Sophia Kokosalaki

PARIS, October 6, 2005
By Sarah Mower
Sophia Kokosalaki's spring collection, particularly the first passage, was a personal best from a young Greek obsessed with conquering the technical and aesthetic challenges of making beautiful draped dresses with a modern sensibility. In a season when flesh-tinted tulle and off-white lace have been flying everywhere, hers were standouts, worked with a self-taught lightness of hand she's achieved through many a hard night's pinning and sewing in her East End London studio.

The trick is to make all the effort look easy, and she injected an off-hand appeal into the delicate layers of a frisée shoulder line, the volume of a caught-up hem and strands of chiffon crafted into a see-through band in a skirt. The experience she's putting into the subtleties of structure and decoration are also paying off. Some of her pieces are weighted with boning invisibly inserted into hems to give a slight bob and bounce in movement. Others come with free-floating garlands of lace casually wound into necklines in place of jewelry.

As a nod to the season's fugitive colors, Kokosalaki chose pale neutrals, optic white, eau de nil, tints of mauve, and her favorite spectrum of dusty pinks. Still, what really matters is the attitude of her most successful dresses. Kokosalaki knows that coming across like you've tried too hard is always uncool. That principle, combined with her growing confidence in execution, adds up to a signature of her own.

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