The bold-face names in American design always show at the end of New York Fashion Week: Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren, Isaac Mizrahi, and the newest member of the club, Reed Krakoff. Here, a quick recap of their Spring/Summer 2011 collections.

LONDON–The second day of #lfw is shaping up to be an impressive one, and we’re only half-way through. This morning, I first traipsed off to Twenty8Twelve by S. Miller, so let’s start there.

Often when we’re examining at a collection, what we’re looking for is a story. We want a cohesive a narrative, real, logically behaving characters, solid structure, and themes we can take home. We look for fantasies, realism, biography and references. If we can find the story, we can begin to dissect what it means to us, to fashion, in this time and place, and then we get to retell it, as do you, right down to the fashionista who actually buys and wears the piece–then it becomes their job to tell the story anew.

Now if we were to move this metaphor to the realm of contemporary fiction, it should not be Johnathan Franzen’s face on the cover of Time, it should be Jeremy Laing’s.

I’ve followed Laing’s work for four years, and this is at once his most sophisticated collection to date, and his most wearable. It is also beautiful, sometimes astonishingly so.

If the spelling and grammatical errors in Yigal Azrouël’s press materials were an indicator of a collection that has not been completely thought out, there were enough innovations, and engaging pieces, to let this failing slide.

The Israeli-born Azrouël, whose toying with vintage in the late nineties led him to a women’s line in 2003, followed by his first men’s collection in 2007, is known for his well-worn, salvaged, and distressed looking garments. And while he hasn’t moved too far from his base with Spring/Summer 2011, he’s playing with a cleaner look.

None of the sleeveless jackets I had seen this year made much of an impression on me (same goes for the tunics, ugh), but Azrouël’s green sleeveless trench had the right balance of military and modernity, and gave me pause. His take on the short-sleeved chambray, using separate materials for the sleeves as the body, was a miss, as were his oddly zippered sheepskin vest and his dropstitch crewneck sweater. But his woven, white, roomy tees were appealing, as were his gingham apron pocket shorts (ending mid-thigh), their jersey knit counterparts, and my personal favorite, a boy’s romper, which he called a “jumpsuit” but was short sleeved and cut off at the knees (more on that later).