Très Chic! The Black and Ivory Edit
· By April Windsor
A lookbook for the whole year, winter first and summer to follow. Everything here is black, white or ivory, because the point of an edit is what you leave out, and everything is dressed up rather than down: velvet and mikado satin, lined wool, embroidered cotton. Nothing in it is a basic. The winter looks come from Australia, Copenhagen, England and Milan, and none of them is over by March. The summer starts in Bali.
THE DRESSES
MESHKI built its name on the body-conscious dress and has got better at the long clean line. The Boston is a boat neck, sleeveless, fitted through the body and cut to the mid-calf, which is the hardest length to get right and the most useful one when you do. In ivory it reads as evening without announcing it. The Tanya runs to the floor: a V neck, a button front, long fluted sleeves, in white. Both solve a wedding, a christening and a dinner in the same week.
Effie Kats works out of Melbourne and makes the kind of gown that justifies the word. The Madison is black velvet with an ivory mikado satin bow. The velvet absorbs the light; the satin throws it back. That is the whole reason to put the two of them next to each other. It is a gown for a room with candles in it. Two sizes left when we checked.
THE TAILORING
Skall Studio is Danish, the work of two sisters, and its tailoring has the Copenhagen trick of looking undesigned. The Barbara blazer has notch lapels and flap pockets and nothing else to say for itself. The Addie trousers underneath have an elastic waist, which sounds like a compromise and is the reason you will wear them on a plane. Worn together it is a suit that does not look like one.
Holland Cooper wants the opposite of undesigned. The Mayfair blazer is longline, cut more generously than the label's usual tailoring. The High Waisted Straight Trouser under it is a lined wool blend in black barathea, a tight twill with a faint sheen. That sheen is the whole difference between these and any other pair of black trousers. It is the sort of black that holds its colour under a bad light, which is more than most black tailoring manages.
Etro started as a Milanese textile house in 1968 and did not take up paisley until 1981. Here the motif stays tonal, embroidered into the blazer and woven as jacquard into the trousers, so you only read it when the light moves. The blazer has peak lapels, two buttons and patch pockets, cut close through the waist. The trousers are cropped and flared with a pressed crease, and though Etro files them as jeans there is not a thread of denim in them. Same motif, same white, sold separately.
THE SUMMER LINEN
Winter ends here. Aline My Label makes its linen in Bali, and there is no better place to learn what linen is for. The Verbena is a crop top, boxy and squared at the shoulder, and the Hostas pant under it is high waisted and cut wide, in a linen heavy enough to hold its line and still move. Both come in white, sand, latte and olive. The label makes more intimates than anything else, in Tencel, buttery soft, which is the only thing worth wearing under linen in the Bali heat. The same hand shows in these two. At fifty dollars for the top and ninety-five for the trousers, they are the easiest yes in the edit.
Nothing here looks like it tried. The dresses are plain and perfectly cut; the tailoring is black on black, or white on white; the linen is for the heat. One wardrobe, twelve months. It assumes you have somewhere to be and would rather be looked at twice than once.