a cut above; David Szeto sharpens his act with some of the snappiest looks around.

Byline: Mark Holgate

This took more than 20 fittings to get right," says David Szeto, holding up a cream dress strewn with a shoal of brick-red lobsters. "I'm always looking for new ways to construct clothes. I once spent a year trying to come up with a new way of cutting the sleeve of a jacket." A comment like that can be a bit dispiriting: It smacks of the young designer in single-minded pursuit of art, driven to design clothes that are conceptually brilliant-but, alas, completely unwearable.

But that charge, as it turns out, can't be leveled at

Szeto. The Vancouver-born, Paris-based designer might spend weeks and months trying to get the drape of a dress just so, or the line of a lapel exactly right, but the end result is always elegant, effortless, and-deep sigh of relief-easy to wear. Szeto's fall collection is based on his philosophy of "using complex cutting techniques to make clothes that are really simple."

Simple in Szeto's eyes, anyway. It's probably not the first word that springs to most minds when a customer beholds an otherwise classic trench whose collar flips up to reveal a secret spray of silk roses nestling underneath, or a delicate lace top adorned with four strings of pearls. Yet these design flourishes aren't simply extravagance. They are functional; they are extravagances that work: The rosebuds help the collar stay up, framing the face; the elasticized strands of pearls act as the neckline of the top, ...