New York Fashion Week: Day 2

Fashion Week is back in full force, and there’s a lot to see. Blink (or scroll too fast on Instagram) and you’ll miss the details: tiny bags, tall shoes, feathered hats, leather capes and diamond dog collars. Every day we’ll spotlight one thing we saw on the runways that delighted or mystified us.

The most anticipated runway show of New York Fashion Week was staged by a young designer not well known outside of fashion — a fact that may soon (or soon-ish) no longer be true.

Peter Do has been hailed as fashion’s latest rule breaker, largely because of how he runs his business (with no hurried ambition to build an empire) and how outspoken he has been about his values: “kindness and mutual respect, which still strangely seems rare in fashion,” as he said last year. Despite forming his label in 2018, he had not shown a collection on the runway before this week.

That collection was full of finely tailored suits and oversize button-up shirts, long skirts and slinky trench coats, and huge low-slung leather bags. But just glancing at a slide show of looks won’t reveal one of Mr. Do’s most elegant (a word used almost automatically when people describe his work) runway touches: a hole-shaped cutout on the back of a long dark khaki coat.

What makes a cutout elegant? It’s the shape, for one: an oval stretching vertically from the shoulder blades down to the sacrum. It’s the juxtaposition of its curves with the coat’s precise lines. On Wednesday, a runway model wore the coat as part of a monochromatic look, layered on top of a suit, so that the sinuous cutout revealed the suit jacket’s sharp center back seam.

It’s also the practicality of such a hole on such a heavy coat: the sensation that comes from just looking at it, knowing exactly what it would feel like to wear it on a chilly but sunny day, letting cold breeze hit a warm back.