Giambattista Valli Spring 2015

                                  Before I start this review I wanted to say how sad I was to hear that Oscar de la Renta passed away yesterday. He was one of my favorite fashion designers, and even when outfits in his collections weren't to my absolute liking, the beautiful ones were so poignant and blew anything sub par out of the water. He is a classic American designer (not from America, but his career was mostly here), and learning about his career and life is essential to even the most basic fashion education.
                            Look 1 was a favorite; how rarely that happens! It was a cute little short number, in a white, creamy shade with delicate flower buds and black pop art drippy black shapes. 2 reminded me a lot of the dresses from Chanel's recent Texas themed collection. Woven and patterned with little white, black, and patterned leaf shapes. It did have a stiff shape, but the feathers gave it a very light, shell-like look. 4 looked cool all together, but when you don't have the necklace with the giant silver circles, how exciting would the top really be? 5's top was beautiful; it had the same idea as 1's print, but with green buds and white with black outline shapes. Look 6 may have been my most favorite. It combined the drippy shapes from 1 and 5 that I love so much, with the woven dress of 2. The black shapes without flowers made it simply delightful. So modern and just plain elegant.
                         I didn't really understand the fringed looks, especially 8. Fringe taken out of its hippie or cowboy style looks out of place and cheap. 9 had a very Christopher Kane look, with the circle flowers on the skirt. 12's top was torn, or at least it looked like it. Was she subjected to a bear mauling? 15 was very different from previous looks; the top had shapes related to 1's shapes (maybe their cousins?), but this time they were all scattered together, very Jane Miro looking. The skirt had little lilac flowers falling down the skirt. 17's combination of chaos was way, way too much. I don't think the shapes even fit together. 19 didn't help at all, adding fuzzy texture to 17's soup.
                         After these looks we just got a bunch of bad rip offs of Keith Haring style squiggles and just wrong prints, like in 23. It looked like badly combined wall paper. 30's short jacket was a breezy combo of dark blue and white; I loved it, and found it very stylish, but it looked a lot more ''winter'' to me (though it didn't look very warm). Most of it was pretty disappointing after this, but 36's pants were metallic, white, blue, and floral. The shine wasn't too shiny, but certainly not understated. Very chic. The last look, 44, was okay; the flowers were pretty, but it just wasn't exciting. Or terribly original.
                         The first looks of this collection were beautiful, spring, and modern. But this collection was bogged down quite a bit by strange patterns, bad combos, and wrong shapes.