fashion & accessories

Six months ago in her debut show for the French house Céline, Ms. Philo, a British designer, showed easy, jaunty sportswear. Confronted with the utter logic of doing something beautiful that also jibed with a new climate of modesty, American designers began stripping away a decade’s worth of postmodern significance to reach a plain A-line skirt.

On Wednesday, Phillip Lim, an engine of affordable fashion, seemed to imbibe the spirit of Bonnie Cashin and Jenny Cavalieri, the “Love Story” heroine. The adept collection included ponchos and toggle coats, white cotton shirts based on a cape, and fuzzy wool checked shorts and cute suspendered skirts with leather binding.

A year after Reed Krakoff, the president and creative director of Coach, announced plans for a label of his own, his first collection featured oversize crew neck sweaters, long flap-pocket wrap skirts and a sleeveless coat in loden wool, and wide-leg trousers in moleskin or leather.

It was a decent start for Mr. Krakoff — the dry Beuysian textures, the nonaggressive lines were appealing — but you couldn’t help but see similarities to Ms. Philo’s way of dressing, especially those wide trousers. And beyond clean lines and reinterpreting outerwear classics, like the peacoat, you couldn’t identify a specific design imperative.

A separate problem is the heaviness of some of Mr. Krakoff’s coats, which he made central to the collection. In bulk and color (gray, loden, army-blanket green), they looked sludgy. Women in mild or warm parts of the country typically don’t think of coats as outerwear but as a finish to an outfit. In that respect, Mr. Krakoff’s focus seemed too narrowly trained on his audience of fashion editors and buyers.

The Proenza Schouler designers, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, also simplified their look for fall but in ways that felt original to them and also vigorously sexy. The opening outfits were based around rubber-printed cotton twill pants, tight and crazily splattered, and worn with a cropped boiled-wool jacket with toggles or a chunky Nordic-style sweater over a school-uniform white shirt.

But forget nasty schoolgirls. In their freewheeling take on American classics like the knife-pleated skirt, the varsity letter jacket and the rep tie — the supposed source for wool skirts and cropped jackets in wide stripes of dark green and black — the designers came up with some bold looks. There was certainly nothing tentative about a long-sleeve black fox top with a flared skirt in that stripe. A closing sprint of baby-doll dresses was mainly interesting for their digitized prints in hard tones of blue and green, and degenerated plaids.

From The Row, the label created by Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, emerged an uncomplicated feeling of ease and discretion. Of course, the famous sisters might prefer anonymous-looking clothes. But they also make a clear, fresh statement — those long tapering skirts with a trailing hem that were worn with a corseted sheer blouse or layered camisole. Other simple but inspired looks included an Empire dress in denim-blue python and a wisp of an ivory shift stiffened with a matching corset.

Designers like Sophie Theallet and Georgina Chapman of Marchesa are under different influences. Ms. Chapman’s evening clothes are pure theater, although this season she and her partner Keren Craig did a magisterial turn with 3-D effects (overlapping pinwheels of tulle on a gown) and whispery dresses in tulle and feathers. There’s something of a star’s dressing room in these clothes — the powder-puff colors, the Dietrich tailcoat, the mirror reflected in a silver bugle-beaded gown.

Ms. Theallet, a French designer who lives in Brooklyn, makes clothes that give pleasure rather than seek attention. That’s a rare distinction. She likes the peasant dress and the bias-cut charmeuse shift, but inevitably there’s a feminine come-on — a panel of crinkled chiffon across the rear or a full skirt in lush, seductive color. And she’s a free spirit: a Persian children’s book inspired the velvet border of dresses and skirts.

Perhaps only in the mind of Anna Sui would the American Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century seem so vivid and contemporary. She put on a terrific show the other night, layering those swirling, crafty prints in shades of green, brown and orange, and making all manner of skirts, bib-front dresses and shaggy coats for modern girls.

IT is no secret that President Obama desperately wants Congress to pass legislation to overhaul health care. But last month, when Mr. Obama convened Congressional Democratic leaders at the White House for a marathon negotiating session, another priority intervened.

His 11-year-old daughter, Malia, had a band recital.

Thus did the president of the United States ditch his own health care talks — temporarily, at least — to slip off to Sidwell Friends School for a few hours to listen to Malia play the flute. When the recital was over, he returned to the White House, and everybody went back to work. The talks wrapped up at 1:30 a.m., and if the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi; the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid; or anybody else had anything to say about the delay, they held their tongues.

“There are certain things that are sacrosanct on his schedule — kids’ recitals, soccer games, basketball games, school meetings,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said in an interview the day after the session. “These are circled in red on his calendar, and regardless of what’s going on he’s going to make those. I think that’s part of how he sustains himself through all this.”

When Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, arrived in Washington little more than a year ago, Mrs. Obama promptly declared herself the mom in chief, and mothers across the nation watched as she juggled her duties as first lady with her responsibilities as a mother. But her husband, the president, conducts an unabashed juggling act of his own.

He knocks off work at 6 p.m. each evening to have dinner with his family, and has given his schedulers strict instructions that, if he must have night-time activities, they are to take place after 8 p.m. That includes matters of war; in November, as the commander in chief wrestled with sending more troops to Afghanistan, he called an 8 p.m. meeting of his national security team, in deference to his role as father in chief.

He squeezes in parent-teacher conferences, soccer and basketball games, and broke away from an economics briefing to call his younger daughter, Sasha, on her eighth birthday. (She was in London with her mother.) And when the White House announced that Mr. Obama would be traveling next month to Indonesia and Australia, the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was not shy about confirming that the trip was timed to coincide with the girls’ spring break.

