BRIGHT DAYS ARE DAWNING
“Here Comes the Sun” could have been the theme song for New York Fashion Week, where nearly every collection was punctuated by a ray of sunshine -- Jenni Kayne’s lemon-and-gray abstract print day gown, Duckie Brown’s taxicab yellow trench, Ralph Lauren’s Chiquita banana flouncy floral dress, and Michael Kors’ tennis ball yellow visors.
And why not? Is there any better feel-good shade on the planet? Yellow commands attention, it has the power to wake us up out of our cold weather slumber. Paired with dark colors, it can be jarring. But tempered with neutrals, as it is for spring, yellow is pure joy.
Yellow may have been the hue to do in New York, but bold colors of any kind are shaping up to be even more of a trend for spring than they have been for fall. The momentum has been building for a while. Last season’s Christian Dior show in Paris was a jewel box of 1940s retro lady suits and origami fold dresses, several in yellow.
Prada dipped into natural-looking colors to create textural coats and skirts. And Marc Jacobs tapped the Dutch Masters for his Louis Vuitton show, where taffeta skirts cast a Vermeer-like glow.
Then there was the 1980s revival over the summer that had club kids from Hoxton to Hollywood wearing the kind of neon colors seen in British designer Christopher Kane’s scuba-inspired bandage dresses, and cartoon brights that could only come from the imagination of L.A.’s own Jeremy Scott.
At last week’s Emmy Awards, the best dressed actresses were in bold hues, including America Ferrera, who rocked a cobalt blue Monique Lhuillier gown (boy, was that a coup for the L.A. designer) and Minnie Driver in a draped, freesia-colored Donna Karan. (Clearly, Reese Witherspoon knew what she was doing when she wore that canary yellow Nina Ricci confection to the Oscars. It was a far better post-breakup get-up than any red dress could ever be.)
At London Fashion Week, the storm clouds have already moved in. But between Basso & Brooke’s paint-box prints and Jonathan Saunders’ sporty color-blocking, the runways are showing no signs of dimming. If only the black-clad editors in the front row could join in the fun.
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