Newcomer Ellinor Malmgren’s aesthetic often gets called a certain 4-letter word typical of fashion designers who privilege risk over playing it safe: bold. The word seems appropriate enough given the types of materials Malmgren selects for her pieces, like stretch-infused leather and razor-thin metal –– and the very exacting color palette she insists they be (think deep Prussian blue, stark charcoal, and matte gold); if you factor in the extravagant silhouettes taking shape from her imagination, the word seems practically tailor-made.
     The result of such “bold” thinking is a strangely-alluring debut collection that reads equal parts confident and mysterious, slightly futuristic – with a healthy subversive streak hell-bent on dismissing the standard notion of hourglass femininity – rather than yielding to it. Jackets with distorted shoulders and hip pockets wide like hula hoops aren’t exactly synonymous with ladylike style; here, they possess a strong appeal in spite of this (or perhaps because of it). Effortless comes in with what’s intentionally left out: ornamentation. It’s not that detail doesn’t interest Malmgren (her cage-like metal cuffs and neck pieces offer proof); it’s simply that communicating her point of view comes at its most natural when relayed through form rather than content.

It takes something special to get fashion’s more jaded tongues to start wagging and Uma Wang has it. The designer, who emerged seemingly from the shadows this season with a near-visionary collection of directional knit pieces, many by hand, has even “seen-it-all” industry-insiders a little stunned – and a lot excited. She also has them fooled, as this is no newcomer to the fashion scene. Wang put in 10 years designing clothes for various Chinese labels before launching her own in 2005, and with a few key dots connected along the way, seems now on an unstoppable trajectory toward “overnight success” – 15 years in the making. One such “dot” that connected was when Anna Wintour, Vogue’s legendary editor in chief, met up with Wang during her visit to China last November. When arguably the most powerful woman in fashion comes knocking, you must be doing something right.
     Wang studied her craft at China Textile University in Shanghai, and London’s Central Saint Martins, respectively, but her real education came when an early employer sent her to “a knitting factory”, as she calls it, to learn the ins & outs of the knitwear trade through a rigorous, almost labor camp-like experience. When I ask her to elaborate, she reveals “I was living in the factory for a while. It wasn’t a very nice place and working long hours every day..”, but immediately follows the recollection with a statement of gratitude: “When I look back, this was one of the most important periods in my life and I treasure it.”

It’s said that only two things in life are certain: death and taxes. And, if you’re a fashion designer, there’s a third: chaos. Chaos that begins right after you take a bow for your latest collection –– because now, you have to start from scratch –– and do it all over again. It’s this allegiance to the industry’s rule book, which dismisses a designer’s creations every six months in favor of something/anything new, that keeps the chaos rolling in as predictably as most collections are rolled out.

On the opposite end of that arc is where you’ll find Mariavittoria Sargentini, the Perugia-based designer behind minimalist’s dream label, Marvielab, deviating from the status quo by following a very different set of rules: her own. First rule: Take your time. Rather than creating 4 separate collections a year (designing both men’s and women’s means two for each), Sargentini channels her energy into producing pieces for 5 distinct categories, which she calls “projects”. Because the projects are kept ongoing rather than seasonal, it allows her work to evolve over time –– rather than a ticking clock. The beauty of such evolution, unhurried, is that it leaves little room to get distracted by the trend du jour – a pitfall even the most authentic designer can fall in to.

If I could assign fashion a “$64,000 question”, it would probably revolve around the age-old debate of whether to share the excitement of a new discovery with everyone in your contacts list–or keep it safely tucked under your hat for as long as humanly possible. In no area does this temptation to “plead the Fifth” seem greater than accessories– where the quest to find a statement-making bag that will keep its cool long after the latest “it” bag has said its goodbyes is still considered a challenge.

Lucky for us, Ria and Yiouri Augousti, the husband-and-wife team better known as R&Y Augousti, are up for the task. If the label doesn’t ring a fashion bell, that’s because the line’s focus has been rooted in small furniture and home accessories design since launching in Paris in 1990. Influenced heavily by their love of the Art Deco era–a period known for taking creative carte blanche in using rare and extravagant materials–the couple adopted a similar sensibility, using exotic skins and shells to create striking pieces with a distinctly “modern vintage” flavor, as they call it.

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says “an accidental meeting is more pleasant than a planned one.” In fashion-speak, this paradox in logic simply means that sometimes the last thing you intended to happen can turn out to be quite a welcome surprise. Such is the revelation being made by emerging niche clothing label, InAisce (pronounced “en ah-skuh”; in Gaelic, it means “in vain”), which has been growing an impressive army of female devotees –– despite the fact the line was conceived for men. I recently caught up with Jona, the enigmatic designer behind InAisce, at his busy Brooklyn studio to find out what, exactly, all the fuss was about –– and to try some of it on for size.
      I arrive to find Jona cutting muslin pattern samples by hand. Soft-spoken, but direct, he’s layered in pieces from his own collection, including black twisted-seam pants which are molded to his legs, and dark military-ish boots that play with the illusion of being dusted in snow. That’s the first thing you notice. The second, are the rows of quietly subversive garments hanging along old overhead ropes –– the sartorial equivalent of being caught in a beautiful, dark storm. Having just helped a flustered intern re-thread an uncooperative serging machine, a game of musical chairs begins as he whips around the room. The continual left-right-left hopping from industrial sewing machine to monstrous pattern-cutting table is not unlike watching a tennis match –– albeit played with scissors instead of racquets.

There’s nothing like sharing a NYC sidewalk with a swell-headed poodle sporting fancier accessories and a better haircut than you to realize stereotypes exist around every corner (or in fashion’s case, around every closet). Example: if I said “cardigan”, what’s the first word that might pop into your head? Classic? Conservative? Perhaps.. boring? Luckily, exceptions to the rule also exist.
     Enter Sacai–the small Japanese label more intent on breaking with tradition than following it. Chitose Abe, the one-woman show behind Sacai, has been quiet at work crafting her caliber of knit and tailored separates that are anything but. Before launching her collection in 1999, Abe cut her teeth at the very top of fashion’s food chain, designing knitwear for Comme des Garcons and Junya Watanabe, respectively, for 8 years. As such, “classic” might as well be a four-letter word, while “whimsical” and “avant-garde” are standard issue in describing Sacai’s aesthetic.
     You’ll see things like delicate flounces of satin or chiffon – Abe’s go-to finishing fabrics – set into seams or added to hemlines to create an unexpected burst of volume, or detachable cuffs and collars in boldly contrasting textures that shouldn’t work together, but always do. Some pieces are even fully reversible, allowing the wearer to change up their entire look without ever having to change their clothes.