Rue du Mail

PARIS, October 5, 2007
By Nicole Phelps
Martine Sitbon's Rue du Mail is on the fast track. Just one season after launching her new label, she opened her first store in Paris this week. And with her second collection, Sitbon put significant distance between herself and her former identity as a designer of moody, romantic things. For Spring, she seemed to be interested in inserting herself somewhere along the techno/hip/sporty continuum, a place where Marni's Consuelo Castiglioni has been known to play.

What that entailed was parkas over slipdresses, an accumulation of waistless and weightless shifts, and a closing series of high-shine graphic-print dresses that looked like ponchos with their sides spliced and their seams resewn at sharp angles. Sitbon has always had an eye for color, and the hues came on strong today: orchid, turquoise, orange, chartreuse, peach. And she hasn't abandoned her former inclinations altogether. Some of her dresses were embellished with swirling insets of micropleats at the bodice; others were decorated with matte white sequins around the neckline. But this did feel like a departure from her Fall debut, which leaned more artsy. It will be interesting to see which approach sticks.