Nina Ricci Resort 2012

What has the Nina Ricci girl been up to since we last saw her? Playing in her mom’s closet—a French closet, full of tweeds, little black dresses, furs, lingerie, and jewelry, that is. Some of it might well have belonged to granny (with the falling-apart ball gowns and all) and, quite possibly, given the quite enviably sexy outcome of her playtime improvisations—slit skirts, see-through this-and-that, a certain rumpled-hair dishabille look—she’s just on the brink of being up to no good.

Peter Copping’s mastery of the lexicon of the mentality of the Parisian jeune fille took a delightfully dangerous turn for fall. It involved many of the ideas that are streaming through the season: a touch of the bourgeois, a sense of the oversize, and the idea of how being covered up can also result in something provocative. Much of it comes down to just how sophisticated he is at manipulating luxurious fabric in a complex, but lightly casual, way. His girl, a tousle-haired beauty, seems to have spontaneously customized her fur collars, sloppily throwing them on coats to lay asymmetrically across her shoulders, not caring if linings show on the outside of tweed jackets, and enjoying the pretty possibilities of slips and lacy underthings as going-out wear. Some of the pieces she puts on seem too big—jet embroidery might dangle from her overlong sleeves; some of her dresses hang cutely loose—and she comes from a good family, this one. Heirloom jewelry is also within her grasp: diamonds draped naughtily around her neck and festooned as ankle straps around her shoes.

The skill here lies in Copping’s light, modern combinations of “old” materials, and his pitch-perfect color sense in his choice of pinks, lavenders, and burgundys. And that’s not to mention his many draped and embroidered treatments of black, in varying degrees of transparency. It was a personal, brilliant tour-de-force of that offhand chic that makes Paris a mecca for all that is great about fashion.