After winning a large chunk of change from the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, Prabal Gurung decided it only seemed natural to launch a pre-fall collection.“You have to do all four seasons at this point,” he says of his first pre-fall collection, debuting exclusively here on Style.com in this video made during his lookbook shoot with photographer Dan Martensen, who has worked with the likes of i-D, The New York Times, and The Last Magazine. “It’s a huge opportunity to introduce new categories and more sportswear pieces—it’s an incredibly important season.”Here, Gurung’s girls Alana Zimmer, Hanne Gaby Odiele, Kate King, and Ming Xi (all have walked in his shows) model his latest efforts. “With this collection, I developed a particular print that I had taken a picture of. I had this printmaker in London that I was working with and it looks like a kaleidoscope,” Gurung tells Style.com, in between meticulously pintucking Zimmer’s dress and picking out the perfect pair of Linda Farrow shades with his longtime stylist, Tiina Laakkonen, as Rihanna blasts from the stereo in the background. “We worked to develop the image more and more and more. I didn’t want it to have the same floral idea of my Spring collection—if you look, it’s pretty from afar, but up close, it’s a little hard.” The kaleidoscope print appears throughout the collection, on featherweight T-shirts (his first), Lurex and cashmere jacquard knits, and multiple silk wool or silk georgette pieces in rich green and jet black.A pre-fall collection isn’t the only new addition to his growing list of accomplishments—Gurung has been hard at work with his new duties as chief designer for ICB, a label that hasn’t been sold in the States for nearly a decade. “The design integrity, aesthetic, and what I believe in will be the same,” he says of his vision for the new ICB collection. “Obviously I come from the American couture background, but there’s also a side of me that lives in the East Village, you know? It will reflect that a little bit more, but not in an obvious East Village way; this will have more grit.”—Kristin Studeman
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—Kristin Studeman
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For her Fall 2011 Fenton presentation, Dana Lorenz invited guests to her Garment District studio. Not much to look at from the outside, admittedly. But step in and you were in a baroque fantasy. The Fall Fenton line, called Versailles at Midnight, is inspired by the court of Louis XIV, and to properly display it, Lorenz called in a set of Louis Quatorze furniture (on loan from D&D) and a sparkling set of Baccarat crystal. (”It had to look perfect,” she said. “This isn’t a barnyard theme, you know?”) The jewelry lived up to the decor. Scattered throughout were references to gilded and polished interiors: A chain link was a miniature handle found on a porcelain pitcher; a gold bangle was ringed with lion’s feet from a claw-foot tub. Different sections of the collection called to mind different times of day: Midnight offerings came in burnished matte onyx and glittering red stone, reflecting a palatial darkness. An earlier morning hour got acid green jade for a shocking, slightly eighties touch. Lorenz’s creations tend to have a contemporary, and-the-kitchen-sink feel rather than a more classical simplicity, but it was a nice surprise how well the older references worked with her reigning aesthetic. She was searching, she said over sips of Champagne, for “a super hand-crafted feeling. I really want to get back to that, especially with Fenton—everything handmade, everything custom.” That’s a sentiment a baroque queen would surely have appreciated.