Mash-Ups on the Fall 2012 Runways February 13, 2012, 2:37 pm Designers sent conflicting signals on their fall runways this week, offering a thoughtful, and sometimes unpredictable, mashup of textures and patterns, as often as not in the very same outfit. Herringbone tweeds kept company with chevron stripes; bird's-eye weaves with elephantine plaids; pompoms with flannels and nomadic motifs. Trendspotting Ruth La Ferla reports on emerging trends from the shows to the streets. Yet all of it somehow coalesced. Marcus Wainwright and David Neville of Rag & Bone artfully combined blanket designs with floral tapestries; arrow prints with polka dots and perforated knits. At Y-3, pebble-textured bi-color fleece mingled with a leopard print and madly striped leggings, shown aptly enough against a magic-carpet backdrop. A similar feeling for full-on exoticism prompted Joseph Altuzarra to combine tribal patterns, bits of fur and bands of multicolored ribbon in his gypsy-inflected show, while Thakoon Panichgul offered a series of dresses overlaid with woven cane, lending a rich dimension to his flamelike prints. Others mated popcorn knits with lacquered tweeds, zany stripes with gilded embroideries. It was a crazy mélange animating some of the week's most spirited collections, in which the message was the mix.