NEW YORK, February 2, 2008 – Hearing a designer comment backstage that he began a collection with a complete disregard for the body, as Alexandre Herchcovitch did after his show, is certainly odd. Instead, the Brazilian downtown darling cited mathematics—geometry, specifically—as the driving force behind his Fall lineup.

Thankfully, those claims of utter disregard hadn't entirely been borne out on the runway. Though Herchcovitch worked heavily with standaway architectural shapes that had a certain sixties futurism and boxy menswear-inflected tailoring, he maintained a sense of the female form, nipping in the waist of a bubble-skirted dress here or leaving a wool jumpsuit sleeveless there. That sense was more prominent in softly constructed pieces like silk dresses and T-shirts, some pieced together in triangular and rectangular blocks of black fabric and, later, in colors and patterns that underlined the designer's Euclidean motif.

While the playing out of his ideas on the runway was interesting and will easily sate Herchcovitch aficionados, the moment of full realization never seemed to arrive. Herchcovitch's vision is, as ever, an engaging one to have in New York, but Fall's show lacked the clarity of seasons past.

– Meenal Mistry