Dolce & Gabbana Spring 2012

Dolce & Gabbana offer up a showing of their signature lacework for the label’s spring 2012 collection. Designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana also add floral and fruit prints, crystal embellished bodices and twill suits to their feminine showing.

While scarf prints were all over Dolce & Gabbana’s D&G line, the brand opened their Spring 2012 collection with fruits, flowers, and veggies. Cucumbers, red peppers, onions, and even eggplants were spied on sharp dresses and separates with 50′s silhouettes. Undergarments peeked out from under sheer appliquéd lace garments in baby blue, navy, and white.

Dolce & Gabbana hop from fruit to lace to candy like decorations all at once and it is marvelous! It just screams SPRINGTIME!!

Ann Demeulemeester Spring 2012

Isabelle Eberhardt was a Swiss writer who traveled extensively in North Africa in the late nineteenth century. She usually wore men's clothing, because she had more freedom of movement that way. In one photograph from her brief life, Eberhardt is dressed as a sailor. This woman inspired Ann Demeeulemeester's Spring 2012 collection.

The creature Demeulemeester created was part androgyne, part decadent, a poetic hybrid of East and West. Demeulemeester imagined a European wardrobe "infected" by the tribal dress her explorer encountered. That might start with something subtle like a striped, tailored blazer with tassels dangling off its buttons, or a trenchcoat de-structured till it was a soft kimonolike wrap. In the middle somewhere, there were slouchy openwork knits and a jacket over-embroidered to look utterly exhausted. Then came the more exotic pieces: the black silk tulle caftan with a trim of beads, the embroidered waistcoat with a trail of fringes. A sheer asymmetrical top and skirt appeared in an ombré that evoked a dust storm.

Ann Demeulemeester; Poetic and beautiful - making physical what many women are dreaming about. 

Giles

Giles Spring 2012 RTW

"This is so not a collection about Black Swan," Giles Deacon said backstage before his show in London. Rather, it was a panoply of interlocking, stream-of-consciousness references. The Silver Swan, the automaton from the Bowes Museum near Deacon's hometown in County Durham, led to society swans photographed by Cecil Beaton, whom the designer dubbed "the Andy Warhol of his day." Deacon was also influenced by Beaton's Symphony in Silver portrait of his sister Baba; that led him to Warhol's Factory and Silver Clouds, which cued the runway backdrop.