The 12 best looks from Fashion Week

Want to be way ahead of the curve? Serena French picks the most exciting styles from New York Fashion Week you’ll be wearing this fall. Remember: You heard it here first!

Oscar de la Renta

Since luxe embellishment continues to reign this season, one of the masters can happily keep his perch over the cocktail circuit. Texture mixology doesn’t get any better than this, with a dress of Silk Road fabric patchwork in jewel tones, a fox collar and feather-trimmed satin sandals.

Prabal Gurung

The young designer is all tied up in knots. And we like it. The wrap theme took him through multi-fur coats, multimedia day dresses and crisscross jackets. This chiffon wrap gown highlights a big color for fall — pimento. It’s hot!

Boss Women

There’s a new boss in town, and it’s Jason Wu. While he amped up the sex factor of his own eponymous designer line, he debuted his efforts for suit-y German label Hugo Boss. This one’s all business, but with a Bauhaus spin that gives all the tony fawn and gray an arty interest and graphic sophistication that makes it stand out.

Diane von Furstenberg

The working women’s designer goes back to her ’70s roots and waxes poetic about the virtues of a jersey color-block dress in plummy cherry tones and a cache-coeur knit with a rose print. She translates artistic bohemia into something you can wear to the office and dinner.

Polo Ralph Lauren

This season, the designer who launched the globe-trotting trustafarian look launches his Polo line for women. With her outdoorsy patchwork plaid hacking jacket paired with romantic dark florals, rag socks and clogs, the younger and cooler counterpart is more free-spirited than her uptown mom.

Reed Krakoff

Cobalt is one of the bright spots of the season, and Krakoff invested heavily in the shade. He worked it head-to-toe, in not-so-simple sweater-and-skirt looks, with a little fur here and a little leather there, and a little pony skin to cap it off.

Proenza Schouler

The downtown darlings with the ruling It bag have seen the future, and it looks like.. . plastics. Or recycled materials, anyway. Picking up where Nicolas Ghesquière left off at Balenciaga, the techy twosome have a relentlessly singular vision of spongy sculptural fabrics in swirly cartoon colors. Perfect for benignly taking over another planet.

Vera Wang

Wang may have crossed over to the Gothic romance side this season, but she delivered her most practical commercial collection in the process. The fall offerings had so many layered combinations — in shadowy plaids and prints reflecting minerals and nature’s beautiful underbelly — that we had a hard time picking just one.

Donna Karan

In an emotional salute to 30 years of dressing women on a journey of empowerment, Karan sent out a sexy parade of her greatest hits. No one better understands the New York female executive’s seemingly conflicting need to be comfortable and sensual, while protecting it all with a coat of armor — or in-your-face sexuality.

Marchesa

Game on! After more than a few references to Renaissance and medieval periods, it’s official: A “Game of Thrones” trend has arrived for fall. Only Joans of Arc and tribal princesses need apply for this wardrobe, and this collection was one of the best examples, with a full spectrum of floral-lace-like hand-smithed filigree and silks swagged like regal sashes. We’ll be royals, indeed.

Michael Kors

California-dreaming gives a groovy, laid back hippie ease to all the hard-edged big city classics. A salt and pepper tweed skirt get a peasant blouse, pelt-tastic vest and metallic floral embellishments. Big fur goes Big Sur.

Marc Jacobs

With his recent talk about re-invention of the brand, the future shock he presented to close Fashion Week shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Femme-bots in identical stretchy Courrèges-inspired uniforms of tunics, leggings and go-go boots in pill-powder shades glided by like so many stewardesses on a virtual trip to Soma-topia. Out of this world.