Fay Fall 2018 Ready-To-Wear....Fashionweekly..On Fow24news.com

How pleasant to walk into a presentation with low-to-no expectations and walk out thinking it was pretty damn awesome. ....
Having not quite processed that Arthur Arbesser has come on board to design for Diego Della Valle’s heritage Italo-prep outerwear brand—and having ambivalently endured quite a few past Fay iterations—it was a delight to see a showroom packed with clever but straightforward pieces.

Arbesser’s own creative process is complicated, but here he was liberated to serve the client. “There is no point in trying too hard,” he said. “I just thought, Make it a bit more fun, a bit [cooler], but keep it very wearable.”

The idea was to make clothes to travel in, so it was hardly rocket science. Models pretended to speak into a bank of old-school coin-operated telephones, or embark and then disembark a huge cut-out of a train, a plane, and a moving staircase. Fay’s trademark metal fastening was attached to an appealing range of outerwear that ran from Barbour-touched waxed cotton country jackets to fisherman’s oilskin to a vinyl-coated check work coat. The Virginia coat was tweaked via fabrication upgrade to a leather collar and technical jersey, as well as a slight lengthening. There was just a hint of repressed kink in a black vinyl wide-waist, pleated, mid-length skirt worn with a metal-finish shirt under one waxed cotton coat, but, on the whole, this was an exercise in pragmatically stylish wholesomeness.

Menswear represents about 65 percent of Fay’s sales, Arbesser said, and what he presented here should not deter those established customers. There were many fine pieces, but a narrow one and a half-breasted gray wool topcoat were this window shopper’s picks. Three words I never expected to write, but: Fay’s pretty cool.