The Etro woman is known for her wanderlust. For spring, she sojourned through the Pacific Coast region, starting in fun-in-the-sun, sports-minded California, continuing on through “postcard perfect” Hawaii and finishing in history-and-denim-rich Japan. It was a busy trip.
Backstage before her show, called “Pacific Zen,” Veronica Etro said she sought to imbue her intrepid traveler with “this balance between the mindfulness, the spiritual and the more physical thing, as if she’s balancing the two.”
“The more physical thing” — got it. These days, fashion hearts sports, and Etro punctuated her interest there by casting two real-life surfer girls: world top-10 ranked Victoria Vergara and Maribel Koucke — both gorgeous; Vergara a brand ambassador for Reef. But telegraphing spiritually via clothes? Fashion convention swings if not toward full-on monasticism, then at least visual calm, which on this journey was in short supply.
Much else was going on in a lineup in which specific points of inspiration blurred; Etro noted that a rendering of a Hawaiian tropical sunset might look like a Japanese landscape, or Matisse-inspired cutouts could in fact be Asian calligraphy. These motifs worked in concert with ikats, florals, bandana prints and the house paisleys, all in a broad-based palette infused with more bold
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