Fashion Ticker: Christian Cota
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Can you wear the sunset? The young designer Christian Cota answered “yes” with his spring 2009 presentation yesterday at the Altman Building.
Mr. Cota achieved the look in a painterly way, using a pastel palette of orange, blue, lavender, and rose on fabrics such as silk chiffon and taffeta.
The collection featured two main silhouettes. One was loose and flowing, with hints of the Grecian, dramatized by feminine accents — buttons off to the side running the length of a long gown, circle skirts, and flattering V-necks.
The edgier silhouette showed fabric hand-tucked into swirls and swirling patterns that produced a brilliant effect. A pink and lavender dress featured a swirl rising out of a strapless bodice on the left, and a fuller swirl gathering above the hem of the dress on the right. The colors on the fabric looked like they were moving and changing like the shifting light in the sky. Sometimes light, not color, was the point, as in a metallic gray pencil skirt, made of silk taffeta, transformed by a swirl-like pattern starting at the waist and expanding toward the thigh.
Inspiration for his wearable sky came from a trip to Santorini and visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view Impressionist paintings, Mr. Cota said yesterday.
“I wanted to paint with shadows, and capture what light would look like in clothes,” Mr. Cota, who studied painting for six months, said.
With a dark, small mustache and slicked back hair, Mr. Cota looked uncannily like a young Monet. One could easily imagine a brush in his hand.