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Anna Sui's Doing Just Dandy

Anna Sui's Doing Just Dandy

With a colorful art nouveau cartoon - featuring a red-and-yellow sunrise, cottony white clouds and puffy purple flowers and dragonflies - serving as a backdrop, Anna Sui unveiled a more refined, restrained Fall 2006 collection in the Tents at Bryant Park Wednesday night.

This is not to say Sui did not employ her usual riotous colors or employ multiple reference points in her designs - she did. But she did so while reigning in her natural more-more-more tendencies and focusing primarily on one idea (the modern-day female dandy), so that the viewer never suffered from sensory overload.

As a result, this collection felt more grown up and tightly focused than the designer's past efforts, from the opening look - a sheer navy metallic striped chiffon blouse with knee-length shorts and subtly embellished cowboy boots worn by Naomi Campbell - to a navy blue crushed velvet tassel-trimmed jacket over a striped organza blouse and crushed velvet bell-shaped skirt with pretty geometric appliqué, to a super cool midnight blue jacquard dress with built-in vest and watch fob accessorized with a matching newsboy cap.

When color did come into play - as in an early suite of teal dresses and a middle passage of multi-patterned cinnamon-hued rich hippie looks (read: leopard print pea coat over a printed metallic-trimmed jacquard blouse and windowpane tweed skirt, zigzag striped rust/plum coat tossed on over a circle print multitiered dress, or a fox collared curly lamb coat with cream chiffon blouse and amber striped mohair skirt) - it never felt like too much because Sui stuck to a carefully considered, tone-on-tone palette so the different textures, fabrics and hues complemented, rather than clashed, with one another.

Sui being Sui, there were also a lot of cool-girl cowboy boots, platform shoes and bags (including a super cute leather-trimmed weekender and wheeled carry-on suitcase whose orange tapestry fabric matched that of the coat, skirt and even shoes that they were shown with). Talk about a head-to-toe look!

Our favorite ensemble, however, had to be a black-and-white donegal tweed shift dress bisected with black velvet ribbon studded with gold nailheads, which was worn with beautiful high black passementrie-trimmed boots.

This timeless, handsomely executed look summed up the "less is more" ethos that made this collection a winner.

* Rag & Bone: Geek Chic Charm * Hot! This just in! Photog Frenzy at Betsey Johnson		* Vera Wang Resort: Surreal Sophistication * Jason Wu Resort: French New Wave Refresher