Emporio Armani at Milan fashion week: 40 years of 'a determined form of grace'

September 25, 2015, 6:09 am

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Giorgio Armani continues to reveal his penchant for designs based on an ‘observation of everyday reality’

The show notes at the Emporio Armani catwalk show in Milan defined the look of this collection as “a subtle yet determined form of grace”. A phrase which applies not just to these clothes, but to the brand Giorgio Armani, 81, has spent the past 40 years building.

The first look of the show was a grey trouser suit. One, of course, with the precisely calibrated slouch that has made the Armani suit an icon of urbane sophistication since Richard Gere wore one in American Gigolo. This being the more youthful and relaxed – read, cheaper – of the two Armani catwalk shows in Milan fashion week, the suit was worn with a pink T-shirt with a smiley face emoticon.

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We are family: the cool clans inspiring this season's fashion

September 26, 2015, 2:00 am

≫ Next: Fashion lessons from Strictly Come Dancing: sequins, superheroes and skin-tight trousers

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From Dynasty’s super-glam Carringtons to the geek chic of the Tenenbaums, meet the screen families influencing the high street

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Fashion lessons from Strictly Come Dancing: sequins, superheroes and skin-tight trousers

September 29, 2015, 7:55 am

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The outfits on Strictly might be too OTT for the average party, but there are pearls of fashion wisdom hidden among the spangles. Just ease off on the hairspray and fake tan …

At first glance, the clothes on Strictly Come Dancing are even less suitable for translation into real life than the clothes on the catwalk. All-over tassels that shake and shimmy like a drive-through car wash in full flow, floor-length gowns with feather trims: these are not looks you can pull off at work. Actually, never mind work, these are not looks you can pull off even at parties. I am all in favour of dressing up but I cannot pretend you are not going to feel you’ve nailed it when you are in a room above a pub drinking gin and tonic with friends who are working a Céline vibe in, say, a below-the-knee skirt and a chunky heel and you’ve got marabou bobbing around your ankles like a cuddly jellyfish.

But cuddly jellyfish notwithstanding, there are indeed pearls of fashion wisdom to be found on Strictly. Here’s what we’ve learned in 13 series of sparkly Saturday nights:

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The geek v the extrovert: Milan's fashion face-off

September 29, 2015, 9:52 am

≫ Next: Carine Roitfeld brings super-sexy leopard print to Uniqlo

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Sensible shoes, specs and skirt suits competed with nightclub styling, 80s glitz and show-off frocks in Milan. But which look was better?

News just in from Milan fashion week: the pouting sexpot who has ruled the Italian catwalks since the middle ages – it has felt that long, anyway – has been usurped by a girl in glasses with hair tucked behind her ears. One in sensible shoes who looks like she might be wearing a vest under her frock.

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Carine Roitfeld brings super-sexy leopard print to Uniqlo

September 30, 2015, 9:29 am

≫ Next: Galliano's rehabilitation continues with high-spirited glamour

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Uniqlo may be best known for brilliant basics but the brand’s latest collaboration is a thoroughly déshabillé affair

If foxy is not a word you immediately associate with Uniqlo, prepare to have your mind blown. The Carine Roitfeld collaboration is elegant, on-point, grown-up and super sexy. Because it is based on an actual woman’s actual wardrobe, it is brilliantly easy to wear together: the general mood among fashion journalists at the preview was ‘how about we just buy the lot and wear nothing else?’

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Galliano's rehabilitation continues with high-spirited glamour

September 30, 2015, 11:18 am

≫ Next: French Vogue: what we've learned from its 95 years on fashion's frontline

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Show for Maison Margiela recalled gleeful days of old while Dries van Noten’s gaudy elegance edged a real-life comfort zone

The 11am catwalk show in the Tuileries on Wednesday was, in theory, a display of next spring’s ready-to-wear womenswear collection for the Parisian house of Margiela. In reality, the entwined stories of John Galliano and Paris fashion long ago moved beyond such mere technicalities.

Ready-to-wear womenswear is, anyway, a term that could be only very loosely applied to skirts wrapped in clingfilm, jackets made from sofa stuffing, and fishnet bodystockings; especially when many of the models on the catwalk are men.

