Nicholas K FALL 2012 COLLECTION, NEW YORK FASHION WEEK

Nicholas K FALL 2012 COLLECTION

NEW YORK - Fashion designer Nicholas Kunz painted a promising picture of Nicholas K's evolution. While keeping her line's cool, utilitarian signatures—a desert palette, outerwear focus, draped knits and jerseys, heavy layering—on display, Kunz pushed her men's and women's clothes in a more geometric direction, and went some distance toward elevating the tone of the 9-year-old brand.
Kunz's inspiration for the season was the Taos artists of the twenties and thirties, and it proved to be a smart one. It related easily to Nicholas K's desert fixation, and it hewed the collections, slightly, to the larger Depression-era narrative shaping up for Fall. Kunz has sometimes found it a challenge to integrate current trends, but the Taos theme allowed her to add to her brand's vocabulary, pulling in both western and Deco references. One of Kunz's most interesting ideas was to tie the two together through the use of fringe; the western part of that worked, resulting in easy, fringed dresses with crochet detailing and sharply cut leather jackets jangling with fringe. The more evening-oriented beaded, flapper-ish stuff, meanwhile, felt a little forced. Kunz had more success with her lightly printed silks, iterated as clean and sexy bias-cut dresses and tops.