Photo: Imaxtree

“She just wants excitement,” was how designer Nanette Lepore described the woman she imagined wearing her spring collection. One look at the pieces she showed on the runway on Wednesday and it’s clear what she meant: This collection injected jolts of color—electric yellow, neon pink, DayGlo orange—into Lepore’s trademark feminine designs. Stripped and floral patterns were so color-saturated that she actually had to approach them differently. “This season with the prints, it was like they weren’t saturated enough,” Lepore said backstage before her show. She added, “So finally we did this painting technique, this pigment, so they get this deep, deep color.” But while there were plenty of Betty Draper-on-acid pieces on display (among them, a creamsicle hued nipped-waist jacket and a full-skirted tank dress in bright lemon), it wasn’t all frills; Lepore cited the Venice Biennale at the American Pavilion as inspiration, with its “Olympic athletes performing on these crazy sculptures—that was exciting.” The body-hugging uniforms worn there were echoed in Lepore’s scuba-style cropped tops and dresses, accented with white piping and graphic, circular zipper pull detailing that you’re more likely to see on the beach than on the streets of New York’s Upper East Side. Perhaps part of this shift away from the pleats and bows that so often occupy her collections (and to be clear, there were still plenty in this one) has to do with where she sees the label going: “We’ve had bags and shoes for about a year—I really want to see them explode—[and] swim is doing really, really well. And I want to move into menswear eventually.” It may seem like an odd fit, but Lepore is just trying to reconnect with her design roots; as she explained, “[Menswear] is something we started off doing years ago, so I would love to get back to that because it was really fun.”