“We spend a lot of time coordinating the girls’ holidays and vacation time,” said Valerie Jarrett, another senior adviser. “It doesn’t just drive Michelle’s schedule, but it drives the president’s as well.”

So far at least, Washington does not seem to have raised any eyebrows. When Mr. Obama told lawmakers why he was leaving the health talks, “We all said, ‘Absolutely, get out of here, go,’ ” said Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, who was there.

Yet even in today’s father-friendly world, Mr. Obama’s balancing act is not risk-free — especially in an economy where so many ordinary Americans are struggling. Critics could accuse him of slacking off when the country is in need. And this city is filled with politicians who have sacrificed their families for their jobs, so Mr. Obama must be careful not to generate resentment among those whose schedules must swing around his own.

“People elect you not to be a good family man, they elect you to fix their problems, and that’s the cold-hearted reality of it,” said John Feehery, a Republican political strategist. “And all those folks on the Hill, they’ve left all their families at home; they don’t have the luxury of skipping back home in the middle of the meeting to catch their daughter’s recital.”

In a sense, the 48-year-old president is reflecting attitudinal changes about fatherhood that are typical of men in his generation, said Ellen Galinsky, the president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research organization. Ms. Galinsky says men, now more than women, feel caught between work and parenthood; her surveys show that 59 percent of men report experiencing some or a lot of work/life conflict, up from 35 percent in 1977.

Yet while Mr. Obama’s advisers like to think he is setting an example for fathers everywhere, he does, in fact, have more flexibility than most — he is, after all, the boss. Because he gets to “live over the store,” as he often says, he doesn’t have the stress of making that mad dash for the subway to get home in time to relieve the baby sitter. At home, he never has to fix the leaky faucet or take out the trash. And if he needs to go back to the office to finish up work late at night, all he has to do is walk downstairs.

As Ms. Jarrett said, “He doesn’t have to rush here, because everything is the way he likes it to be.”

Still, Ms. Galinsky argues, that does not diminish the significance of the president’s choices. “You could argue on one hand that he has a lot more autonomy than most men, and that is absolutely 100 percent true,” she said. “But on the other hand, he’s got a lot more responsibility on his shoulders than most men.”

And Mr. Obama has had to give up a few things as well. When he lived in Chicago, he enjoyed driving Malia and Sasha to school; his huge entourage now makes that impractical. “Quite frankly, they don’t want him to,” Michelle Obama said of the girls in an interview last week with Larry King on CNN. “They think his motorcade is a complete embarrassment.”

The cause was apparently suicide, though Mr. Filipowski said Mr. McQueen’s family had not yet made a statement about the cause.

Though he apprenticed on Savile Row, Mr. McQueen, thumbed his nose at the conventions of English style by staging lavish runway productions that included clothes made with animal bones and models made to look as if they were patients in a mental ward or participants in a life-sized chess match. Yet he was a tailor of the highest order, making impeccably shaped suits that were also surprisingly commercial.

Mr. McQueen’s troubled personal life was often the subject of concern among his colleagues and close friends. He was deeply affected when Isabella Blow, the eccentric stylist who discovered and championed him, committed suicide in 2007, and he was said to be devastated by the death of his mother on Feb. 2.

As news of Mr. McQueen’s death rippled through the tents of Bryant Park, where the fashion world was gathered Thursday on the first day of the New York collections, there was shock at the loss of a designer of outsize talents, perhaps even genius.

“McQueen was probably the best woman’s tailor in the world,” said Steven Cox, one of two designers of the Duckie Brown label. He was also, “a working-class bloke,” Mr. Cox said, and one whose renegade instinct manifested itself early on, when he stitched an antiroyalist imprecation into a suit sewn for the Prince of Wales.

“Show after show after show, he amazed us all,” Mr. Cox said. “You think about him and you think, I am not worthy.”

For the hairdresser Eugene Souleiman, who had worked with Mr. McQueen from the earliest days of his career, he was a designer driven by instinct, emotionally fickle and so single-minded in pursuit of his vision that he routinely conducted five preliminary fittings for every fashion show, where most designers settle for one.

“You’d get together with Lee for the first fitting and you’d discuss everything and settle everything, his ideas for the collection,” said Mr. Souleiman, referring to the designer by his nickname. “You’d go up for the next fitting and find the whole collection had changed.”

Mr. McQueen was the youngest of six children and the son of a London taxi driver, who survives him. He left school at 16 to apprentice at Anderson & Sheppard and then Gieves & Hawkes, two of the most revered English tailors. He worked briefly in Italy before returning to London to pursue a master’s degree from the Central St. Martins design college, where Ms. Blow discovered his work and bought his entire thesis collection. His first shows in London, in dark underground places, were received as a break from the traditional luxury collections being shown elsewhere in Europe.

For five years, until 2001, he also was the designer of the couture label Givenchy, where he turned the classic French house on its head, often drawing the ire of longtime fans of a label known for its elegant black dresses. He offended several French journalists by calling Hubert de Givenchy’s past work “irrelevant.” That year, he sold his own label to the Gucci Group — a rival of Givenchy’s parent company, LVMH — following several conflicts with his label’s management.

During Mr. McQueen’s early days in London, his collections often made audiences uncomfortable, as when he referenced the ravaging of Scotland by England by showing brutalized women in a collection called “Highland Rape.” But since he began showing his collections in Paris in 2001, he became more widely respected for designs that were seen as commentary on the often surreal, and self-referential, world of fashion.