Diane von Furstenberg / Fall 2012 RTW

Diane von Furstenberg is a designer who reaches places many others can only fantasize about being able to touch. As a businesswoman, she utterly escapes the image of a cold, strung-out numbers person. As a leader of American fashion at the CFDA, she rocks. She’s personal and funny. This counts. Far from the USA, people know who she is and what her clothes might do for them, i.e., make them hot, like her. And as a spreader of generosity, she’s willing to share the limelight of her show with her creative director, Yvan Mispelaere.

So, okay, what did she—and he—do for fall? Sexy, shapely color; a topical smattering of surrealist torn fabric and handprints, clearly inspired by the oeuvre of Elsa Schiaparelli, who is the co-subject of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming summer exhibition, which compares her work with that of Miuccia Prada’s. Amongst the shapes: neat, clinging dresses, holding the body super-secure to a point below the knee, and draped all-in-ones, easy over the shoulder, and roomier in the leg. Still, this wasn’t an intellectual dissertation in any sense. Before she took her extended lap of honor with Mispelaere at her side, she confided backstage that the theme they’d come up with—the idea of a Rendez-vous boiled down to an image of “a girl who has a beautiful, beautiful dress, with a big coat on top. She goes to meet someone, and she pulls off the coat.”

Source; www.vogue.com