Grabbed by Their Lapels

New York designers have been harping on youth and playing Led Zeppelin, one of the funnier contradictions of Fashion Week. But rock ’n’ roll doesn’t make fashion relevant any more than putting bobby socks with stilettos does, although Oscar de la Renta did both. He had all the elements he needed in his clothes: in the airy skirts in marigold and emerald silk taffeta that opened his show on Tuesday; in gauzy bowed blouses that appeared with a silk knit suit; in a sweet, below-the-knee dress in white cotton voile and Battenberg lace. Lightness always gets the lead out.
Fashion Week always has a distorting effect on people’s perceptions, designers included. At first, the game seemed to be sports-influenced clothes.A day in the life of a bus driver: On the road again. Then the action suddenly shifted to easy summer dresses, with run-amok prints and colors. On Tuesday, when Olivier Theyskens, the creative director of Theory, sent out linen and tweed jackets with jeans that could sit on your waist while riding your hips, everybody sat up and said, “Gee, that looks great.”
This news was hardly hidden, though. Like the youthfulness of Mr. de la Renta’s ball skirts, it was right under our noses. The fact is, three dominant themes have emerged for spring, each of them reinvigorated: the sports garment (be it biker shorts or Michael Kors suede Bermudas or a floaty parachute skirt); the soft, below-the-knee dress (whether it’s a lean wisp of silk or a blousy Rodarte number), and a jacket. Mr. de la Renta showed a number of relaxed suits, but the blazer looks its newest over a dress or with pants or slim shorts.
The clearest, though by no means brainiest, articulation of the look was Mr. Theyskens’s lanky blazers and cardigans with skinny jeans that borrowed on the hip-hop style of letting your britches sink below your bottom. I remember seeing a similar technique of creating a high waistband with a hip belt and low back pockets in the 1990s from a designer raised in Detroit. Mr. Theyskens’s versions worked in their own right, along with the femmy tops and minidresses he showed both with hooker heels and combat boots. He also tossed in some neon metallic jeans, perhaps anticipating competitors who might have a similar style in the pipeline.