Donna Karan+Jenny Packham

NEW YORK, February 13, 2012

By Nicole Phelps

It's been a good week so far for Marlene Dietrich. Jason Wu hitched a ride on the Shanghai Express last Friday and today Donna Karan channeled The Blue Angel, topping off nearly every look with one of Stephen Jones' jaunty mini fedoras. You know what comes next: suits. Karan is fixated on them for Fall, but naturally it went way beyond blazers and pants here. On the one hand, she folded, tucked, and pinned pinstripe wool into a sexy bustier dress or plunge-front cocktail number; and on the other she added lapels to a red draped wool dress and used silk cummerbunds as a neckline detail on another evening frock. What looked like a pinstripe jumpsuit was actually a "body jacket," i.e., a clever bodysuit tucked into a pair of slim pants, bisected by another one of those cummerbunds.

When Karan did turn her attention to an unreconstructed double-breasted jacket or coat, she gave it exaggerated shoulders that read a bit too mannish or maybe too 1930, the year The Blue Angel came out. The sleeker part of Karan's new man/woman story was the better one.

						NEW YORK, February 13, 2012 By Maya Singer If it was a coincidence that Dita Von Teese was in the front row at this morning's Jenny Packham show, it was a mighty convenient one. This season found Packham trying her bad girl on for size, showing bias-cut gowns and embellished pencil skirts that paid obvious homage to the forties femme fatale. The collection wasn't particularly racy, though. Packham's default setting is sweet, and despite all the lipstick red and noir-ish black on the runway, and the sexy dive of some of her deep V-necks, there was nothing here that would raise any eyebrows at a charity gala. (Or at Buckingham Palace, for that matter.) There were some solid gowns, though, several of which looked likely to be whisked straight off the catwalk to Oscar fittings in L.A. Packham's gold and black beaded bias-cut gown and voluminous floral printed silk were particularly memorable; a strong-shouldered black bias-cut gown with a plunging neckline, meanwhile, made for a fine approximation of the kind of thing that Barbara Stanwyck or Lauren Bacall might have worn at the Copa, back in the day. The problem here was with the emphasis on embellishment—Packham can be awfully heavy-handed, and a few dresses covered in crystals and sequins looked terribly weighty. Still, there were enough winners here to keep Packham's star on the rise.