Costello Tagliapietra's Dramatic Draped Dresses

Costello Tagliapietra’s show was not exactly surprising — but it didn’t need to be. All of Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra’s signature elements were present — draped jersey dresses, lovely satins, and the same air-dyed textiles they’ve been using for five seasons now — and they were all perfectly lovely. Corinne Bailey Rae took in the show from the front row (Miss J. was there, too) wearing a pretty mint-green Costello Tagliapietra dress.

As much as I loved the splotchy, floral-inspired prints, the solid colored dresses were also gorgeous. The collection was very feminine, and sexy, too, with a lot of open-backed dresses, and many of the jersey looks incorporating draping in the bodices and gores for skirts that swished and flared around the models’ calves as they walked the runway.

AirDye is like it sounds; it’s a way of dyeing fabric that doesn’t use water. Like a lot of aspects of the textile industry, traditional dyeing is hardly environmentally friendly: it takes many hundreds of gallons of waste water to dye one bolt of cloth. And the dye chemicals in that waste water can easily poison the local water supply. AirDye is heat-set, and you can do things with it that you can’t do with traditional dyes, like dye the recto and verso sides of a single bolt of fabric two different colors.

I really get a kick out of seeing Ranya Mordanova, left, on the runway.

And I loved that the models’ nails were the color of concrete.