Greg Armas likes to cast his imaginative net wide. Spring’s ninjas and Shakers gave way to Fall’s Tuareg nomads, cat burglars, and cowboys. And yet season to season his collections maintain a core of simple silhouettes that can be worn many ways. “I want to leave room for people’s personal style,” said Armas, holding up a roomy button-down dress in black Japanese cotton and then another one cinched with a thin string. Undo the string, and it could be worn as a coat.
Armas wants to come up with a sexier word for functionality. In the meantime, he’s using black ribbed turtlenecks and leggings as base layers for those aforementioned dresses and a gray mini sheath, and he has replaced zippers with horizontal Velcro strips so a woman can adjust her gray wool trousers. He brought back wide-leg pants from an earlier collection that can be cinched high on the waist or low around the hips. It would be good to see Armas commit and push beyond the basics, because while the clothes are wearable and can indeed be styled any number of ways, they have started to feel interchangeable.
