Detour

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Strong silhouettes

By: Booth Moore

19/09/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

111After several seasons of sweet and ladylike, fashion has found its edge. The jacket -- be it long, loose and boyfriend-style by Stella McCartney; shrunken into a schoolboy silhouette at J. Crew; sequin-dusted at Zara; cropped and rendered in crisp white from 3.1 Phillip Lim; or studded and shoulder-padded at Balmain -- is the key to fall's strong mood.

And for good reason. No other piece of clothing, except perhaps a pair of heels, is as transformative. A jacket is an instant confidence-builder in uncertain times. It's a kind of body armour that makes you sit straight and walk tall, and it covers a multitude of imperfections.

This season, the jacket is at the centre of the 1980s trend, the motorcycle trend, the aviator trend and the return-to-professional-dressing trend. A jacket need not be expensive to command respect. But there is nothing like a jacket to make you appreciate good design -- the elegant drape of a shawl collar, the gentle embrace of a shaped waist, the perfect peak of a shoulder.

If all this talk about jackets sets off a wave of nostalgia for former Los Angeles Lakers' coach Pat Riley, Miami Vice and Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, remember: There is a difference in how jackets are being worn this fall and how they were worn in the Armani heyday of the '80s and '90s with pleated, full-legged trousers and corporate-looking, matchy-matchy pencil skirts.

The trick now is to balance a strong jacket with some leg. That could mean a bandage skirt (if you're 22), leggings, skinny jeans or even just a strappy shoe. Because this time around, women aren't just dressing like the boys, they're making jackets their own.

-- Los Angeles Times

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 19, 2009 F2

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