It turns out that when Vera Wang announced plans for a scaled-back show, she didn’t only mean the change of venue from the tents to her pristine white store on Mercer Street. She was referring as well to the clothes. For fall, a newfound temperance reined in Wang’s artistic fervor, here inspired by Peggy Guggenheim in Venice, so that her now-signature elements — the textural interest, the brooding romance, the flourishes of cut, the fab baubles — while all present and accounted for, went a notch or two subtler on the eccentricity scale. This made the collection as soothing as it was glamorous. And perhaps as savvy, because these gorgeous clothes should appeal to a broad range of women.

 

In a season when competition for the best little black dress is high, Wang opened with a pair of very different stunners, one a languid, bibbed affair inspired by Peggy’s go-to guy, Fortuny; the other, a stiffened scuba and gazar A-line. Shifting structures continued throughout, here a must-have belted viscose shirtdress; there, an austere scuba jacket that looked like Zoran-gone-girly, courtesy of deep sequined cuffs and a chiffon top peeking out from underneath. Similarly, when Wang chose to impose shape from the outside, she did so either minimally, defining a lovely green dress with a thin Grecian key belt, or to the max, cinching another, in purple chiffon, with a deep corset.

 

Yet not all decorative elements were add-ons. Simply cut dresses flashing huge, random pools of sequins were breathtaking, and painterly enough to have made Wang’s art-loving muse take notice.