The Spring 2016 ready-to-wear collections had been showing on US runways since September, and by the third Tuesday of March they were finally in stores — hanging on the racks, photographed for the lookbooks, worn at the press parties. Spring 2016 felt, for the first time in a few seasons, like American fashion was doing something different from European fashion: cleaner, more pragmatic, less about silhouette gymnastics, more about clothes you would actually pull off the hanger and wear to dinner. We spent a Saturday walking the floor at Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue, taking notes, and the version of spring we left with was not the runway’s most photographed but the one most likely to live in our closet through August.
Marc Jacobs and the prom-night maximalism
Marc Jacobs Spring 2016 — the one with the prom-court-meets-Marie-Antoinette ribbon-and-tulle showstoppers and the sequinned mini dresses — was an outlier on the schedule and read, on the rack at retail, as the most opinionated thing on the floor. The wearable shop pieces, though, were wonderful: a series of A-line shifts in citrus solids, the polka-dotted blouses that took the show’s exuberance and tucked it into a pencil skirt, the platform Mary Janes that ended up being one of the most reordered shoes of the season at department stores. The takeaway: even the maximalist brands had figured out how to translate a runway moment into something a thirty-five-year-old could wear to a Tuesday morning meeting.
Calvin Klein at the peak of its quiet
Francisco Costa’s Spring 2016 for Calvin Klein Collection was the season’s most quietly accomplished collection: long fluid dresses in pearl and oyster silk, the trapeze tank, the slim trouser, an absolute conviction that less was the answer. We did not all need a Calvin Klein piece in spring 2016, but anyone shopping for the wedding-guest dress that did not look like a wedding-guest dress had a clear answer. Costa would step down from the house in June 2016, and looking at the Spring collection in store, you could feel that this might be his last full statement at the brand. The takeaway: minimalism rendered with this much craft is not boring; it is rare.
Tory Burch and the optimistic stripe
Tory Burch Spring 2016 was one of the easiest collections to actually shop. The Cuban-inspired off-shoulder tops, the wide-cuff stripe shirting, the ankle-cropped wide-leg trouser, the Reva flats reissued in three new colourways — the brand had spent five years building a closet of wearable pieces, and Spring 2016 was the season the editing finally felt confident. Anyone in our group chat who had a corporate dress code was buying the cotton midi shirt-dress, and the stripes that ran through the collection ended up — by July, we noticed — having migrated into nearly every closet of every working friend we had. Lesson: a well-edited stripe is the most underestimated workhorse in a spring wardrobe.
Coach and the leather-on-leather
Coach‘s Spring 2016, Stuart Vevers’s third full collection for the brand, was the season the rebrand stopped being an in-progress story and started reading like a permanent identity. The varsity jackets, the western-piped collar shirts, the chunky-link bracelets, the Rogue bag in three new sizes — the collection felt like a full closet of decisions, not a runway statement. The Rogue 25 became the bag of spring for our group, and the brand’s stitched-leather penny loafers showed up in every editor’s photo grid by mid-April. The takeaway: when an American brand commits to a point of view for three full seasons, the customer finally believes it.
Michael Kors and Ralph Lauren on the easy end
The dependable end of the rack — Michael Kors and Ralph Lauren — was, for spring 2016, exactly what the slightly louder end of the floor was missing. Kors’s collection was a long study in cream and camel: the camel cashmere coat, the cream cropped trouser, the easy white shirting, all the pieces every working woman from Boston to Dallas was going to be wearing through July. Ralph Lauren’s Spring 2016 leaned heavily into white-and-navy nautical with a cleaner hand than the previous year — the rope belts, the rugby stripes, the easy white denim — and proved that for all the bright colour everywhere else on the floor, navy and white still ran the spring. The lesson, walking out of the department store: you can buy spring at the loud end of the floor, but you live in spring at the quiet end.
Tommy Hilfiger and the rest of the floor
Tommy Hilfiger Spring 2016, the tailgate-themed show at the Park Avenue Armory in September, translated to retail with a confidence we did not always associate with the brand: cropped denim jackets, varsity-stripe rugby polos, painter trousers in white. The collection bridged the gap between American sportswear nostalgia and the Gigi Hadid co-sign era to come, and you could see the brand finding its voice for the rest of the decade. Across the floor, Diane von Furstenberg was leaning back into the wrap-dress as a quietly confident answer to whatever maximalism the rest of fashion was running. The lesson, taking a final lap of the floor: spring 2016 was deeper than the runway photos suggested, and the rewards belonged to the customer who bought slowly.
What we are taking home
Our actual spring 2016 capsule, narrowed down on the train home: the Tory Burch wide-cuff stripe shirt, a Calvin Klein cream slip dress, the Coach Rogue 25 in black leather, a pair of J.Crew ankle-cropped trouser in oyster, and one Marc Jacobs polka-dotted shift for whatever rooftop dinner was going to ask for it. The capsule was four hundred dollars over budget by design, and we made peace with it before we got off the train. We will see you on the third Tuesday of June for the summer jewellery edit.