It would be tempting to look with bemusement on Karen Walker's latest collectsion, what with its rocket-ship prints so redolent of The Jetsons.; How sweet, you might think; remember when people in the sixties looked at the stars and thought, We'll live there one day! And further: Suckers. We're more cynical now. Except… Coincidentally, Walker's space-race collectsion arrives at a moment when the landing of the Mars Rover has restored a little of our collectsive galactic wonder. And so the optimistic tone here felt right and relevant. Though Walker laced the collectsion with Kennedy-era references—a Peter Pan collar, a short belted shift, a little angora—the clothes never felt vintage-y. She has a knack for the offbeat that kept the clothes modern. Often that was down to her proportions—oddly cropped pants, say, or a slouchy chiffon blouse with low-slung gathers. And even more frequently, Walker updated the clothes with pattern—intarsias and prints of exaggerated dots, and white damask covered in circles. (Her pebbled jacquard, meanwhile, called to mind another Hanna-Barbera classic: The Flintstones.) The palette, too, was modernizing, a quirky mix of sherbet tones, tan, bleach white, and metallic rust. Long story short, this was a sugary collectsion, with some snap to it.
