Taking a page out of Slim Aarons’s playbook of ”photographing attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places” this season designer Georg Lux has decided to travel with Leonard to the sunkissed land of warm summer holidays spent lounging by the pool with a cocktail in hand. The film he has created for his sophomore collection speaks of a world where women dress up even if it’s just to walk from their Italian villa down a few stone steps to its azure blue piscine. After all, good manners are never passé.
Outsized floral prints, both pulled from the house’s extensive archives and newly introduced this season, come in tangy tropical colors of mandarin, pineapple, punch pink and mint green. They are used to create skin baring short dresses that finish in a flourish with a single sleeve of matching organza, slimming liquid jersey trousers, structured coats that end in floating feather cuffs, slender mini skirts and long sleeve gowns that gather in a midriff revealing circle. All of them channeling a late 60s, early 70s relaxed jet set allure.
Summer romance is also the order of the day at Leonard. Chic limpid shirts in a “faded by the sun” effect clematis floral print, worn with a matching crisp white circle skirt, make for an impeccable Croisette promenade ensemble.
While floating tiered chiffon dresses and palazzo pants that caress the skin and sway in the summer breeze are the perfect destination wedding attire. Think Sophia Loren on vacation on the Amalfi coast. Then pair those pants with a matching halter bralette top for the post nuptials seaside cocktails, saunter up to a Leonard attired man and let the festivities begin.
But no glamorous getaway is truly perfect without elegant travel ensembles to get you from the city to the coast. Lux has utilized the updated geometric Leonard logo as a hypnotic print for graphic tailored suiting and matching accessories that harken back to that golden age when getting dressed up to go on a voyage was the order of the day. The designer has also reimagined the circular Leonard symbol into a unique guipure lace motif on dresses and pants that lets the wearer’s skin come out and play.
Most spectacularly as perforated goal medallions linked together to make a show stopping dress that glints in the estate sun, especially when dripping wet from a cooling dip in the pool.