New York wraps up fashion week with nod to elegance

NEW YORK: New York has wrapped up its fall Fashion Week, promising retro elegance, light femininity and longer lines for next year's spring and summer ready-to-wear collections.
    
Top designers like Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Diane von Furstenberg and Oscar de la Renta showed their collections, along with dozens of relatively unknown aspiring young creators wanting to become the next big thing, at the event which saw its finale on Wednesday.
    
The darling of the New York fashion set, Marc Jacobs, as usual bucked the trends of the week with a wacky collection featuring seemingly half-finished pieces, exposed underwear
and slinky dresses, while mixing silk and plastic.
    
He offered a refreshingly stripped-down take on pieces such as cutaway dresses, but some fashion professionals were fuming over Monday's show starting two hours late.
    
"It's not as if he's some young 19-year-old," Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue, vented to Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper. "He's a grown-up with a
huge organisation behind him."
    
For her part, Vera Wang, well known for her wedding dresses, offered draped tunics finished with colourful glass jewellery around the neckline, a long grey satin dress and figure hugging evening wear in silver lame.
    
One of the highlights of the week was a party to mark Ralph Lauren's 40 years in the fashion business, attended by celebrities such as Hollywood stars Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman.
    
A few designers, including the creative duo of Mark Badgley and James Mischka, sprinkled their collections with mini-skirts.