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French Vogue: what we've learned from its 95 years on fashion's frontline

October 1, 2015, 7:52 am

≫ Next: Balmain goes back to 1980s with ruffles, jumpsuits – and an Instagram preview

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The seminal style magazine is celebrating its 95th anniversary with a special edition featuring all the requisite Vogue themes: cigarettes, nudity and the odd flash of nipple

We think our colleagues at French Vogue will take it as a compliment when we say they are one part journalistic endeavour, one part style goals. The editorial teams – led for the past five years by Emanuelle Alt, and before that by Carine Roitfeld – strut around Paris fashion week en masse, like Reservoir Dogs but in white jeans (Alt era) or black pencil skirts (Roitfeld era). To look “very French Vogue” is the ultimate #goals.

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Balmain goes back to 1980s with ruffles, jumpsuits – and an Instagram preview

October 1, 2015, 10:39 am

≫ Next: The avocado is overcado: how #eatclean turned it into a cliche

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Designer’s spring/summer catwalk has nostalgic flavour of 80s Paris club wear, but its brand-building is bang up to date

You can debut your spring collection the old-fashioned way, in the gilt-and-frescoed salon of a grand hotel next to the Paris Opera with a select few hundred of the fashion establishment in attendance.

Or you can debut it on social media, giving Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid dresses from the new collection to wear to a party the night before the show, and letting Jenner post a close-up photo of the two supermodels’ bottoms – one in open-weave cobweb knit dress, one in a semi-sheer jumpsuit – to her 37.7 million Instagram followers.

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The avocado is overcado: how #eatclean turned it into a cliche

October 5, 2015, 6:40 am

≫ Next: Lace slippers, silk slips and late-night lingerie: fashion embraces hotel-room hotness

≪ Previous: Balmain goes back to 1980s with ruffles, jumpsuits – and an Instagram preview

Once exotic, it’s now the basic brunch of Instagrammers – which means it’s toast in style terms

The history of the avocado and the modern history of popular culture are basically one and the same. I mean, no offence to Stephen Hawking, I’m sure black holes are also a big deal in their own way but, if you really want to get to grips with the meaning of modern life, look no further than the avocado. Or – to give it its most up-to-date name – the overcado.

The news that the avocado is in crisis – an unwitting scalp of the great #eatclean debacle, a healthy eating movement which now looks like the biggest self-serving scam since someone invented investment banking – hits at the very heart of who we are as a society. The glorious rise and tragic fall of avocado on toast has been written about at way too much length to recap here, but suffice to say that, in Japan, McDonald’s now has an English-muffin version on its breakfast menu. It is still on every fashionable cafe menu, but it is now basic. Basic in the Kate-Moss-Easyjet sense of the word, meaning that it aspires to values that are now too generic to be aspirational.

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Lace slippers, silk slips and late-night lingerie: fashion embraces hotel-room hotness

October 6, 2015, 8:36 am

≫ Next: Balenciaga appoints Demna Gvasalia as new creative director

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Cerebral chic is dead; long live sensual style. It’s time to put away your pyjamas and dust off your nightie

Every fashion week has a defining pair of shoes. Be honest: the one catwalk item you actually remember from the previous season is the Gucci fur-lined loafers, right? And that’s fine, because that one pair of shoes told you everything you needed to know about where fashion was at – geeky but luxurious, challenging but not uncomfortable.

This Paris fashion week’s shoe-shaped soundbite came on Friday evening, at the Balenciaga show. Balenciaga wasn’t, funnily enough, a collection from which anyone expected much this season. It was the last collection by Alexander Wang, who had already been announced as leaving the label – a departure that has come precisely because his Balenciaga collections, although well-received, weren’t setting the fashion agenda in the way of Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent, or Alessandro Michele’s Gucci.

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Balenciaga appoints Demna Gvasalia as new creative director

October 7, 2015, 3:28 am

≫ Next: What I wore this week: glam geek

≪ Previous: Lace slippers, silk slips and late-night lingerie: fashion embraces hotel-room hotness

Following the departure of Alexander Wang, Balenciaga has appointed the Georgian designer to take over the creative direction of the Parisian label

As one fashion month finishes, news breaks that sets the scene for an industry shake-up next season. Balenciaga has announced the appointment of Demna Gvasalia, the 34-year-old designer of cult label Vetements, as the successor to Alexander Wang, who recently left the label after three years.

