Royal Chic: The Duchess and her Prints

The result can be polite and familiar,as in the embrace of print by Kate Middleton in the run-up to the royal wedding. Or on her North American tour when,as Catherine,Duchess of Cambridge,she wore a frill-collared shirt with graphic motifs under her cowboy hat at a rodeo demonstration in Calgary,Alberta. The “Catherine factor” gave basic summer dresses,always focused on that narrow waist,a fresh feeling. What might once have been dismissed as a take on mom’s household apron was elevated with a pair of wedges to achieve new fashion status. Digital scanning is the great transformer in modernising prints,meaning that a tiny fraction of a flower can be enlarged to cover half of the body. These blow-up patterns make them less about specific floral species and more about cloth drenched in colour.

Geometric patterns have produced an interface of lines and squares. And there is always an opportunity to digitally transform the obvious. Another way that old becomes new again is clear to anyone who has played with colour choices in design software. There is a wealth of possibilities: seemingly unlimited shades of gray and variations on green almost as impressive as nature’s colour trail of leaf to moss to cucumber. With such a palette to work with at the click of a mouse,there are colour options that could barely have been imagined a decade ago.

The scarf print—a historic hallmark of Hermes and for Gianni Versace in his heyday in the 1980s—has become the base for many of the new digitally engineered design effects. The scarf contains and frames a pattern,and that becomes more effective the wilder the print. But how to wear wondrous artistic creations without looking like a poster for contemporary art? As in newsprint,so in fashion,the effect is best when short,sharp and succinct. The more graphic—yet simple—the designs,the easier a print is to wear. The ultimate in stylishness is not a cover-all dress exploding with pattern. But rather a fresh white shirt with patterned skirt—or those playful shorts dresses,as tiny and powerful as their prints.