She’s Been Baking!
By CATHY HORYN
I love the morning after a party and the girlfriends call to discuss the food, the conversation, the clothes and, of course, the men folk. I gave a little party on Saturday night — I’m sorry I didn’t invite y’all — and the guests trooped through the darkness and the muddy snow, with bottles of wine, cakes and a bunch of white roses. I had brought together two separate worlds, friends and cousins, city and country people, and everyone got along and stayed until midnight. I cooked a fresh ham (thanks to James Beard, the calmest and funniest of authorities, I think), and my brother sent scallops from Nantucket, which I turned into a kind of pie. We had a potato gratin and a tossed salad. I dug out my mother’s recipe for chocolate pot de crème, and I used her old “Good Housekeeping Picture Cookbook” for the coconut layered cake. I cooked a batch of the Swedish ginger cookies, the ones made with bacon fat. Freddy the Jack stayed close to the ham all night, and Toby the Lab gave every pair of gray flannels a nice comet of hair. It was fun, the girlfriends said, sounding almost surprised.
A look from Narciso Rodriguez’s pre-fall collection show.
This morning I hustled down to Narciso Rodriguez’s pre-fall collection show, in his studio on Irving Place. For the last week or so designers have been having pre-fall presentations. Pretty soon we’ll be asked to look at pre pre-fall presentations. I saw Oscar de la Renta’s collection last week: lots of garden prints that made me think of Balenciaga. My favorite “odd girl” look (Diana Vreeland might have called it a lemon) was a green tweed pencil skirt worn with a brown cardigan that had a panel of matte gold sequins on either side of the buttons. The winners in Rodriguez’s brisk collection were coats in washed cashmere with fleecy collars, the skinny black stretch pants, a loose Henley sweater in heather green wool (shown with a full silk faille skirt), and a slinky silk cocktail dress in a shade of army fatigue.
A Narciso Rodriguez coat in washed cashmere with a fleecy collars.
I see everyone’s a little surprised and amused by the Ungaro news. Frankly, I’m with notdaisyo — that is, I’m not going to leap on this old horse. I mean, how many designers has Ungaro had? Esteban Cortazar is a nice kid; he’s outgoing and he’s got some talent. But a number of the fashion-house appointments don’t seem all that well considered, and at some point the mistakes become irritating. I certainly wish Cortazar well. Working in Paris can be a great experience for a designer, but as Fashion Turtle notes… does he have the craft? It’s not an insignificant thing. I see a lot of good clothes in Paris, presented under well-known labels, but the difference between “good” and “excellent” is vast, and I sometimes wonder if people know the difference. And if they can’t tell the difference, what does that lack of knowledge mean for the future of the fashion industry? So-so luxury with big fat price tags?
And consider the competition that Ungaro has today, and how people, at least in Europe and the States, dress more casually than a decade ago. I’m less interested in a “new” designer at Ungaro than a new and enlightened management strategy. A fashion line directed toward the so-call BRICs — Brazil, Russia, India and China? Just a post holiday dinner thought.
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