolled up over short sleeved metallic tops that made it all the more convincing.  Yes there were still some of the 'club-orientated' dresses that have been something of a mainstay at DBG but there was something that felt quite modern about the toning down of the metallics with the white shirt, akin to how people in reality would dress all that shine down.  There was also an awareness of creating more of a direction as opposed to making trend-lite dresses for the Diesel customer that might fancy something a bit more spesh than the jeans they buy. 

P.S. Selfishly, I've put this up before any of the other 40-something shows/presentations to see how the new lens, which I tested out at the show, holds up.  Long live B&H Photo!!!

**EDIT** A correction from Ms. Kokosalaki herself.  She has in fact been taking a break for the past two seasons as she has bought back her company and she'll be presenting again in Paris this season and showing again in March…. woop woop!