http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/fashion/new-york-fashion-week-coach-rodarte-tory-burch.html 2016-09-14 15:37:50 Acting Out at Coach, Rodarte and Tory Burch The fashion week cast included Brandon Maxwell and Vera Wang. === Maybe it’s the influence of the But all of a sudden, fashion week seems populated by characters. Not the peacocks Defined by their costumes, those personas are easy to identify. And, perhaps the thinking goes, to identify with. If, on occasion, the looks are oversimplified. Why depend on someone else to invent the character of Cookie Lyon and make her an icon, after all, when you can magic her up on your own? Or at least a wardrobe to suit a type. For Stuart Vevers, creative director of His being the newly christened “Bobcat Rebels,” as displayed on the back of studded and fringed leather biker jackets paired with sweet, sheer lace-trimmed floral dresses and romper-stomper shoes with giant spiked platforms. The studs also appeared on mini-handbags encrusted in badges and charms and often dangling chains (every outfit had one, and every one was a little different), and extralong leather fringes forming a scrim atop the rose prints and worn, occasionally, under Elvis tees. It’s one way to go, anyway. Another was on display at Maybe you know her. She might hang out, sometimes, with It’s certainly easier to recognize, and relate to — Glamour! Seduction! Repartee! — than the disenchanted Victorian poet trapped in the age of athleisure and longing for the days of Keats who was in the mind (or so it seemed) of Hers was a convoluted narrative, despite being conceived in black and white, though no more so than the clothes that framed it: tailored wool jackets cut into corsets and down off the shoulder (the better to expose the cotton tank top beneath), with sleeves curved into bells and stretched unnaturally long, atop matching tailored trousers lopped into shorts with a peplum on top, or sheer shirred skirts left trailing on the ground. It wasn’t so much multilayered as obscure, unlike the gang of Janis Joplin fairy princesses at As it happens, Rodarte’s designers, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, recently finished directing their first feature film (they also wrote it), and, according to Laura, “When you start using a different creative muscle, it pushes the rest even further.” So perhaps it shouldn’t really be a surprise that they were thinking about the ways in which we convey character through clothes. But the dramatis personae — and the rest of this fashion week cast — do raise the question of what happens if you don’t want to dress for the proscenium every morning? Even though, yes, all the world’s a stage, etc., etc., it can be an exhausting proposition to transform your closet into the costume department of your own personal production company. For that, there is A resolute minimalist in the mode of the American artist Robert Ryman, Mr. Rodriguez hews to the belief that clothes are the backdrop to the woman, not her cartoon avatar. This season he took the idea even further, elongating linen vests into dresses, scrunching silk knits around the torso, and dropping white silk T-shirt tops into trains at the back atop black wool pants. The only decoration came from a black top bristling with a techno fringe and a series of metal SpaghettiO-like rings glimmering from a steel-toned silk satin slip dress. In those clothes, there is only one person you can be: yourself.