Pigeon-holed, typecast or expected. No matter what the peg is, designers don't necessarily want those like they'd want the peg of great all-around designer . Why? It doesn't readily promote a brand's growth through the creativity that many a designer desires if they are 'known for' and 'expected to' produce the familiar season after season. While this is what retailers love and the public thinks they want, when designers step out of their comfort zone and expand their perspective, it makes everyone from the highest fashion editors down to the newest fashion students take notice. Especially if it's done well. 'Well', by today's standards, could mean getting an investor, turning a profit, opening a store, being repeatedly carried in stores and having a namesake that's understood from Hollywood to Houston to Harlem.
'Well' by today's standards is Monique Lhuillier. What she's refused to do, however, is allow her line to become that pretty little collection that sings quietly and contently in the pigeonhole. Her successful bridal designer beginning has blossomed into her gowns continuing to complete a bride's fantasy by expanding with a ready-to-wear collection that shares in her aesthetic of the modern elegant cosmopolitan woman who understands the classic beauties that make women's fashion covetable and memorable.
For Spring 2013, Ms. Lhuillier is showing how she is shaking off the potential to be typecast as a bridal designer and blossoming into being a good designer that also does bridal. Having that versatility makes her highly in touch with the pretty ideas that women have about the outcome of their ensembles. She showed red carpet stunners with bias cut asymmetry, flirty full-skirted & beaded cocktail frocks and lacy black and golden flesh-toned numbers that playfully danced the dance of skin and silk. Although her sportswear was great consisting of chic slim cigarette pants, dressed up boy shorts and some wonderfully cut dropped-armhole sheath blouses, the stunners of this collection were her printed dresses and gowns. Commanding attention and transporting one to watercolored fantasy all in one fell swoop, Ms. Lhuillier showed exciting prints that were almost a colorfully remixed dance of sand dunes which felt intricately composed with an ethereal softness to them.
It would've been very easy and expected to show pared down wedding gowns as a ready to wear collection. However, Ms. Lhuillier is continuing to create a well-rounded brand and show that her love of design may have started in bridal but is cultivating itself, more importantly, all over a modern woman's closet.
*Special thanks to photography by L.Trevor McIntosh
*Special thanks to photography by L.Trevor McIntosh
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