New | Vera Wang brings darkness, mystery to New York Fashion Week

Vera Wang brought a dark, brooding, almost eerie atmosphere to her runway show at New York Fashion Week, with exaggerated proportions like sleeves that extended past the fingers and dangled toward the legs.

“I loved playing with proportions, juggling all the proportions,” the designer said backstage Tuesday. “You can’t change the human body, but you can change how you mix your proportions. It’s fascinating to me.”

Wang famously loves black, and all of her garments were in black or white — but mostly black. And they were unusual: Besides the over-long sleeves — “almost like a glove,” she described them — there were a number of structured jackets that had no shoulders.

Wang said the three main concepts she was going for were power, craft and “mystery — dark, dark, mysterious.” And also sexy, she added, surely referring to the long filmy skirts that were so sheer, they left absolutely nothing to the imagination.

The skirts were long enough to prove treacherous for the models, who had to wear stiletto-heeled booties and somehow heroically avoid stepping on the skirts. There were a few stumbles, but no washouts.