What I wore this week: the belted coat

January 23, 2015, 8:30 am

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‘The proper-belt-over-your-coat gives your look the snap you get from a killer heel, but is way more commute-friendly’

Coats sometimes come with belts, but they tend to be weedy little belts. The kind that are perfect for pulling your dressing gown close with fumbling morning fingers while you make that first cup of tea. But for facing the world, you need something a bit sharper. Relying on the floppy belt that comes with your coat is ultimately unsatisfying: like trying to eat a steak with plastic cutlery.

There is a charming insouciance to the loosely belted, dressing-gown style of coat. But “charming insouciance” works best in kooky contrast to really fabulous hair and spiky heels. When you have a three-days-since-hair-wash ponytail and practical winter shoes, charming insouciance edges perilously close to plain old scruffbag. That’s where the proper-belt-over-your-coat comes in handy: it gives your look the snap you get from a killer heel, but is way more commute-friendly.

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Versace does what Versace does best as Paris haute couture shows begin

January 25, 2015, 3:37 pm

≫ Next: Christian Dior’s Raf Simons constructs a 1960s vision of the 21st century

≪ Previous: What I wore this week: the belted coat

Eva Herzigová and Amber Valletta, models who made it big last century, step back on to catwalk to model irony-free designs

The collection with which Donatella Versace opened the Paris haute couture shows on Sunday night was sexy and glamorous.

The dresses were long and form-fitting, with slim naked slivers peeled off across the body, as if Donatella had attacked her gowns with a lemon zester.

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Christian Dior’s Raf Simons constructs a 1960s vision of the 21st century

January 26, 2015, 10:38 am

≫ Next: Fearless France – the muse of Paris couture

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Haute couture collection delivers a mischievous layering of past and present, neither simply nostalgic nor straightforwardly futuristic

Considering that Christian Dior’s most recent financial results showed a 13.4% sales rise to €747m (£560m), in the first six months of last year, we may assume that the designer Raf Simons had free rein to show Monday’s haute couture collection in any Paris venue he chose.

So it is worth taking a moment to consider why he chose to erect an indoor building site – a freshly painted, plushly carpeted one – in the garden of a shuttered 18th-century museum in central Paris.

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Fearless France – the muse of Paris couture

January 27, 2015, 10:26 am

≫ Next: Touchscreen gloves – put to the fashion test

≪ Previous: Christian Dior’s Raf Simons constructs a 1960s vision of the 21st century

Haute couture is an expression of French national pride and Parisian self-belief – and this season’s catwalk shows were the boldest, bravest and most forward-looking the city has seen for ages

The words the designer Raf Simons used in praise of his teams in the Christian Dior ateliers after the haute couture show on Monday afternoon were interesting: “They have no fear,” he said. The petites mains, the craftspeople of haute couture, are the keepers of the flame in high fashion. They are much lauded for their traditional skills, their long-suffering patience. The techniques handed down through generations, the hundreds of hours of close work behind the scenes, are championed each season.

To praise their fearlessness is rather different. And the choice of words is striking, in the context of Paris this month: whether consciously or not, Simons made a link between the workers’ spirit in the ateliers, and the spirit of the demonstrations on the streets of Paris after the terrorist attacks.

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Touchscreen gloves – put to the fashion test

January 28, 2015, 3:49 am

≫ Next: What I wore this week: the Cuban collar

≪ Previous: Fearless France – the muse of Paris couture

Nobody wants bare hands when the weather is nippy – but we still need to text. So thank goodness for touchscreen gloves. But which pairs look good and which work the best? Crucially, how long does it take to type out, ‘fancy a drink?’ Guardian Fashion investigates

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What I wore this week: the Cuban collar

January 30, 2015, 8:30 am

≫ Next: Dig that polo neck out of your wardrobe

≪ Previous: Touchscreen gloves – put to the fashion test

‘I fell in love with a collar shape that was slightly oversized, elegant in a retro kind of way, unfussy yet quirky’

Your collar, like your accent, instantly places you. It says something about who you are before you open your mouth. It’s a fashion judgment almost as old as the hills. Long before there were new-season It bags, there was white collar and blue collar, and – arguably the daddy of all fashion statements – the flash of white on a dog collar. A neatly pressed collar is such a powerful message of conservatism that you can give your look a subversive edge just by swerving it: a collarless grandad style immediately relocates a shirt from office to artist’s studio. Pop the collar upwards on a classic blazer and your look switches from Sloane Square to Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

All this is a justification for the fact that I’ve spent 10 months – not full-time, but in more idle moments than I care to admit – trying to figure out a name for the style of collar I’m wearing today. In March last year, at Nicolas Ghesquière’s first Louis Vuitton catwalk show, I fell in love with a collar shape that was slightly oversized, elegant in a retro kind of way, unfussy yet quirky. At Vuitton it came in contrasting colours on leather jackets and belted coats; since then, it has been infiltrating the fashion world. But what’s it called? I tried “donkey jacket collar”, but that’s ugly and sounds like a terrible party game. I experimented with “denim jacket collar”, but that was confusing. Square collar? Big square? Don’t think whoever came up with Farrow & Ball’s Elephant’s Breath and Lamp Room Gray was quaking in their boots.

