Emilia Wickstead’s pre-fall lookbook opens with a model who has an unusually confrontational expression on her face: her slicked-back hair and buttoned-up coat dress treads the line between the ladylike and the tomboyish as her mouth opens to speak—or possibly even give you a harsh dressing down. “I like to think that my muse is standing up for herself this season,” Wickstead explained. “She’s a bit more rebellious and loud.”

Wickstead’s jumping-off point for the collection was Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo , a perennial source of inspiration for designers of all stripes thanks to the sumptuous ’50s glamour of Edith Head’s designs for Kim Novak’s lead character. (Or is that two characters?) Yet where Vertigo tells a tale of “how a man becomes obsessed with a woman, and the way that she loo

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