For fall, Steven Alan’s approach started off pragmatic. “We definitely wanted to have an increased penetration of our brand in the store, so the starting point for me was the shirt,” he said at his presentation.
Alan started off by looking at female icons and how they wore their shirts — Patti Smith stood out. “We went into that era and we picked up on a lot of the jewel tones that were prevalent at that time and the texture, like corduroy, paisley prints, pajama plaids and permanent pleating,” he said.
The resulting lineup felt casual yet inspired. As Alan pointed out, the shirts were the prevailing item — ranging from silky pussy bow blouses to a memorable burgundy with black dot pleated peasant top.
Denim was also important, as he offered patched tops and classic jackets as well as non-stretchy relaxed fit bottoms. The denim highlight: a tied robe jacket version. Knits were also noteworthy — rendered in substantial heavy yarns or superfine versions that could almost pass for T-shirts. “A lot of the factories that we were working with to me could be best-in-class in producing what we were going for, that’s very important. A lot of times with collections the

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JOINING THE PACK: Missoni on Tuesday became the latest Italian brand to combine its men’s and women’s shows, with the first coed runway show to be held in September here for the spring 2018 collections.
The show, which will take place on Sept. 23, will mark the 20th anniversary of Angela Missoni’s creative direction. The company will host a celebratory evening event the same day.
Reached by phone, the Missoni company declined to comment further on its decision to combine the two shows.
In making the move, Missoni is following many of its peers. While Gucci, Jil Sander, Etro and Bottega Veneta will show both their men’s and women’s spring 2018 lineups in September, Dsquared2, Damir Doma and Diesel Black Gold will host coed spring shows in June, at Milan Men’s Fashion Week.
Last April, Missoni revealed its men’s wear collaboration with Parisian streetwear brand Pigalle. The men’s wear capsule collection will be available this month exclusively at Colette in Paris, Dover Street Market in Tokyo’s Ginza district and Pigalle stores in Paris and Tokyo.
In March, Missoni Surface Conversion, a project aimed at supporting contemporary artists, presented Kreëmart “Salotto Angela Missoni,” an immersive and intimate exhibit within the brand’s Madison Avenue boutique. The space, which reflected the

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PARTY WITH KARL: Karl Lagerfeld will cohost this year’s Serpentine summer party in London, alongside the Serpentine Galleries’ new chief executive officer Yana Peel and artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist.
The invitation to the party, which is taking place on June 28 at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, features a handwritten note by the designer: “The Summer Party 2017” in smudgy green watercolor crayon.
The Serpentine Gallery has always drawn leading figures of the fashion industry, with previous hosts including Tommy Hilfiger, Christopher Kane, Brioni and the late L’Wren Scott. It draws celebrity figures such as Kate Moss, Thandie Newton and David Furnish.
Each year the party takes place in and around a specially designed pavilion, which then remains open for a series of evening talks and events that are open to the public. The architect Diébédo Francis Kéré has been commissioned to design this year’s pavilion. His design promises to be bold and bring his characteristic sense of light and life to Kensington Gardens.
This is the first time the party will be hosted by Peel since her appointment as the gallery’s new ceo, taking over from Julia Peyton-Jones.
During a talk cohosted with Porter magazine at the gallery, she laid out her vision

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These dresses are not your average cotton frocks. With rich embroideries, ethnic beading or eyelet detailing, they will surely become the go-to wardrobe staple of the season.

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MILAN — Moncler has teamed with Parisian-born artist Jean-Philippe Delhomme to create a series of three postcard-inspired prints.
Inspired by famous international seaside destinations including Venice Beach, Saint-Tropez and Capri, the prints, donned in bright colors, such as yellow, blue and red, decorate some of the key pieces of the brand’s men’s and women’s spring lineups.
The range includes four T-shirt styles, a hooded raincoat, a pair of men’s swim shorts and a shopping bag. Priced from 230 euros, or $250 at current exchange rate, for swimwear, to 995 euros, or $1,083, for the raincoat, the pieces are now available at Moncler flagships, as well as at the brand’s online shop.
Rendered with digital printing technique, the illustrations give the fabrics a 3-D feel fusing technological research with craftsmanship. The range echoes beach lifestyle yet incorporates urban feel, reflecting the spirit of the brand’s spring collection.
 

A piece from Moncler men’s spring collection. 
Courtesy Photo

During his career, Delhomme developed several collaborations with fashion brands and publications, including GQ France and Vogue Japan. In the early Nineties, his advertising campaign for the Barneys New York department store was such a huge success that it appeared on billboards across the United States.
Last Thursday, Moncler released its results

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With summer around the corner, it’s time to brighten up your water-side wardrobe with an array of pastel swimwear. From tangerine one-shoulder bikinis to classic, mint colored one-pieces and Tumblr pink, baby-doll-T two-pieces, there’s a silhouette to suit everyone. Dive right in, these 15 pastel swimsuits are available now.
 

