Carolina Herrera

NEW YORK, September 18, 2002
By Janet Ozzard
In a testament to Carolina Herrera’s finely tuned sense of balance, her spring show contained equal measures of youthful nerve and sophisticated maturity.

Though Herrera's clothes never scream "trendy," she knows how to drop in an up-to-the-minute reference to keep things fresh. With workwear all the rage, she added subtle details like D-rings and tab pockets and showed a slim-cut safari jacket atop a fluttery paisley chiffon skirt. Charmeuse is turning up on a lot of runways; Herrera used it sparingly but to good effect in long, cool dresses of vivid green and aquatic blue. Her butter-soft pink leather suit, with its knee-length skirt and patch pockets piped in brown, was luxuriously proper without being hard-edged. Elsewhere, the designer added romantic volume to her curve-hugging jersey dresses with a classic poet's sleeve, cut on an angle. And she gave that standard voluminous ball skirt a frisky new attitude simply by sitting it on the model's hips and pairing it with a crisp, sheer organza top.

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