Go RunwayStripes, checks and digitally generated prints all came down the spring runways.When I was a sweet 7 years old, my doll drawings were all curves. I drew curly hair, circular eyes, puff-sleeved dresses with full skirts. Even the shoes were round-toed, not pointy like Cinderella's glass slippers. Today, however, any little girl who has her mind set on a career in fashion would do well to add a ruler and a T square to her box of crayons.
Were there anything but straight lines in the spring-summer collections that will hit the stores by the end of the holiday season? The cut was streamlined - lean tunics and pants were practically ubiquito us. Blouses were mostly crisp and collared rather than the full-sleeved peasant variety. Dresses followed a narrow A-line and stood away from the body.
Then there were all of those intersecting prints: straight lines, bold squares or diamond shapes, often raked at an angle (and often inspired by the Miu Miu collection from last season). Sure, polka dots are still around - the residue of Marc Jacobs's fascination with the work of the obsessive Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and his collaboration with her for Louis Vuitton. But one look at Jacobs's Vuitton collection for spring and you have the motif of the entire season ahead: dresses with stripes and checks and one, two, three different hem lengths. As the models descended a pair of escalators at the Vuitton show in Paris, there were nothing but straight lines as far as the eye could see. Jacobs says he was inspired by the artist Daniel Buren's installation of round pegs in the gardens of the Palais Royal, but in fact th ose clothes - not to mention the vertical and horizontal lines in Jacobs's namesake collection - brought to mind the Op Art era of the 1960s.
The geometry of fashion favors either a compass or a ruler. Had I grown up a hundred years ago, at the end of the belle époque, my rounded drawings would have been perfectly in style: circular hats balanced on pouffed up-dos, a bust swelling out like a balcony and a bustle at the rear. The 1920s gal swapped curves for angles, with straight shimmy dresses and neat, cropped hair. This kind of straight-edge dressing may go in and out of fashion, but it always signals a forward march. In the 1960s, linear looks of the space age made a dynamic thrust against the ladylike clothes of the postwar period - all nipped-in New Look jackets and big skirts - just as broad shoulders and sharp tailoring of the '80s would knock out the floppy Woodstock look.
The one word that defines spring 2013 is “graphic. †If I shut my eyes and wait for fashion images to pop up, I see first the checkered Louis Vuitton collection, then Junya Watanabe's dynamic color blocks on athletic stretch sportswear. I pick up that color blocking again on the zippered, calf-high boots at Jil Sander. I see stripes cutting through the southern Italian poster prints at Dolce & Gabbana; complex, crafted pieces-of-a-puzzle at Proenza Schouler; and the carefree stripes, blocks and zigzags from Yoshiyuki Miyamae at Issey Miyake. But most of all, I see black lines, zapped like strips of electrical tape over airy pink chiffon at Christopher Kane. There could not be a more symbolic way of declaring that fashion is x-ing out femininity.
Why now? The tougher and more masculine geometric angle is a direct response to the girly, fluttery dress-and-cardigan look of the early 2000s. It is also the result of technology. Color blocking achieves a new dimension when it is superimposed on a floral pattern or intermin gled with other graphic prints. Similarly, the sort of body mapping, best illustrated by the queen of prints Mary Katrantzou, could not have been achieved before the advent of digital design. When prints and grids fit convincingly on a garment whose silhouette already succeeds in flattening the body onto one smooth plane, the geometry adds up to a modern look.
So if I take a step back to my childhood, how would my doll drawing look now? An elongated rectangle, crisscrossed with squares and stripes set at an angle. The head is outlined by a sharp bob. The feet might be in pumps with a square block of a heel and a ball as decoration.
Note to you American Dolls: time for an update.
