All punning aside, there’s something different going on with layering this season, and Consuelo Castiglioni composed her thoughts about it in a coherently fresh way. Her distinctive talent for reinterpreting mid-century modern print and color is lovely. But this time, the way she divided each silhouette into horizontal blocks of two, and sometimes three, garments nailed a brand new, totally together look in a way that made the whole thing seem non-retro. The idea of multiple and simultaneous hemlines—up at the front, down at the back and opaque pelmets under transparent layers—has been playing through the collections one way or another all season.

Here, the distillation made it look serenely easy in sequences of trumpet-hemmed dresses over longer gauze skirts, boxy tops over boxy skirts, tops over a mid-section peplum over a skirt, and matched-print textured suits. If one wants to be literal about it, there is something of the sixties in Castiglioni’s taste for pop-cum-Lilly Pulitzer daisies, the op-art whirl of discs, and the puffy, couture-like dog-tooth brocade. She is, of course, a specialist in this area, and no-one can mix and mismatch stripes, textures, and jazzy fields of plastic paillettes and fringed beading quite like she does.

Oddly, when she got into sick color-combinations—yellow with brown embroidered vertically on flowered lace—it looked even more peculiarly interesting; an expert step beyond the pretty pastels so many designers are working with this season. Besides that, she also worked in a section of graphic geometric pattern-hybrids of ethnic raffia chevrons and Deco sequin shimmer, placed on simple white shifts—a totally modern take on the twenties without even a whiff of vintage.