Designer: Paulina Susana Romero Valdez. What I loved most about her collection was how she incorporated all of the bright floral embroidery into her textiles. She wanted to bring color and texture to her designs and pay tribute to her Native American heritage.
Designer: Kevin Smith and Andrea Nyberg. Kevin and Andrea made an excellent team. He had the idea and she created the textiles. You could tell that they communicated and worked really well with each other. I loved the inspiration they used of the clouds and how that translated into their menswear collection. It’s a little hard to see but the pattern on the shirts was amazing!
Designer: Ozanhan Kayaoglu. Ozanhan had quite the story to tell regarding the inspiration for his collection. You could immediately tell how passionate he was. The greatest part to me is how he incorporated his inspiration into the collection. His textiles were created with barbed wire. He wrapped the wool around the barbed wire and let it soak. The end result was pretty spectacular.
Designer: Emmanuelle Jones and Ghazaleh Khalifeh. I loved the prints and patterns these girls used for their collection. The color choices were amazing! Their collection was so bold and vibrant.
Designer: Christian Willman. I loved how she let the construction of her collection speak for itself. Sticking with a grey and taupe color pallet you focused your attention on the clothes and the detail work. You can see her inspiration, experimenting with structural power and use of friction and gravity to achieve balance in her collection.
Designer: Xue Yang and Oom Terdpravat. Their collection was greatly inspired by vintage Chinese fabrics. Oom designed the textiles while Xue created the garments. I love their use of color and how they incorporated both vintage fabrics as well as their own textile design. The construction of their pieces was amazing and how they blended the fabrics together to create their patterns.
Designer: Farnaz Golnam. When I first walked backstage this collection immediately caught my attention. The three dimensional floral and cage like details were so impressive. Farnaz allowed the construction of her garments to take center stage by sticking with a black and grey color pallet. The details are impossible to miss up close but really hard to capture in a photograph on the runway. I just couldn’t believe how she was able to construct all those pieces in her collection.
This season during NYFW I had the opportunity to go back stage before the Academy of Art Universities runway show at Lincoln Center. Let me just say, it was quite the experience! I was able to meet all of the student designers before the show and talk with each of them about their collection, find out about their inspiration for their collections, and which were their favorite pieces from their collection. While that last question was hard for each of them to answer the response seemed the same. The piece that was the most labor intensive and time consuming was each designers favorite piece from their collection. Just like last season, I was super impressed with the collections. There were many pieces I would be interested in purchasing, if they were for sale, no joke! I wanted to share some of the looks I loved hanging on the racks and then what they looked like walking down the runway.
Do you see any pieces that catch you eye? Which pieces are your favorites?
Runway Photo Credit: All runway images were courtesy of AAU via Getty Images. All other images unless otherwise noted are my own.
