Herrera and Reese spring lines pretty, fresh

NEW YORK CITY - The best artists are those who find inspiration in the seemingly mundane and translate a vision into a beautiful work of art. For fashion designers, artists whose medium is fabric, there’s the added challenge of making the creation practical and wearable.

The pressure to continually prove oneself can push a designer to extremes, resulting in bland safeness or garish overreach. Or, as Carolina Herrera showed here yesterday on the fifth day of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, it can keep a designer fresh and relevant yet still true to the signature style that has made him or her successful.

Carolina Herrera

Tracy Reese

Japanese baskets got Ms. Herrera’s creative juices flowing for her spring 2010 collection. A woven texture was incorporated in daywear and evening looks, on jackets and dresses and skirts and belts in soft natural colors such as amber, caramel and rose. Elegant, pretty and slimming are her trademarks, and the collection was infused with just the right amount of glamour and richness thanks to embroidery and other softly luminous finishes.

She introduced a silhouette not seen elsewhere this week, tea-length dresses fitted at the top and in the bodice and then fanning out in a wide circle that hovers high enough to show off fabulous heels. There was a gorgeous version in the unexpected combination of silver and redwood jacquard and belted with a redwood leather rope, another in a celestial ivory raffia fils coup, another in a sumptuous berry pink jacquard with gold embroidery.

Some other fabulous looks in the five-star collection: an ivory satin toile long-sleeve blouse with matching skirt; a sleeveless quartz striped organza dress; an amber triple-layer chiffon blouse and matching skirt; an amethyst satin toile gown and a caramel fils coup floral top with fully beaded rope weave print shorts that puts a new twist on warm-weather cocktail.

If Tracy Reese can be judged by her designs, then she is a happy woman who believes in romance. Her collections always reflect a sunny, optimistic joi de vivre, and her new spring line is in the same vein.

Like many other designers, she tapped into the trend that combines body-consciousness with relaxed drape, innovative manipulation of fabric, and new variations on color and shine. It could have been a hot mess. But like her inspiration, French Post-Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard, she walked the tightrope without falling.

Ms. Reese went well beyond her usual fare of pretty skirts, dresses and coats. There was a passionfruit trench over little black shorts; a black zebra jersey A-line dress; an ecru draped dress with an exaggerated portrait collar, a wide black belt and pockets; cute little macramé and lace dresses in antiqued chartreuse and a pale yellow-green; and, in new twists on cocktail, a fetching watercolor floral sequin mini slipdress and pants in the same fabric shown with a black burnout camisole and an oversized black cardigan sweater.

The only discordant note was a ruched bubble dress in a periwinkle trailing floral motif. It appeared on the runway like an old mule in a sea of young stallions, jarring in its poor fit and unapologetic ugliness. Its sole redeeming quality was that it succeeded in making one appreciate the beauty of everything before and after it.

Some other looks from the runways

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Donna Karan New York