You can no longer say that big things are expected of Joseph Altuzarra. According to the Council of Fashion Designers of America's annual awards, he is 2014's Womenswear Designer of The Year - so at New York Fashion Week, that makes him the main event.
Within the clothes that tilt at creepiness was expressed via kinkiness: showpiece thick latticed leather jerkins and dresses over Lycra smacked of the dominatrix, and a near-the-end section of black and sheer lined with pearls was agonised Belle de Jour. The opening section was in gingham, cotton or seersucker and dusty pink or baby blue, sexed up via slits in the pencil skirts that fractured higher up the thigh than that folksiest of patterns warranted.
The finale of floor-rustling floral organza frocks - and these really were frocks - were historically inspired versions of the same deeply bourgeois standards that ran through the collection. Once that show-friendly whiff of vice is softened for the retailers, this collection will prove highly-buyable to those who want to wear American fashion's anointed.
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