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Dig that polo neck out of your wardrobe

February 3, 2015, 10:26 am

≫ Next: Stand up straight like Gwyneth Paltrow – and other essential red carpet rules

≪ Previous: What I wore this week: the Cuban collar

Jackie O loved them. Now Kim Kardashian wears one as a body-con dress, Alexa Chung teams her sweater with a leather mini, and Joaquin Phoenix’s statement layering is the only watchable thing about Inherent Vice

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Stand up straight like Gwyneth Paltrow – and other essential red carpet rules

February 4, 2015, 10:01 pm

≫ Next: What I wore this week: suede

≪ Previous: Dig that polo neck out of your wardrobe

As Bafta night looms, our fashion editor reveals the tricks of the trade she has picked up from the likes of Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore and Sienna Miller

This is the actual point of the red carpet, when you think about it. The red carpet is the only time we watch actors and actresses being themselves. It is their moment to promote their personal brand: fun, kooky, clever, sweet, whatever. The smart ones know that for the long-term longevity of this brand you need people to like you, not just fancy you. Cate Blanchett is brilliant at this. I’ve only ever seen Blanchett being a scary ice queen (Elizabeth, Blue Jasmine) or a kids’ film scary ice queen (The Hobbit; The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe) and, once, a madwoman called Lotte in a German play at the Barbican I couldn’t make head or tail of. And yet she has my lifelong devotion, primarily for the lavender and yellow Givenchy she wore at the 2011 Oscars, but also for livening up every red carpet I’ve ever covered. See also: Claire Danes, who has successfully softened and humanised an image dominated by her stressy black trousersuit-clad on-screen character by joyous, colourful red carpet choices, like the Tiffany-blue Prada dress she wore to the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2013.

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What I wore this week: suede

February 6, 2015, 8:30 am

≫ Next: Alexander McQueen: into the light | Jess Cartner-Morley

≪ Previous: Stand up straight like Gwyneth Paltrow – and other essential red carpet rules

‘Now leather is overexposed, suede doesn’t look such a wallflower; it looks authentic and intriguing’

For a long time, my thoughts on suede could be summed up as follows: it’s leather for squares. Leather is for rock guitarists, suede is for guitar teachers. This has always been suede’s image problem, pigeonholed as the approachable, strokable face of animal skin, while leather is the scary, growly side.

But that was before we reached Peak Leather Trouser, a high-water mark recorded sometime around the eighth series of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Leather trousers started out subversive (think: Patti Smith at the Chelsea hotel), became edgy-glamorous (think: French Vogue editors channelling Patti Smith), then just glamorous (think: reality-soap stars channelling French Vogue), and finally wannabe glamorous (school-run mums channelling reality-soap stars.) It’s like a fashion game of Chinese whispers that starts with dangerous downtown decadence and ends in the suburbs, with leather trousers worn with frosted highlights, waterfall cardigans and eternity rings.

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Alexander McQueen: into the light | Jess Cartner-Morley

February 9, 2015, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Can taping your toes together ease high heel pain?

≪ Previous: What I wore this week: suede

Alexander McQueen was defined by his dark, even menacing vision. Five years after his suicide, Jess Cartner-Morley discovers that behind his apparent nihilism was a passion for life

The night before Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis collection was to be staged in Paris, on 6 October 2009, Sam Gainsbury, McQueen’s show producer, tried on the reptile-scaled lobster-claw shaped boots that became known as armadillo shoes. The heels were 10 inches high. “I couldn’t walk,” she said. “So I went and found Lee [Alexander McQueen’s given name] and I said, ‘I can’t walk in these, and I can walk in any heel. This could be a disaster. What if the girls fall?’ And he said, ‘If they fall, they fall.’”

Had they fallen, they would have done so in the first catwalk show ever to be live streamed on the internet. With one twist of an ankle that show could have been remembered for callously putting young women in danger. McQueen, bloody-minded, made it into a victory parade. “Before the show Lee was backstage with all these 17-year-old models,” Gainsbury recalled, “looking into their eyes, telling them how incredible they looked, how proud he was, that they could do it. He gave them such confidence. And not one of them fell. It was like a gift, with Lee. He made you feel like you were capable of anything.”

Darkness makes for a good story, so I understand people want to talk about that. But he also had a romantic side

He was fascinated with the chase and the predator idea that we were all hunted. But McQueen identified with the prey

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Can taping your toes together ease high heel pain?

