“Well, he can cut a mean pair of trousers, can’t he?” New York’s Peter Do brought his collection to Paris for the first time this morning, to put some distance between this show and the Helmut Lang one he did back home a couple of weeks ago, and to introduce his work to the European crowd. The trouser comment came from a Peter Do first-timer who is not so easy to please on the subject.
Do is a designer with big ambitions. Early on, he told me he wanted a creative director job at a European label, and he made it happen (though Helmut Lang is now owned by Japan’s Fast Retailing). But making a killer pair of pants is also high up there on his to-do list. At a time when fashion’s designer-as-content-maker contingent is expanding, Do holds actual honest-to-goodness clothes-making in higher regard than most. “I want to make grown-up clothes,” he said backstage.
To start, what that meant here was you didn’t see the silly short-shorts that were all over the Milan runways. Do cut his blazers into horizontal sections, placing a band of silk twill lining with subtle logo details between a top and bottom in summer-weight wool. Some jackets were tucked into pants with a similar treatment. If that’s a runway styling trick that may not make it in the real world, many other pieces have good odds, like the jackets cropped at the midriff and the blazer vests with exaggerated shoulders. Then there were those great looking trousers. The most ambitious were the pairs with vertical slices down the front that revealed a bold lash of red underneath. On the softer side, a pair of halter dresses—one knee-length and the other to-the-ankle—had provocative sheer insets in front and elegant draped backs. The draping and twisting felt new for Do, an expansion of his vocabulary.
Sprinkled in were pieces from his Banana Republic collaboration, due in stores on October 10. The khaki trench with a removable shearling collar and a two-in-one chunky ribbed sweater added a more easy-going vibe to the show. Just don’t call them casual. There’s nothing casual about Do’s drive.
Collection
This article was originally published on Vogue Runway.
