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A new British team has taken over at Pollini, the design label that grew out of an old, established Italian shoe brand. Jonathan Saunders, the Scottish proponent of graphic modernist print, is designing the clothes, and Nicholas Kirkwood—a rising talent with a hot line of his own—the shoes. In a brisk presentation of 27 looks (quick-march, and staged three times so audiences could flow in and out within 15 minutes), the duo framed a breezy snapshot of what's to come. "I started three months ago, so this is just the beginning," said Saunders. "But I just thought it should be light and feminine, with a positivity about it."

Saunders worked with dots and stripes, branching into pastel swirls in dresses cut with multilayered skating skirts or standout origami folds (like some of the shapes in his own collection, but softer). Kirkwood followed through with color-blocked suede and patent heels in lime, cobalt, black, and white, followed by high loafers with chunky tassels and inserts of polka dots. The best in the lineup, though, was the crisp monochrome tailoring for day: a jacket with Bermuda-length city shorts and a neat trench in black and white spots, and a gray menswear long-line jacket with collars and cuffs in piqué shirting material. It remains to be seen which tack the Saunders-Kirkwood team will take when they've had a chance to settle in, but if they're smart enough to keep up the quick and effective staging of this first show, they'll be doing time-deprived press and buyers a welcome favor.

MILAN, September 23, 2008

By Sarah Mower

What is it about the twenties that is playing on so many designers' minds? For Raf Simons at Jil Sander, it was the moment the Parisian avant-garde discovered African art and gave birth to modernism: Simons referenced this by projecting a Man Ray photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse cradling an African head sculpture onto the backdrop of the runway as the audience assembled. Simons said it was just a matter of spontaneous instinct that made him take flapper fringing as a central device in the show. "But it was more about the aesthetics of that time. I didn't want to do a 'Charleston' collection," he said. "Jil Sander must always be pure, and I'm aware of making any reference minimal, but I also want to show my freedom to be inspired by the moment."

The opening of the show was a powerfully graphic series of one-color silhouettes in which silken skeins of fringing were draped over stretch bodysuits. It began a sequence of precision-cut experiments in form that abstracted tailoring into unexpected elements—shorts suits sliced into sharp, asymmetric angles at the front; hemlines constructed from rectangular panels; jackets made with a swooping drape in the back; leather shifts with incisions left open at the hip.

To be sure, Simons' exhaustive demonstrations of a million new ways to loop, drape, and fly a fringe (they even dangled to floor level on bags) did eventually tip over into tedium. He could have dispensed with a lot of that, but the development of his overriding vision of a clean, even glacial modernism is a powerful thing to watch.

MILAN, September 23, 2008

By Sarah Mower

Miuccia Prada had a sound bite for her Spring collection. "It's primitive," she said, "going back to what counts." And what counts most in a back-to-basics time, when most of us will need truly visceral temptation to get us out and shopping? Why, glamour and eroticism, of course. When the chips are down, there is no one who can turn up the thermostat of subversive sexual provocation quite as high as Mrs. Prada. Her girls, their skin glistening as if on a fevered summer's night, might have been passing through on their way to or from lovers' assignations, their clothes disarranged in various states of falling-off, or looking as if they might do so at any moment. Rumpled and crinkled fabrics have been appearing all over this season, but never with such sly intent. One pull of a trailing drawstring tape and, whoops! A person could find herself half naked. Not that this collection is, of course, at all brassy. From some angles, it can all look like a perfectly innocent summery dishevelment—that is, until there's a glimpse into an open-sided dress, or a cashmere sweater turns to display hospital-tape ties holding the back together (or just about).

There was something fabulously Italian about all this shameless reveling in femininity. The fifties overtones, with the high chignons, the ruched bras, and swishing rear-action in the below-knee pencil skirts managed to channel the heyday of Cinecitta without cliché. Best of all, this is a collection destined to look even better on a woman with a real body than it does on a teen model. And that, Mrs. Prada surely knows, really is "what counts."

MILAN, September 22, 2008

By Nicole Phelps

As the kids say, Francesco Sconamiglio has mad skills. He can cut a lean, mean suit with the best of them—but he'll never graduate to the big leagues like his front-row pals Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi have until he turns down the kink factor. The show opened with a respectable-enough cropped ivory jacket; unfortunately, it was worn with see-through plastic trousers. The second look, a coat-dress with an asymmetrical neckline that purposely exposed one breast, was even more risqué. The blouses were lovingly crafted, with spills of ruffles at the throat or, more unusually, with shoulder pads made from feathers—but, again, because they were so sheer, their appeal will be limited.

A series of little white dresses (bracelet-sleeved, one-shouldered, or strapless, decorated with sculptural rosettes or ruffles) showed Scognamiglio at his best: just this side of flamboyant, but relevant at retail, too. When he starts thinking more along these lines, he'll start drawing the crowds that his technique deserves.

Modernist