Costume National Fall 2005 Ready-to-Wear Collection on Style.com: Runway Review

PARIS, March 1, 2005 – Designer Ennio Capasa cited enduring sixties boho icon Marianne Faithfull as a starting point for his Costume National fall show, which had "folk chic" in the details. With its willowy chiffon dresses worn with seventies boots, and romantic Doctor Zhivago Russian coats (accessorized with foxy Cossack hats or oversize fedoras), the collection seemed ripe for Sienna Miller—the latest in an It girl continuum stretching back to Faithfull herself.

Capasa captured the Mitteleuropa flavor of the moment thanks to strict tailoring, embellished with hussar military frogging details and this season's ubiquitous passementerie and crochet embroideries—very much part of his house's handcraft vocabulary. But he wanted a look that was "graphic outside and very fluid inside," so he underscored that shapely tailoring with saucy peasant dresses built around fitted and corseted velvet midriffs, in chiffons that were printed in various different paisleys.

For all its boho credentials, the collection was ultimately geared to a hippie with a very heightened sense of luxe—from the strips of black mink worked into a coat's sleeves to the whorls of golden sequins on the finale's siren sheath gown.

– Hamish Bowles

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