Resort 2013: Versace, Louis Vuitton, and the undead return of Juicy Couture.

Francesco Scognamiglio

Today's topic is: funsies! Which is the kind of vocabulary that regularly comes to mind when I'm writing about Resort Season. Most of the collections in this post were dominated by silliness and bright colours, ie the main themes of Resort collections the world over -- at least, when they're not dominated by bland, saleably on-trend basics.

Marni
There's a lot of '70s-inspired designs floating around at the moment, much of them kinda fugly because, let's face it: The '70s. For example, there's certainly something to be said for the growing popularity of outfits that combine layers of skirts and/or mid-length trousers with an overskirt, but not when the fabric is rigid and coloured to match the furniture in Starsky & Hutch. Fashion borrows from itself continuously in a series of 25-year loops, as each old trend gradually transforms from "so old" to "charmingly vintage". The thing about "charmingly vintage", however, is that we get to retroactively edit out the non-hideous trends so only the good stuff survives. The whole point of recycling retro styles is that you get to weed out the stuff that looks like this:

Louis Vuitton
More '70s mid-length trousers, but this time they seem to be going for a Barbie Goes Backpacking kind of look.

Honestly though, this whole collection was a major disappointment for me, mainly because last season's Louis Vuitton looked like this:

Norma Kamali
This collection was inspired by the Olympics, which means that Norma Kamali is my auto-enemy. (Barely an exaggeration.) Seriously, the only good thing the Olympics have inspired so far is this Horrible Histories song. Bias aside, this collection wasn't too bad, successfully avoiding most of the traps of sports-inspired fashion. One thing I would criticise is that although I quite like the dress pictured below, it's a bad idea to use shiny fabrics in clothes that you're explicitly marketing as "affordable". I suspect that most of these clothes look kinda cheap in real life.

NO. This looks like an air stewardess costume from a 1960s-themed advert for those flights rich people hire to go into the upper atmosphere and experience zero-gravity. If your outfit unironically resembles tinfoil Space Fashion from a vintage TV series, Do Not Pass Go.

Skaist-Taylor
I was totes baffled by the hideousness of this photoshoot until I found out that Skaist-Taylor are the people behind Juicy Couture, at which point everything became clear. I mean, why not pair your party-girl frock with a fake fur stole that looks like it was made from furniture coverings, and then pose in front of a vomit/spilled-makeup combo background? Literally no one who buys these clothes is ever going to see the lookbook anyway.

You just know that anyone who buys this suit is going to wear it with that exact same styling. Women's suits are often modeled with no shirt or bra on underneath (because who wants to look at pictures of women where all their flesh is covered??) but then worn "normally" in real life, but I suspect that the Juicy Couture crowd will take this lookbook's advice to heart and pair their pink tuxedoes with silver platform shoes and a pout.

Ter et Bantine
I feel like I have whiplash from switching straight from Skaist-Taylor to the calm and stylish lines of Ter et Bantine. Snobbery-whiplash, that is. Chances are, these two types of outfit will be marketed at exactly the same economic bracket, except the women wearing Skaist-Taylor will be rich because they're reality TV stars while the women wearing Ter et Bantine will be interning at their father's publishing company. Women wearing Skaist-Taylor put their party photos on Facebook; women wearing Ter et Bantine have text-free Tumblr accounts where they reblog The Sartorialist and whimsical photos of coffee paraphernalia.

Thom Browne
Thom Browne is dedicated to designing clothes that look objectively ridiculous, particularly menswear. The deicsion to attempt a marketable Resort collection, therefore, was kind of baffling. While some outfits were entertainingly silly (see below for borderline Willy Wonka cosplay), most were disappointingly bland and adhered to the kind of preppy tameness that I'd expect from... well, anyone but Thom Browne. I mean, for a guy whose last menswear collection combined gimp masks, belly shirts and pastel-checked trouser suits, this show was distinctly unimpressive.

Versace
The faux-masculine slouching, bright colour scheme, Joan Jett hair and spike heels all added up to something that looked like a cross between a K-pop photoshoot and a makeup ad. This isn't something I'd expect from a label this famous but I can't deny that it's fun, even though the collection does seem to skew a lot younger than I'd expect from Versace.