Spring In Their Step.(Devi Kroell and Joseph Altuzarra)

Byline: editor: Sally Singer

Mark Holgate meets two New York talents who made sure-footed debuts with their 2009 collections.

"There is nothing in the collection strictly for evening. woman can interpret it in her own way"

devi kroell

When I first started doing my big, slouchy python bags," says Devi Kroell, "it was the right moment to do them. And I am now doing clothes because it feels like the right moment to do that. I just couldn't find anything I wanted to wear." It certainly looks like Kroell's knack for perfect timingand her ability to project her own desires about what she wants to put ononce again hasn't let her down. Kroell's bagscapacious, shoulder-slung totes in lustrous, durable snakeskinstruck a chord because they were so antiIt bag; their anonymity allowed them to fuse seamlessly with their owners' sense of style, while the quality offered the reassurance that they'd stick around for years. Not so different, then, from Kroell's first collection, which pulls off that decidedly difficult trick of being both current (the new slim yet soft pant, which gently tapers toward the ankle) and eternal (a neat collarless jacket, devoid of fuss and fastenings, that looks like it has a good decade's worth of wear in it).

When Kroell was working on the collection, she was thinking about the following: being European (she's Austrian) in New York. So she was striving for a combination of Old World craft and New World modernity, and day, day, and yet more day. "There is nothing in the collection strictly for evening," Kroell says, "though a woman can interpret it in her own way." So the washed-duchesse-satin dress, with its substantial straps, dropped waist, and gently voluminous skirt, would work as well with her sculptural Deco heels as it would with gilded snakeskin thong sandals. And she hasn't forgotten that her collection makes a great backdrop for her accessories. "They're so lush and exuberant," Kroell says, laughing, "that the clothes could really only be architectural and precise."

joseph altuzarra