Marissa Webb doesn’t tend to spend time conjuring inspiration from far-flung sources. Instead, she aims for a steady evolution. “It’s all built around the philosophy of soft and hard, masculine and feminine,” said the designer at her Greenwich Village studio, where she was shooting her Pre-Fall lookbook. (Webb also served as the collection’s de facto stylist, fiddling with trouser cuffs and shirt hems in between takes.) This season, she worked with a mix of textures, including a nubby wool tweed, a woven silk jacquard, and a weighty silk blend with a heavy sheen. Those fabrics were fashioned into pintucked-bib tunics with ties hanging loosely in the front, a softly shaped striped blazer wrapped up almost like a kimono, and a long cargo-pocket vest with an exaggerated stand-up collar. There were some things in the collection that came off as feeling not so fresh—a flippy miniskirt, for instance. Webb’s vision is certainly clearest when she bucks the trends. Cutouts on a tweed blazer’s hemline or the pitched seams of a blouse that curved just so offered unexpected twists to traditional silhouettes.
—Lauren Sherman, Style.com
