MILAN, Italy -- Mario Valentino made leather light and airy for hot weather and Fendi produced mini suits of denim Monday in their spring-summer ready-to-wear collections.
Both designers went for short skirts in a big way with the Fendi sisters' Paris-based designer, Karl Lagerfeld, showing tight tube skirts that stopped at mid-thigh.
Valentino, a Neopolitan who once designed shoes for I. Miller in America, is as inventive with leather as anyone in Italy. And his latest collection combines technology with the best design since Gianni Versace took over from Giorgio Armani as the Valentino stylist three years ago.
The secret this season is perforation.
Closely perforated suede becomes not only light but sheer. Rows of perforation make soft white Nappa leather cardigans look like cable-knit sweaters. Black or blue leather is braided through perforation for trim.
Valentino produced above-the-knee skirts that flared below the hips, short straight skirts and loose pants that stopped two inches above the ankle. They came in pale colors like sandy beige and most were paired with long boxy jackets.
But he also showed knee-length tent dresses in powder or sky blue and low-calf-length dresses in rosy shades of suede with high empire waists.
His dressier suits were of black Nappa with white piping and welting. He also showed white Nappa shifts with bare strap tops trimmed with woven strips of silvery leather and worn with silver stockings and flat silver ballet slippers.
Lagerfeld, who also designs the Chanel line and another in his own name in Paris, never lacks for new ideas.
His newest ideas include a sunny print based on Kandinsky paintings. He uses the print for short tent-like chiffon dresses with hemlines that curve up in the front to reveal underskirts of black with big white polka dots.
Other ideas have to do with jeans, some deriving from the all-denim costumes Fendi provided last month for a production of the opera 'Carmen' at Verona's Arena Theater.
A suit of pewter gray denim could become a summer classic for women who have the legs to wear the straight mid-thigh skirt, which comes with a long fitted jacket.
For evening there is a spectacular long 'Carmen' dress in tiers of black denim worn with a long loose duster of gray and white pin-striped cotton.
