|
London: Allegra Hicks Dresses the Jeunesse D'Ore
2006-09-22
Allegra Hicks is one of those to the manor born gals, a designer whose front row Tuesday in London Fashion Week was a who's who of the local jeunesse d'ore. Row A at Hicks' show included the Queen's cousin Lady Helen Taylor, Brazilian uber beauty Andrea Delal, British rock's most famous divorcee Lucy Ferry, country beauty Sally Albemarle and It Gals Kim Hersov and Saffron Aldridge. Hersov, a UK Harper's Bazaar editor, was also the star of The Getaway, an amusing eight-page comic, placed on one's seat, whose tag line explained the subject was "the fashionable adventures of a forlorn housewife, a cheeky bank robber, three lovely children, sausages and a Grande Punto." Fiat, the Italian auto giant that makes the Punto, partly financed the show and even placed a mini version of the car in our goodie bags. Even daughters of privilege - Allegra is the granddaughter of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India - need sponsors in modern Britain. The collection, however, was far less droll than the comic. Hicks does have talent: shaping Mantary print gauze caftans into cool silhouettes ideal for hosting a tropical soiree, and cutting silk georgette shirts into just the right, loose sleeved shape of the moment. Allegra also has a neat sense of how to edit embroidery to embellish rather than outweigh a look. Her single best passage was a really lovely cream dress finished with tulle designs. A pity there was not more of this. Instead, far too often dresses appeared in pretty but predictable prints, na?¯ve floral patterns in mint, pink and chocolate none of which managed to excite. Moreover, while some might call it realist, Hicks generous silhouette was frankly unflattering on several models - making a mockery of the current international polemic against super thin catwalkers. Above all, this collection felt like it had not been sufficiently edited, where a potentially novel designer had been trapped by friends too polite to tell her what worked, and what didn't.
|
