Countdown to Fashion Week - Thank the Deli for That Dress - NYTimes.com By Natalia V. Osipova and Joanna Nikas Sally LaPointe: Final Fittings: In the third installment of Countdown to Fashion Week, the designer Sally LaPointe makes final fittings and adjustments to her spring 2014 collection. Just past the sheer curtains marking the entry to Sally LaPointe's studio and workshop on Thompson Street in SoHo, things were in a state of flux. Strips of organza and georgette wafted, neglected, from an inspiration board. Alongside them were rows of photographs showing floral bouquets in sundry stages of decline. The desiccated originals were tacked to a third board nearby. Dakota, a model wearing almost no makeup, her hair center parted, was wan as Ophelia - though an armored Ophelia, to be sure. She was trussed in a closefitting bustier that gave way at the waist to a flower-patterned bouffant skirt, its frothiness counterbalanced by wickedly pointy, goth-tinged shoes. "She has the perfect look," Ms. LaPointe remarked. There's something fierce but pretty going on. As for the dress, "I might need another round with it," she said. The idea is there, but it needs a little work. Weeks of daydreaming, sketching and piecing together panels of muslin had gone into that sample. But with Fashion Week (Sept. 5 to 12) fast approaching, it remained a work in progress. Ms. LaPointe, 29, was in the final fitting phase of her collection, making subtle but telling adjustments to near-finished pieces. She was toying with the notion of shearing off part of the skirt, which came to a point at the center hem and looked, she noted impishly, "like an evil flower." She thought she might add a skinny, structured underskirt. The look would be puffy, but from the waist down it would be, she said, "a little bit elongated, almost like the model is a flower on a stem." That dress and related looks are to provide the dramatic high point on Ms. LaPointe's catwalk, on Sept. The show, as she envisions it, will start with a procession of tabardlike vests over matching dresses, abbreviated jumpsuits and sheaths, each in a chalky tint of pink, eggshell yellow, ivory or a more strident marigold silk. It will end with emphatically buoyant cocktail dresses - "an explosion of flowers," she said, "coming back to life." Those frocks will represent a departure from the moodier pieces she showed for fall. Fall's look, inspired by the Depeche Mode song "In Your Room," was, she acknowledged, "dark, dense, sultry and slightly sinister." Mostly black, faintly predatory and spliced here and there with mock crocodile panels, that collection seemed to affirm Ms. LaPointe's stature as "a high priestess of goth opulence," as Style.com later called her. Her intricate cuts and somber lyricism appeal to private clients, notably Lady Gaga, who helped to cinch the designer's reputation by wearing Ms. LaPointe's creations on her music videos and at public appearances. They speak as compellingly to Elizabeth von der Golt, a senior vice president at Bergdorf Goodman. "They strike a balance between sexy and progressive, and feminine," Ms. von der Golt said. She added that Ms. LaPointe's last collection, priced from about $500 to $3,500, sold briskly. For spring, though, Ms. LaPointe is aiming for a lighter tone, modifying her signature severity with plunging V-necklines, curved seams, arced sleeves and dropped shoulders - and, on occasion, a pinched pleat that mimics the folds of a petal. Clearly, though, the designer, who is in her seventh season, has not strayed far from character. Her floral print, on an inky ground, is "my version of black for the season," she said. Scattered over a cellophane-coated organza, the faintly decaying petals do indeed seem a trifle macabre. The print, developed for her at a mill in New York, was reproduced, line for line, from the photographs of the dying flowers propped against her wall, the details blown up and the colors slightly intensified for a splashy effect. Ms. LaPointe bought the bouquets by the dozen from a neighborhood deli. "I kept on the cellophane wrappers," she said, "and took a photo every day documenting their demise."