Spring 2017 in American fashion will be filed under one date — February 10. That was the night Raf Simons sent his first Calvin Klein collection down a runway in New York, painting the entire industry into a corner with a single, exact statement of purpose. By the time the rest of the spring shows had wrapped, the question on every editor’s mind was how to follow that. The answer turned out to be a season of strong, distinct American voices doing exactly their thing — Marc Jacobs going theatrical, Tory Burch staying romantic, Ralph Lauren rewriting the see-now-buy-now playbook for the second time, and Coach quietly building one of the strongest American luxury narratives of the decade. We have spent the spring with these collections taped to our mood boards, ordering the wearable pieces, and trying to figure out what the rest of 2017 will sound like.
Calvin Klein 205W39NYC: the most-watched debut in years
Raf Simons’s debut at Calvin Klein arrived after a year of speculation, two years of slow restructuring at the brand, and a single Sterling Ruby art installation that turned the new headquarters into a piece of public commentary about what American fashion was about to become. The collection — released under the new 205W39NYC label — used Western shirting, school-uniform plaids, sheer slip dresses, and shearling work jackets in a way no European designer had ever read American clothing before. It was a foreign reading of America, and it landed at the exact moment the country was trying to figure out what it was. By March the editorial press had been writing about the show for four straight weeks. We were not buying the runway pieces, but we were buying the idea — pulling out a vintage cowboy belt, layering a slip over a t-shirt, finally retiring the long camel coat in favor of a shorter shearling. The Spring 2017 wardrobe in America was being rewritten, and it was being rewritten by a Belgian.
Marc Jacobs and the hip-hop runway debate
Marc Jacobs staged a Spring 2017 collection that was as much about silhouette as it was about a conversation — the show closed with Lady Gaga and a runway of looks layered with synthetic dreadlocks, which the designer addressed publicly within the week. The collection itself was vintage Marc — oversized, ’90s-tinted streetwear pulled into a high-fashion silhouette, with platform shoes, neon trims, and cropped fits that have aged better than the staging. The wearable takeaways from the collection — the slouchy hoodies, the platform sneakers, the bright outerwear — sat on the floor at Bergdorf and Bloomingdale’s all spring. We did not buy a platform shoe (yet), but the conversation around the show pushed us to think harder about which ’90s pieces still felt right in 2017 and which felt like costume. The answer kept changing, which is itself the point of a Marc Jacobs season.
Tory Burch keeps doing the thing that works
Tory Burch showed a Spring 2017 collection rooted in 1970s American resort — printed cotton, soft suede, drop waists, the shape of a Saint-Tropez vacation re-translated for a Madison Avenue lunch. Where Calvin Klein was cerebral and Marc Jacobs was loud, Tory was wearable. The Spring 2017 floor at her boutiques — and the assortment that made it onto her own e-commerce — was the deepest in years, and the dress shapes in particular sold through Memorial Day. We picked up a printed wrap dress in March and a pair of espadrilles a week later and called the spring sorted. There is a category of American designer who simply produces beautiful, sellable clothes year after year without needing a controversy or a debut to do it, and Tory has built a brand around being that.
Ralph Lauren and the see-now-buy-now reset
The Spring 2017 season was the second full one under fashion’s see-now-buy-now experiment, and the brand most committed to it remained Ralph Lauren. The September 2016 show — staged on Madison Avenue with a cars-and-couture set — had pushed the entire collection into stores the morning after the runway, and by spring the model had matured. The Spring 2017 collection that hit boutiques in March was leaner, more polished, more confident in the sportswear DNA that has defined the house for fifty years. Tommy Hilfiger took the same approach with the Tommy x Gigi collection, which dropped on the runway and into stores in real time and sold out in pieces within forty-eight hours. The model is not for every brand, but for the ones that built their name on broad American sportswear, it has worked.
Coach 1941 keeps building the upmarket case
Stuart Vevers’s continued reinvention of Coach through its 1941 line had quietly made the brand one of the most interesting American luxury propositions of the decade. The Spring 2017 collection leaned into a varsity-Americana visual language — embroidered jackets, prairie dresses, dinosaur appliqués — that read as both nostalgic and sharp. The handbag silhouettes — the Dinky, the Rogue — sat on the front shelf of every Coach boutique through spring, and by late March we had picked up a small Rogue in a very specific shade of brown and accepted that this was the bag of the year. Coach has had a long climb back up the prestige ladder. Spring 2017 was the season that climb officially completed.
What we are buying, what we are passing
The wearable Spring 2017 wardrobe, distilled: a slip dress (Calvin Klein influence), a printed wrap dress (Tory Burch), a pair of platform sneakers if you are feeling brave (Marc Jacobs), a small Coach Rogue or Dinky in a saddle brown, and one shearling piece staged for early-fall transition. We are passing on the loud athleisure crossover pieces, the more theatrical Marc Jacobs runway looks, and the fully-sequinned see-now-buy-now items from the second-tier brands that copied Tommy x Gigi without doing it as well. The American spring season is rarely about radical shifts; it is about which version of a familiar wardrobe a designer is making the case for this year. In 2017, the case is for restraint, for craft, for a slightly Western edge, and for a bag with shape. We will see you on the third Tuesday of June for the summer jewellery roundup.