Stella McCartney

PARIS, March 8, 2010
By Nicole Phelps
Stella McCartney's show began with a fake recording of Tiger Woods' alleged call to his mistress, the one in which he asks her to remove her name from her voicemail because his wife has found her number on his phone. Things ended, as usual, with a Beatles song; this season it was "Mother Nature's Son." They made for perplexing, if thought-provoking, bookends to a collection of daywear that for the most part looked tailor-made not for celebrity groupies but for the smart, powerful businesswoman. It was clean, polished, and chic—three buzzwords of the season.

An unfettered charcoal coat, a notched lapel its only decoration, opened the show, and was followed by streamlined, hip-grazing tunics. When they were worn with narrow, tapering trousers or even stirrup pants, along with pointy kitten heels, they looked like modern, easy answers to the much maligned boardroom pantsuit. Just as often, though, they came without bottoms, which meant that there was a lot of leg on McCartney's runway. Plenty sexy, but perhaps not so user-friendly as a sleeveless coat-dress in camel or her beautifully spare double-breasted white coat.

For evening, the designer experimented with sheer organza overlays (a motif that also turned up at Givenchy). She draped them on top of a one-shoulder iridescent paillette dress or a nude bustier number embroidered with scarlet roses. In other words, they were quite a bit trickier than her fabulously minimal daywear.

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