February 13, 2015, 4:11 am

≫ Next: What I wore this week: purple

≪ Previous: Alexander McQueen: into the light | Jess Cartner-Morley

The Guardian’s fashion editor puts Marie Helvin’s theory to the public transport test

I am a total sucker for any old internet cod science, if it promises pain-free high heel wearing. I have tried gel-injected tights and nude footsie socks. I have read reams of advice on heel height to surface area ratio. I have never had Botox injected into my soles, but if you are offering, I’m in.

So I am pretty excited about today’s high level investigative journalism assignment. I am to road test not just any old cod science, but cod science as endorsed by Marie Helvin. Helvin is 62 and yet from what I can see in the party pages she goes out to standy-aroundy cocktail parties night after night, and always looks as if she’s having an awesome time and not like her feet hurt and she’s wondering if she’s got time to get home for Wolf Hall if she orders an Uber right away.

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What I wore this week: purple

February 13, 2015, 8:30 am

≫ Next: J Crew's Jenna Lyons: 'Sequins are the new black'

≪ Previous: Can taping your toes together ease high heel pain?

‘The best stylist of purple is not fashion but nature. Style it like a florist or a gardener, not a fashionista’

Wearing purple is a statement, but not usually one about style. In Jenny Joseph’s poem it is the colour you will wear, defiantly, when you are an old woman. It is the colour of which Alice Walker says, it “pisses God off if you walk by… in a field somewhere and don’t notice it”. It is the colour of goths and glam rockers, popes and bishops, princes and Prince. The Victorians used lilac for half-mourning, which makes sense when you consider the way it always seems a little off-key, among the sweetness of other pastels.

Purple, lilac and lavender were put back on the fashion slate when Miuccia Prada piled her spring catwalk with sand in a lurid, lava lamp shade of violet. The half-psychedelic, half-folkloric 70s mood was echoed at another Milan house, Alberta Ferretti, with purple suede, fringed shift dresses.

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J Crew's Jenna Lyons: 'Sequins are the new black'

February 17, 2015, 9:46 am

≫ Next: Oscar de la Renta's joie de vivre lives on at New York fashion week

≪ Previous: What I wore this week: purple

Label’s creative director fights against ‘fashion gone quiet’ with sparkles, bright yellows and deep purples as she shows collection at New York fashion week

Backstage at the Lincoln Center, moments before the J Crew show at New York fashion week, the models asked Jenna Lyons, the label’s creative director: “Are we allowed to smile?”

Lyons – dressed for the occasion in floor-length black culottes with a simple striped cotton shirt, signature black-rimmed spectacles and slicked back hair – burst out laughing. “Oh my god, yes! Please smile.”

Our man doesn’t want to be visible from 10 blocks away because of the colour of his shirt

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Oscar de la Renta's joie de vivre lives on at New York fashion week

February 17, 2015, 8:11 pm

≫ Next: Michael Kors shows a return to high-rolling glamour

≪ Previous: J Crew's Jenna Lyons: 'Sequins are the new black'

Peter Copping’s first turn as creative director stays true to the late designer’s legacy, with a femininity that remains refined yet upbeat

There are not many catwalk shows at which you will find Nancy Kissinger and Taylor Swift sharing a front row, a fact which pinpoints precisely why the Oscar de la Renta show is the most important of this New York fashion week.

For four decades Oscar de la Renta, who died last year aged 82, helped define the very image of America. He all but invented the notion of First Lady fashion; created legendary Academy Award red carpet gowns; dressed Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. Less than two months before his death, he designed the wedding gown for the almost-royal wedding of America’s bachelor prince, George Clooney, to Amal Alamuddin.

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Michael Kors shows a return to high-rolling glamour

February 18, 2015, 4:22 pm

≫ Next: Ralph Lauren back at cutting edge of fashion after New York show

≪ Previous: Oscar de la Renta's joie de vivre lives on at New York fashion week

Designer tries to woo fashion’s tastemakers with refined and sophisticated takes on ready-to-wear as success of his handbags jeopardises brand’s exclusivity

Michael Kors has what many in the fashion industry would consider to be an enviable problem: he is selling too many handbags.

Having identified a gap in the market for a £300-£500 handbag – affordable luxury, in industry-speak – he has been remarkably successful in dominating it. In the last three months of 2014, revenue rose by 30% to £848m, and the opening of 194 new stores brought the global total to 509.

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Ralph Lauren back at cutting edge of fashion after New York show

February 19, 2015, 12:10 pm

≫ Next: Marc Jacobs dismisses street-style at New York fashion week

≪ Previous: Michael Kors shows a return to high-rolling glamour

Designer creates cosy winter wonderland in which to give crowds a masterclass in sexy-but-warm elegance, reaffirming his place as the king of all-American cool

Given that Kanye West last year told an interviewer “I am Warhol. I am the number one most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh”, it seems fair to assume that the rapper is not easily starstruck.

