If you need a gobsmacking party look in New York City, calling LaQuan Smith is a safe bet. The designer is fluent in sexed-up glam, corsets, cutouts, and celebrities. However, he’s trying to grow the remit.
“My woman has evolved. She’s not coming to me for the same things she used to ten seasons ago. She’s coming to me for a full 24 hour perspective,” said Smith. In other words, he’s doing night and day. It was only natural, then, that contradiction guided his spring collection: danger and delicateness, hard and soft, good and evil. One strength of the collection was Smith’s unlikely pairings—flirty, fluffy skirts with boyish, windbreaker jackets, for example.
Smith also took those thematic goalposts and went wild, quite literally. Embossed python forced the collars of a jacket upward and the peplum of a skirt outward, perky shoulder jackets were rendered in feathers and Bambi print. Another print merged those docile dots of a doe with the fierce pattern of a cheetah. (Smith also made a few pieces, including a sparkling gown, in collaboration with Paramount’s forthcoming movie Children of Blood and Bone.) The crowd was satisfied with the offer. Every phone, and a few gasps, went up as a breezy, barely-there orange gown floated down the runway.
As part of the effort to evolve with his customer, Smith has been introducing more tailored pieces into the mix—“bombshell suiting,” he called it. The best items fitting that bill were a couple of dark denim sets that could be zipped and unzipped at the wearer’s discretion; the denim lent them an air of approachability while the cut dressed them up. The LaQuan Smith spirit, tip-toeing into a new realm. However, models negotiating high heels, a slippy runway, and unhemmed pants or material pooling peskily around their ankles neither sustained the showtime fantasy nor helped sell the wearability message.
Still, there were bright spots and Smith has big ambitions: “I hope this really opens up a lot of eyes and perspectives for people to see I’m here to stay and that I can dress women all around the world,” he said.