Bland: Anything but Boring (Fashion Wire Daily)

New York - Rest assured, not every fashion designer showing during New York Spring 2009 Fashion Week, Sept. 5 - Sept. 12, will cater to the Carrie Bradshaws or "Gossip Girls" of the fashion buying public.

Some, like up-and-coming designer Teddy Willoughby of Bland, who will present his Spring 2009 collection at splashy downtown art gallery Deitch Projects Wednesday, Sept. 10, have a different customer in mind altogether.

"I'm into cool working girls who are doing things," said Willoughby at his studio on Wednesday, Sept. 3, in the midst of making final adjustments to his designs. "Art gallery girls, artists, movers and shakers." Think Kim Basinger's character in '80s movie "9 1/2 weeks" - she plays a SoHo art dealer - strong, beautiful and edgy; women whose closets might be full of Japanese labels like Yohji Yamamoto or Comme des Garcons or Alaia and Balenciaga.

Willoughby's designs feature structured tailoring mixed with unexpected soft draping on the neck, back and shoulders that one imagines looking really great at a sci-fi cocktail party in a white cube. He reassigns techno fabrics, like materials used for backpack straps, as the basis for a dress. Or "trucker hat" mesh fabric is used to add texture and internal structure. Other fabrics are cleverly used for a girdle effect - hiding and reshaping the hips on a dress that might leave the shoulders and legs are left exposed. Willoughby also plays with transparency and matte effects in the fabrics, and the effect is a collection that can either be turned up or down depending on the time of day - chic for daytime behind a gallery desk, or scintillating at night.

For Willoughby, 28, who studied at Parsons and worked for a few years as a freelance designer "in the Seventh Avenue scene," he said, decided to start a label of his own last year. He was already making clothes for art world friends, including costumes for the annual Art Parade sponsored by Deitch Projects and Paper magazine. This season marks his first official foray onto the fashion calendar with a two hour presentation that will be part fashion show, part dance performance and part art installation.

Willoughby's accessories deserve a mention as well - rubberized matchbooks and faux cigarette butts as lapel pins and barrettes, for one, and sunglasses fabricated to look like the gridded see-through rulers used by designers. He calls them "surreal conversation pieces."