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For the last seven years, most of the 14 Republicans representing parts of California in Congress railed against Obamacare, high corporate taxes and illegal immigration.

But that was mere chatter. So long as a Democrat was president, nothing new was going to happen. And so, even though Obamacare policy holders, illegal immigrants and poor people abound in many of their districts, their talk never cost them much. That could change soon.

For Republican Donald Trump controls the White House today and pushes constantly on those issues. He makes GOP congressional talk more than mere noise. What was empty rhetoric now can become reality. This was never more clear than when all 14 California Republicans voted to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare’s formal name, and replace it with far inferior health insurance.

Example A might be Jeff Denham of Atwater, whose 10th District contains a large Latino populace and about 100,000 persons whose health insurance comes via Obamacare. Denham won re-election last year by 51.7-48.3 percent over Democratic farmer Michael Eggman, the winning margin fully 70 percent below its 2014 level.

In a town hall in his district about two weeks before the Obamacare vote, Denham assured more than 1,000 constituents that “I’m a ‘no’ on the health care bill until it is responsive to my community.”

Turning him around was a last-minute amendment to create high-risk pools for persons with pre-existing conditions and provide $8 billion over five years to subsidize premiums a bit for this type of coverage, whose premiums have always been sky-high. At the same time, the bill takes at least $800 billion from Medicaid (known here as Medi-Cal) over 10 years.

Medi-Cal covers about 300,000 Denham constituents, many among the estimated 24 million persons likely to lose coverage under the Republican plan. Will those people brand him a liar and turn out next year to dump him? No one can predict.

The health care bill passed the House by a narrow 217-213 margin, so if even two California Republicans had voted no, it would have failed. In Denham’s district, no one but him has claimed publicly that the $8 billion amendment (less than $200 million yearly to California) made it “responsive to my community.”

Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco declaimed after the vote, “This vote … is a scar (Republicans) will carry.” But Democrats have been notably ineffective at unseating Denham and other Republicans from similar districts. David Valadao of Hanford is one: His Latino-majority district went for Hillary Clinton by 15 percent last year, but he still won by 9 percent. With many thousands of his constituents likely to lose coverage if the GOP changes become reality, can he survive? A lot depends on Latino turnout, notoriously unreliable. Both Valadao and Santa Clarita’s vulnerable-seeming Steve Knight criticized the Medicaid cuts, which could hurt tens of thousands in their districts, but still voted for them.

The Orange County district of Republican Mimi Walters may also be in play. With fewer Obamacare recipients than many other areas, her district still went for Clinton last year. She ardently backed the GOP changes, celebrating the House vote with Trump at the White House. Will that be political suicide?

Another Rose Garden celebrant was San Diego County’s Darrell Issa, whose vote at almost the last moment may have been decisive. Issa, his fate in question for weeks after last year’s election, survived then by just 1,600 votes. He acted unworried after this vote.

“Today … gives a voice to the victims of Obamacare … a failure from the get-go,” Issa said. But he kept his position secret until the last moment, refusing to reveal it until he actually pulled the lever. Would Issa have voted against the repeal or abstained if his vote had not been crucial for passage? Was he promised something for his vote?

Those questions may go unanswered, but it’s for sure Democrats will use that vote against Issa next year. Uncertain, of course, is whether it will work.

That’s the question about all the Democrats’ loud ventilating over the health care vote. Their talk will only matter if they can make this bill an albatross around Republican necks and oust enough GOPers to retake control of the House.

Thomas D. Elias is a writer in Southern California.

Mandates to local school districts from on high — whether that’s Sacramento or Washington, D.C. — don’t always work out for the best for students and parents.

They can backfire — see No Child Left Behind standards from the George W. Bush era — or inspire some extremely creative accounting on the part of districts in order to reach those goals.

That is currently the case in the efforts of school districts to increase their high school graduation rate under goals set by President Barack Obama. There’s nothing wrong with shooting for more graduates. But as we have noted in this space, districts are cutting standards in order to increase their graduation rate, including calling a D a passing grade and allowing students to take watered-down online classes to make up for classes they failed the first time.

Even those of us not inclined to busybody interference in the decisions made by local California school boards can agree that the best state and federal standards are often ones that deal with students’ physical and mental health. On the vaccination front, for instance, it makes no sense for the common good if individual districts have their own policies allowing parents to opt out — that increases the medical dangers to everyone.

