If anyone gets the “trooper” award this New York Fashion Week, it might just have to be designer Rachel Comey, who dutifully answered editors’ questions backstage after her brilliant Spring 2013 show while nine months pregnant. (Her due date is actually next week.)
Comey has long been a go-to among the indie and boutique set for her printed day dresses and quirky knitwear, but this season the designer experimented with some new and upscale pieces for Spring 2013.
“I do prints, but we did all this hand-beading for the first time,” she told us backstage. “I don’t know, I got a feeling for it and we went with it. We started to explore dressier occasion-type clothes. I think people know to come to us for going-to-work and weekends type stuff, which of course is still there, but creatively maybe I wanted to see what would happen or how our girl would go out at night. It’s also given me the freedom to buy all these very expensive fabrics!”
In addition to some impressive crisp white looks, Comey showed a serious of elegant evening dresses and exhibited a real playfulness when it came to upscale fabrics, showing, for example, a wonderfully offbeat pair of shorts in a lacquered metallic leather.
Swimwear was also prominent in the collection (especially ladylike one-pieces), and expect to see even more from Comey in the future: “We have so many shoots that we didn’t even show,” she laughed. “We could do an all-swim collection.”
Fans of Comey’s signature accessories — from chunky heels to offbeat satchels — will have much to look forward to for spring, as the designer has also experimented with some of new fabrics here as well. Shimmery metallics, in particular, were among the more eye-catching elements, especially when it came to the shoes. “The metallic is a synethic that I got from Italy for the first time,” said Comey. “We started doing some shoes in Europe, which has allowed me to get all this Spanish and Italian components. In the past, I’d developed only in South America — working with wood and leather, more organic materials. This has allowed me to go kind of crazy and get mirrored leathers and stuff.”
Judging by the number of front row attendants talking about several of the metallic pairs after the show, we’d say Comey is definitely onto something! Take a look at some of the best looks from the collection in our slideshow above.