But as Ralph Lauren greeted well-wishers at the end of his New York fashion week show on Thursday morning, West rose from his front row seat, approached the designer and handed a security guard his phone, gesturing to him to take a photo of the pair together. Lauren has a net worth currently estimated by Forbes at $7.1bn dollars, is the only designer to have been awarded all four of the top honours given by the Council of Fashion Designers America – and Kanye West wants a selfie. Not bad going.

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Marc Jacobs dismisses street-style at New York fashion week

February 20, 2015, 5:52 am

≫ Next: What I wore this week: cropped trousers

≪ Previous: Ralph Lauren back at cutting edge of fashion after New York show

Marc Jacobs’ show, which closed New York fashion week, was a riot of glamour and sophistication, and a far cry from the street-style looks outside

This New York fashion week has been characterised by near-identical looks on the catwalk and front row: polo necks, a 1970s skirt or trouser shape and long lean layering in muted colours: the synergy between haute street-style and next season’s designer looks has never been stronger.

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What I wore this week: cropped trousers

February 20, 2015, 8:30 am

≫ Next: Kids at the catwalk: In defence of taking children to fashion shows

≪ Previous: Marc Jacobs dismisses street-style at New York fashion week

‘At first I thought all the models had had growth spurts since their last fittings, and then realised that no, the trousers were meant to look like that’

Trousers that are too short for you are the next big thing; they’ve got a name and everything. What I’m wearing here is a High Tide Hemline. Or a Cropped Flare. Or an Overgrown Bermuda. OK, I made that last one up, but the first two are real, as is this trend.

The too-short trouser looks pretty out-there, no doubt about that. And yet the high-tide hemline is just the natural next step in a direction trouser lengths have been headed for years. Do you remember when we bought trousers extra long, so that when you wore them over heels, they almost touched the floor? Undeniably effective at making you look super-leggy, but a practical headache in that you needed a different pair of trousers for each heel height, and you couldn’t stash flats in your bag to walk home in without trashing the bottom two inches of your strides. By last year it was all about trousers that ended bang on your ankle bone, and that sliver of skin that flashed between the turn-up of your jeans and trainers was a fashion erogenous zone for a few months. And then the catwalk shows for this season happened, and at first I thought all the models had had growth spurts since their last fittings, and then realised that no, the trousers were meant to look like that, ending an awkward, chilly two inches north of where you’d expect them to.

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Kids at the catwalk: In defence of taking children to fashion shows

February 21, 2015, 12:00 am

≫ Next: Who won the Oscars red carpet?

≪ Previous: What I wore this week: cropped trousers

Was Kim Kardashian wrong to bring baby North West to Kanye’s Adidas show? Half the crowd thought so, judging by their faces during North’s tantrum. Our fashion editor disagrees

What is it about taking kids to catwalk shows that makes people so cross? I don’t get it. You can take kids to music festivals, you can take them to fancy restaurants, you can take them to far-flung corners of the world, and the world will look on and think: that’s cool, it’s all good life experience. But take them to Somerset House for a London Fashion Week catwalk show? Cue more pious outrage than that time Michael Jackson dangled his kids out of a hotel window.
Does it make people cross because they think you are using the kid as an accessory to attract attention, like a new pair of Sophia Webster shoes? This would make sense if the fashion industry was peopled only by neurotic loners who use their ovens for shoe storage and have no human contact between one show season and the next, but in reality this workforce has a disproportionately high rate of working mothers. So, perhaps it makes people cross because they believe fashion is inherently morally degenerate, and therefore the front row no more of a place for a child than a crack den? Um, run that one by me? Because I fail to see how the next generation will be inexorably corrupted by early exposure to the return of the high-waisted trouser.

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Who won the Oscars red carpet?

February 22, 2015, 11:58 pm

≫ Next: Oscars menswear: the end of black tie?

≪ Previous: Kids at the catwalk: In defence of taking children to fashion shows

The Oscars 2015 red carpet was, as ever, a lesson in high glamour. But between Emma Stone in beaded chartreuse, Keira Knightley doing maternity-chic and Gwyneth Paltrow returning to sugary pink, who took home the plaudits? (Clue: she didn’t win an award)

It’s not just a beauty pageant, actually. I have zero time for the “what’s the big deal, they’re just frocks” angle. This night is, in fact, a Hollywood hustings. The fact that it’s a hustings which is all about the women – whereas the men get to advance their careers in more straightforward ways, like, I dunno, being good at their jobs – is sexist, of course it is. But to assume that this is because it is a hustings of all-female candidates and is therefore all about prettiness – when in fact it’s about career strategy and the securing and servicing of a power base among the Hollywood electorate – would be sexist too.

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