Apart from being totally unnecessary, including in one single collection too many looks can be tricky and easily drive both the designer who created it and its reviewers simply crazy.
It is ofen the case that behind the longer and at times more extravagant shows there are evil market forces together with the strong desire to create a spectacle and the secret and perverse hope the reviewers will get so distracted by the action that they won’t actually pay too much attention to the designs and eventually realise how bad they are.
After all - somebody may argue - there is safety in numbers, so the more looks on the runway, the better.
Praise should be given instead to those designers who, in a sea of confusion and chaos, keep things short and coincise, realising that ordinary people may not have the money to buy an entire collection and may not even have the space where to store it.
Even more praise should be given to those designers who try to empower women using a little bit of clever minimalism rather than coming up with collections full of dresses unwearable by most real women above a certain age. Yeohlee Teng is definitely among such designers.
Still moving from one of her main principles - the one that claims that the geometry of clothes can form shapes capable of lending a wearer power (and how can you disagree with this statement? Try a perfectly cut garment and see how you feel…) -Teng launched her new collection during New York Fashion Week via an informal presentation that featured only seven looks.
Yet this somewhat reduced presentation included more relaxed designs such as a loose black jersey dress (think along the lines of Teng's "one size fits all" principle and you get the idea…), but also an elegant fitted silk faille dress in a dark purple shade that embodied two of the designer's obsessions, geometrical precision and passion for textiles.
Indeed creating perfect patterns means to respect the material you're working with since you avoid superfluous cuts and seams.
Since the early '80s Teng designed her garments from one single piece of cloth, calculating the proportions by eye and hand on the table and throughout the years she perfected her technique.
The designer often claimed she creates for a urban nomad in mind, so she favours versatile and multi-functional clothes, adjectives that could perfectly be used to describe garments such as gabardine skirt-shorts or a mohair wool cape in ombré gradations of green.
You could argue that such clothes privilege the wearer’s comfort and mobility over spectacularity.
But maybe we (reviewers, buyers, consumers...) should try to remember more often that the spectacularity and the sensuality come from the wearer and not from the garment.
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