Feathers and Fringes at Rachel Roy
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
A lifelong love of American-Indian culture came through Rachel Roy’s Fall 2008 collection, shown Thursday at the Peter White Studio in Chelsea. She succeeded in transforming the rustic, bold patterns, textures, and colors into elegant ensembles. And yet, her artsy, downtown designs, which drew on menswear tailoring, did not seem derivative of other designers who have gone down this path before. Highlights included a brown-and-white Hopi print silk skirt, paired with a black wool trench coat and a feather-adorned fedora, and a silk blouse with a black-and-cream batik-like pattern, shown with an oversize feather-fringe necklace. Plenty of monochromatic pieces — suits, dresses, trousers — made the collection versatile. The only misfire was taking a complex metallic fabric and turning it into a dress with a shawl collar, embellished with a bow in the front and a feather pin at the shoulder. That fabric worked better as a full skirt — sitting low on the hip, with a black tulle underlay. Models in braids and a sky reddening at sunset created just the right backdrop.
