NY Fashion Week: At Proenza Schouler, reveling in haute tackiness

NEW YORK -- So bad it's good.

That's what came to mind while I was watching the dynamic Proenza Schouler runway show Wednesday night at New York Fashion Week. And I mean it in the best possible way.

Designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez continued to play with the rounded silhouette that has become one of their signatures, showing short, belted dresses, and jackets and coats with sloped shoulders paired with mini skirts or tapered crepe pants.

But the genius thing was how they used textural fabrics and prints to bring new dimension to tailored pieces, and suggest a delicious haute tackiness.

A multicolored, confetti-like boucle tweed brought to mind particle board (which anyone who has ever put together a piece of budget Ikea furniture is intimately familiar with) and vividly hued, flock-printed crepes with a relief-like appearance, and designs evoking paint drips, abstract wood grains and animal stripes conjured up Grandma's retro flocked wallpaper and Christmas cards.

The trippy orange light that bathed the runway as guests arrived added to the rumpus-room vibe.

'We wanted to create fun, energy and a bit of humor, and move toward something more instinctual,' McCollough said backstage, stressing that what they didn't want was for the references in the collection to be too literal. 'We always sketch with pencil and paper, but this time we used colored pencils for the first time.'

The result was one cool collection. I felt like I wanted to pull up a bean bag chair and stay a while.

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