ALICE MCCALL SS 2009, Forms to Look For

Text and Photos by Gaby Greenlee

Alice McCall's Spring 2009 show, "All Are Not Insects", was thematically appropriate to the Spring and Summer seasons and maybe not at all a strange title for evoking notions of feminine form and style. The more successful of her pieces paid attention to structural detail (and easily called to mind the attraction of insect forms) without losing the grasp that actual women would be wearing them and not small arthropods.

Her limited palette and the linear theme in some of the pieces also gave strong emphasis to her designs. Pieces that accentuated the lines of the waist or followed the form of the bust or heightened the shadows cast by shoulder blades were able to say something simple about a woman's form while simultaneously pushing style. Less interesting were some of the garments that were more fluid in form because they didn't seem to say one thing or another about the wearer or about an intention-- though one of the more fluid pieces was of a beautiful white, ethereal, lace-thin material, I was more interested in the fabric than in the piece itself.

Still, a few combinations, like the simple blue skirt paired with a soft, deeply-scooped black top threatened to billow into obsolete, flowy, organic, forms but held on to the structure of the model's body just enough to make it interesting. Ultimately, maybe Alice McCall appeals to young women more when she allows for roomier clothing but I think the strongest current in her collection is the one that tilts away from the more easily digestible shifts and frocks and attempts to rein these in to give accent to a woman's body.