It’s been a benchmark year for Maryam Nassir Zadeh, what with a sell-out J.Crew collaboration and a pair-up with ba&sh, which together gave her particular brand of downtown cool some major exposure. These “extracircirculars” were anything but a distraction when it came to creating her namesake collection for spring, however: “I felt more clear about what I wanted to make,” she said on a walk-through.
Zadeh was just as sure about the material she wanted to use—it’s a silken spring at MNZ and a colorful one. The designer described her palette as being pulled from “ice cream” (or sorbet) hues like mango, citron, guava, pistachio, and cherry, which she balanced with brown tones, in a sort of equivalent to a milk-chocolate ice cream dip. Moodier hues were mainly used for seriously sexy bikinis, unisex looks in plaid (an unexpected trend this season), and denim.
But the real draw of the collection draw were the light and bright pieces which were layered and combined in interesting ways in the lookbook by the stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington. Among the day-to-day options are the label’s best-selling dance pants, this season with a long swatch of fabric fringe hanging from one hip (a detail that also appears on a skirt). Shirting options that look femme rather than “borrowed from the boys” were inspired by vintage favorites.
A leather bomber in a shade of iridescent pink you might find in a bottle of decorative “pearls” in the baking aisle was paired wit.
