Ungaro Manages To Produce Ugly Clothes Without Any Help From Lindsay

Lindsay may be out at Ungaro, but a very Lohan aesthetic of short, bright, tight dresses — a style kindly described as “flirty” — dominated the collection. Does Estrella Archs have the vision to hold the house together?

Magic 8 Ball says: Doubtful.

There’s almost nothing wrong with a dress like this, or even a collection of dresses like this, technically speaking — but it is terribly boring. There is nothing new about these silhouettes, nothing original in the treatment of these fabrics, and nothing that betrays any consideration of a theme or an idea on the part of their designer. The collection has a strange sense of purposelessness.

So there were no heart-shaped pasties, but I’m not here to thank Asim Abdullah for small mercies.

The separates weren’t much better than the dresses.

Proportions seem off.

And Archs’ sense of color is seriously challenging.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with a nice blazer slung over a party dress, or in this case, a softly draping polka-dotted skirt and top. I wear blazers, you probably wear blazers; we all pretty much like blazers. But we don’t typically expect a Paris fashion house to parrot a look that was made trite and formulaic by the high street in 2007.

And don’t even get me started on the polka-dot chiffon jumpsuit.

In fact, if polka dots are the closest thing your grab-bag of a collection has to a unifying theme, that might be a sign of trouble. Just a rule of thumb!

Last year, when “artistic adviser” Lindsay Lohan walked the runway so awkwardly next to “creative director” Estrella Archs, the assumption made by the fashion press was that it was Lohan who had more or less ruined the collection. Lohan, after all, is famous for cocaine and fake tan and a leggings line, whereas Archs has worked for Hussein Chalayan, Miuccia Prada, and Nina Ricci, among others.

This season’s products make me seriously question whether Lohan was slandered.