Over the course of only a few seasons, Kimberly Ovitz has distilled the look of her line to a few key elements: a palette of neutrals, silhouettes clean and geometric, equestrian-inspired details, and an emphasis on draped jerseys and knits that gives her collections a quality of surprising coziness. That's not a bad formula for a designer, especially one as punctilious about material and cut as Kimberly Ovitz is, reinterpreting her themes every season through the prism of art and her own keen sense of the moment.
This season, Kimberly Ovitz's prism was the square, a form she says she reconsidered after viewing the exhibition On the Square at the Pace Gallery. "I was interested in the ways artists as varied as Sol LeWitt and Louise Nevelson used the form of the square to create order out of chaos," Kimberly Ovitz explained at her presentation at MAC + Milk this week. "It seemed like an interesting idea to apply that to clothes."
Kimberly Ovitz applied the idea quite directly, cutting cloth into large squares and then draping it into loose, nearly floor-length cardigans, and applying patterns of squares to a body-hugging minidress reminiscent of one her early best-sellers. "It's a commercial piece," she acknowledged cheerfully. Elsewhere, the square got stretched into a rectangle and repeated as cutouts on a leather vest, insets on leggings, and as tiered horizontal pleats on a pencil-skirted dress. The looks will be snapped up by retailers, and that's a credit to Ovitz, too—she has an impressive ability to take the conceptual and interpret it in an accessible way. Even so, one hungers to see a little more madness work its way into the designer's disciplined method. Previous collections have had more textural variety, which might have been welcome here. Ovitz has yet to really incorporate print into her collections. She clearly has the intellect and the design chops to address herself to that challenge, so it's a compliment when we say: We hope she tries.
Jx
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