Ralph Lauren / Spring 2012 RTW

Back in 1974, Ralph Lauren costumed a big-screen version of The Great Gatsby, starring Mia Farrow (as Daisy Buchanan) and Robert Redford (as the titular Gatsby). Lauren’s designs were a huge success. They sparked a craze for fluttery bias-cut tea dresses and kindled a longing for vintage at a time when that meant ratty old clothes. The movie’s style that Lauren created quickly became as much a part of the iconography of the Ralph Lauren brand as it was perfectly emblematic of boom-time Jazz Age America where financial cataclysm was lurking just around the corner.

Fast-forward nearly 40 years, when, after various returns to that time and place, Lauren’s eye is fixed once again on the gilded mansions of Long Island’s North Shore. His Spring 2012 collection is an homage to the world he helped create so indelibly all those years ago, with a gentle, romantic, yet moneyed look: ruffled georgette blouses; slithery, slippery bias-cut dresses; charmeuse wide pants so light and fluid they were like lingerie in trouser form; the cross-body purse wittily reinterpreted as a bag that looked like a fringed silk shawl; and strappy pearl python sandals on metallic high heels that evoked the Chrysler Building at a time when it was still only a twinkle in the eye of its architect, William Van Alen, and not twinkling on the Manhattan skyline. All very timely too, this return to the mid-1920s given that Baz Luhrmann is gearing up to film his own Gatsby with Carey Mulligan as Daisy. (If Luhrmann’s wife, designer Catherine Martin needs inspiration for the movie’s costumes, well, she should start clicking her way through this show.)

Yet for all the historicist perspective, Lauren hasn’t forgotten that his clothes are about now, not then. He engaged in the ongoing conversation that’s centered around the place of all those pale, pale, pale shades of cream and ivory, as well as a gleaming white, that are a welcome counterpoint to the Pantone chart explosion that deposited its neon-bright debris over other New York runways. These were the tones for some of the collection’s loveliest clothes, classic Ralph one and all: masculine double-breasted jackets; feathered and beaded slips; and, lean, long, glistening evening dresses. It’s that color palette that sticks in the mind, rather than the slightly too strong pastels that opened the show; those might have been better if they’d been conceived more as colors conjured up from distant, fond memories of the past, and not so much the hues of a clear and vivid present.

Photos: Marcio Madeira/firstVIEW
Source: www.vogue.com