Fashion Watch Report: Ferdi Abuel makes heads of tailoring

“It’s always like that for me, neutrals with pops of color,” says Ferdi Abuel of his collection for Fashion Watch. Rather than shock his audience with drop-jaw flamboyance and over-the-top detailing, Abuel sticks to what he knows best: clean tailoring and wearable designs.

Drawing inspiration from an exhibit by Hamish Bowles on Cristobal Balenciaga’s Spanish influences, Abuel creates suits, long coats that fall at the thigh and graceful dresses meant for the woman leading a contemporary lifestyle, whether she’s a top-notch executive (probably toting a Balenciaga bag), a young mother with a part-time job or a jetsetting single woman. Pieces such as a cropped jacket in burnt orange, a sheer cobalt blue top, and a knee-length skirt in canary yellow give a playful vibe to the collection as well as sneak in bursts of unexpected color. Shiny palazzo pants, buttoned-up tops and boxy outerwear give a quirky, corporate slant.

Mostly, though, Abuel combines stiff structured pieces in gray, black, white and beige with pieces in sheer fabric, some structured together to form a unique jigsaw-like pattern. These are his pieces meant for the evening, either for cocktail wear of an evening gala, and it is in these choices that Abuel shows that he knows how a woman needs to look both trendy and elegant.