AFTER seeing the first few autumn/winter 2010-11 looks come down the white marble runway at Phillip Lim, we jotted down “Lauren Hutton/Charlie girl” in our Moleskine notebook, as the sense of Seventies ease and elegance that pervaded the collection put us in mind of that era’s most famous supermodel and the smilingly confident girl who strode across the pages of those now iconic perfume ads.
So we weren’t at all surprised when the newly shorn Lim revealed, post-show, that his inspiration had, in fact, been “disco/punk”, the twin musical movements that are now synonymous with the Me Decade.
“I love disco. I love platform shoes. It makes me happy!” Lim exclaimed gleefully after double-kissing Vogue fashion writer Amanda Brooks (herself a Seventies-inspired style icon), and his BFF, Richard Chai.
But while the collection touched on all the sartorial signifiers one might expect (toggle coats, breezy short shorts, “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” camel coats, a giraffe print dress and leisure suit, a gold lamé Le Smoking suit, purple sequin blouses under flirty knit jumpers, and some seriously cool shearling patchwork coats), this never felt like a redux, but rather like a timely reinterpretation of a more fun, innocent and hopeful time in our history. And, really, who among us couldn’t use a little bit of that right now?
