Swipe through the Vogue Runway app, and you’ll notice there are not two but four seasons happening at once: Menswear, Resort, some early-bird Spring collections, and now Couture. (And yes, keeping track of it all is as head-spinning as it sounds, thank you very much!) Then there’s the season designers are promoting now that the clothes are actually hitting stores: Pre-Fall, or “high summer” as some prefer to call it. Unlike the stuff we’ve been seeing on the runways this month, Pre-Fall’s clothes tend to be of the breezy, uncomplicated variety—the kind of stuff you want to wear on a balmy 90-degree afternoon. That straightforward ease and no-brainer wearability are where Arjé’s Bessie and Oliver Corral really shine, so the see-now-buy-now paradigm works well for them. Their new linen suits, poplin shirtdresses, and georgette blouses aren’t items you need six months to screenshot and pine after; they’re pieces you rush to scoop up on the first day of summer, with zero chance of buyer’s remorse. (In fact, the Corrals are so adept at designing the stuff women actually want to buy that they don’t even sample their collections: They produce full runs, then sell them to stores and in their shop accordingly.)
Pre-Fall, which just became available in the label’s Wooster Street store and on Net-a-Porter, includes subtle twists on Arjé classics: Their silk button-downs come with crochet trim, for instance, and they spun their double-breasted suits in a luminous linen-silk blend. There is genuine newness, too: The flowy silk dresses are the most “conventionally” feminine pieces the couple has designed (nearly everything is intended to be unisex), and for a brand that tends to avoid prints, the rack of striped cotton and linen pieces is a surprise. The warm palette of beige, sand, blush, and brick red lends a vaguely Mediterranean vibe to all of those natural materials, and Bessie confirmed they’d been thinking about iconic films set on the Italian coast, namely The Talented Mr. Ripley (which turns 20 this year) and Call Me By Your Name (destined to be referenced for just as long). While the former takes place in the ’50s and the latter is a vision of the early ’80s, it’s easy to picture characters from both films wearing the linen button-downs and slim trousers—both appropriately rumpled, with the sleeves and cuffs rolled up just so.
