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 looks and dresses, and then wanting to transform another woman into her,” as Wickstead succinctly puts it, the designer’s take on that premise came with a few more layers of meaning. First, she points out her fixation on the transformative power of dressing, to which most fashion designers can probably relate; and second, her interest in turning the tables, so that her version of Novak as Judy is altogether more defiant. “She’s loud in her expressions, and how she speaks, but also loud in how she dresses,” Wickstead added, noting that she deliberately went for an arresting backdrop of primary colors against which to show the clothes.

Wickstead has a clever ability to take colors and prints that could, in less experienced hands, feel a little too loud (especially for her client base of professional women across the business world and the arts) and rework them into something immediate and wearable. There were plenty of her signature chintzy floral day dresses in the mix, yet many of the collection’s loveliest looks involved smartly-styled separates, such as the collar of a blue button-down peeking over an oatmeal cable knit paired with a check skirt, or an oversized dark green coat atop a fuzzy V-neck sweater. That’s not to say there weren’t a number of killer evening gowns too, some leaning more opulent than usual for Wickstead. A particular standout was a dazzling gold metallic jacquard floor-sweeper with an impeccably-cut hourglass waist, trimmed with beaded swag sleeves across the shoulder. “Even with those more glamorous pieces—I don’t love using the word glamorous, to be honest—I wanted to play a lot with distortion and movement,” Wickstead noted.

A few stranger and more perverse styling details brought it all back to that initial source of inspiration, as well as the darker underbelly of Vertigo. Most fascinating were pieces made from layered organza with polka dots, which appeared to eerily warp and distort as the different pieces of fabric moved across each other. “I think it’s about duality, illusion, obsession, transformation—those are the key words,” Wickstead said. There’s always more to her clothes than first meets the eye.