A new bill requiring later secondary school start times in California by state Sen. Anthony Portantino, D-Pasadena, might seem at first blush to be a case of Sacramento overreach. But Portantino — who during his time in the Assembly made creative bills on health care a hallmark of his terms, including one establishing an umbilical blood cord collection program key to future medical advances — comes at this from a strictly biological position.

Research unequivocally shows what every parent (and teen) knows — adolescents are different from the rest of us. They have a different brain chemistry than do younger children and adults, and they require more sleep. You might say that in that case they should simply go to bed earlier in order to rise at 5:30 a.m. to make it to class by 7:30 a.m. or so. But they don’t — in middle and high school they have more homework, more social life, more extracurricular activities, and they go to bed late and get up early.

The movement to start secondary classes no earlier than 8:30 a.m. is making inroads across the country, with Seattle the largest district to implement it district-wide. In a meeting with our editorial board, Portantino said the positive results are clear in such districts: “Grades and test scores go up, and car accidents and drug use go down. So do sports injuries — down 68 percent.”

Portantino knows that some parents argue that the later start time could play havoc with their own commuting needs if they must be at work early — and that frustrates him. “All the arguments against this sensible approach are adult-based,” he says. “And the start times have to be statewide, as otherwise it creates issues with kids in different schools with different extracurricular activities.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a policy statement advising school districts to begin middle and high school classes no later than 8:30 a.m. The medically based arguments for Senate Bill 328 in the name of better adolescent health are hard to refute, and we think it deserves support in the Legislature.

ORANGE COUNTY SOFTBALL TOP 10
(Records through Sunday, May 7)

1. Los Alamitos, 23-3

A win over Fountain Valley on Tuesday and the Griffins are a mere lock for a top-two seed in the Division 1 playoffs.

2. Orange Lutheran, 24-4

The Lancers can claim the outright Trinity League title with a win over No. 4 Mater Dei on Tuesday.

3. Mission Viejo, 20-5

With no regular season games remaining, the Diablos will wait to see their playoff destiny when brackets are released Monday, May 15.

4. Mater Dei, 21-6

A win versus No. 2 Orange Lutheran on Tuesday and the Monarchs earn a share of the Trinity League title and go into the postseason as the league’s No. 1 seed.

5. La Habra, 17-7

Wins over Fullerton and Sunny Hills this week would give the Highlanders the outright Freeway League title.

6. Pacifica, 18-7

The Mariners’ win streak is up to nine games and the last four have come via shutouts.

7. Santa Margarita, 21-5

As the No. 2-ranked team in this week’s CIF-SS Division 2 poll, the Eagles are likely a win versus Rosary away from a top-two seed in the Division 2 bracket.

8. Villa Park, 19-8

Wins against Brea Olinda and El Dorado this week would give the Spartans the North Hills League title and the most wins in school history.

9. Huntington Beach, 16-9

A 2-1 win over Marina last week gave the Oilers the inside track for second place in the Sunset League.

10. Canyon, 17-9

A win over Foothill on Wednesday gives the Comanches the Crestview League title.

Everyone says that Orange County has a housing shortage and that is the reason for high rents and high cost of homes. There has been so much building going on in Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach that it is causing extreme traffic and more accidents than ever before. Just wait until the places on W. 17th/Pomona are built. 17th will be a nightmare to drive, worse than it is now.

The places that are being built are the “live where you work” style, with four stories and tons of stairs. These are not made for older people nor are they made for families. They are made for the young, singletons and how are these young singletons able to afford these places? Seems to me that people are coming to O.C. from other countries, buying vacation homes or buying for their children. The average person who was born and raised in our county cannot afford to buy and are being forced to move because those who are from other states and countries want to be by the beach. Let’s build affordable housing for those who live here already.

— Carrie Berg, Newport Beach

Politics doomed shuttle

Re: “Little Saigon Shuttle shuts amid political backbiting” [News, May 4]: In August, I was a participant in a phone conference with Supervisor Andrew Do and high-level OCTA staff in which I heatedly emphasized that the city would not, under any circumstances, start our own transit authority to hurriedly start this program before the election. I emphasized the certain possibility of failure due to inadequate planning, community outreach and the winter start date, which historically always results in poor ridership performance because of inclement weather and minimal tourist activity.

Hastily moving the project to a pre-election start proved to be a waste of precious Measure M monies, and saddled the city with costs it could ill afford. The city needed this project to be successful to relieve congestion and air pollution in Little Saigon, not to burnish the supervisor’s election credentials.

For the record, Supervisor Do’s office requested that we apply for this grant. Our staff and the OCTA staff performed heroically in the frenzy caused by moving up this project without proper planning. Lastly, Garden Grove correctly declined participation because they had no traffic analysis, an element crucial to the success of any project. The failure of his project lies squarely with Supervisor Do.

— Diana Lee Carey, former councilwoman, Westminster