Emanuel Ungaro

For my first most inspirational collection, I've picked one that I thought was unfairly panned.

From the Guardian:

Peter Dundas at Emmanuel Ungaro had what may well have been the worst show of the month but at least it proved useful in reminding people how bad ankle boots, an unfortunate trend this season, look with sequinned mini-dresses.

They misspelled "Emanuel" but we'll let that slide.

I don't deny that some of the stuff he showed was downright awful. As the collection as a whole goes, it was rather hit or miss. But the looks that did work were original and fun and much better than most of the boring stuff other designers were showing. And that's the reason he makes my top dozen-or-so list.

First, I loved the palette he used for the beginning and end of the show that used hightly saturated colors, especially blues and purples.



While the two outfits below were definitely unwearable, I did like how he put mismatching patterns into really interesting combinations. The first one here is held together nicely by his use of complementary colors, and the second with three analogous colors.



I thought this polka-dot dress was just super cute.



Although some of the 80s stuff he did was awful (as mentioned above), a few elements he brought back really worked. The first dress has a fabulous 80s silhouette and print but somehow looks current. The second and third dresses bring back some 80s excess with the sequins but still are wearable because they're in normal, understated shapes. I would love to own the orchid (?) dress.