This is a daring and intriguing appointment. The fashion house founded by Cristóbal Balenciaga in Paris in 1937 is known for understated refinement: the soft curve of a cocoon coat, the precision of a bracelet-length sleeve, the cool femininity of a ballerina neckline. In Paris last week, at a Chinese restaurant in the scruffy Parisian quarter of Belleville, Vetements opened their show with a yellow T-shirt branded with the courier firm DHL and closed with a denim cut off micro mini skirt.

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What I wore this week: glam geek

October 9, 2015, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Style lessons from Donna Karan: seize power, work topless and forget convention

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‘The look is part bookworm, part superpower. Think Violet from the Incredibles, or Napoleon Dynamite’

We haven’t got all that long so, in the interests of saving time, may I assume you’ve all had the Margot Tenenbaum memo? How Gwyneth Paltrow’s mink-clad, barrette-wearing, chain-smoking character is fashion’s muse of the season, etc. Yup? Marvellous. Because wittering on about Margot is all well and good, but I’m not sure it gets us very far in terms of what we are actually going to wear. Are you going to buy, let alone wear, a huge great fur coat? Do you, hand on heart, think a Fred Perry tennis dress is going to be a useful item to have to hand when you come to get dressed on a wet Tuesday in October? Well then. Quite.

The glam geek look – pussybows and thick-rimmed specs, long skirts and goofy loafers – originated on the Gucci catwalk six months ago in a collection that Alessandro Michele said was not actually designed with any Tenenbaums in mind. It was not an obviously commercial trend. (As in, it won’t help you pull, it doesn’t make you look thin and it’s mostly in colours that make you look ill.) And while the show was a critical hit, few expected it to chime with the masses.

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Style lessons from Donna Karan: seize power, work topless and forget convention

October 12, 2015, 9:15 am

≫ Next: Mademoiselle Privé: exhibition brings Coco Chanel to life

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The New York design legend, whose memoir is published this week, proves that the fashion industry is a place where unconventional women thrive

“The thing women have yet to learn,” Roseanne Barr once said, “is that no one gives you the power. You just take it.” I thought of those words the other day, reading about the memoir Donna Karan will publish this week. Karan set up her own label in 1984, after being fired from a job at Anne Klein; she says what she mostly remembers of that time is terror, not excitement. She sold the company 27 years later for $643m, although she almost lost her nerve and backed out of signing the papers at the 11th hour. In other words, Karan achieved what she did not because she possessed the supreme self-confidence that usually marks the alpha overachievers, but while having self-doubt as well as self-belief. She was a normal person and she took the power anyway.

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Mademoiselle Privé: exhibition brings Coco Chanel to life

October 12, 2015, 1:11 pm

≫ Next: Christopher Kane stripped bare

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Karl Lagerfeld’s vision of designer steers Saatchi gallery exhibition which brings brand’s history to life for the smartphone generation

Mademoiselle Privé, the Saatchi Gallery exhibition about the life and legacy of Coco Chanel, includes a short film made by Karl Lagerfeld imagining an encounter between him and the woman who founded Chanel.

Coco, played by Geraldine Chaplin, wakes on the sofa of her Rue Cambon apartment after forty years and confronts Lagerfeld about his work. “What do you think you are doing?” she asks, to which he replies “I am keeping you alive.”

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Christopher Kane stripped bare

October 13, 2015, 10:39 am

≫ Next: From Victoria Beckham to Erdem: the British Fashion Awards nominees

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Britain’s biggest fashion star began studying the body as a child by drawing his sisters. Now, life drawings and art therapy inspire his latest collections

Christopher Kane is quoting Winston Churchill to me. This is not how I thought this interview would go. Kane is the brightest star of British fashion, Donatella Versace’s Glaswegian golden boy, a 33-year-old who takes inspiration from bondage and his school science textbooks and wins every fashion award going.

We are here to talk about his art-inspired autumn /winter collection, Lovers’ Lace, and about the life-drawing class he is hosting at his Mayfair boutique this week to celebrate Frieze. We are expressly not here to talk about the tough year he has had personally, having lost his mother in February; his team have politely asked me not to broach this, and so I have just offered up a gingerly worded question about how, as a designer whose collections always been very personal, he has coped with the pressures of work this year.

Jeremy Irons is so hot in that film it’s unbelievable. It was amazing. A bit, you know, sado

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From Victoria Beckham to Erdem: the British Fashion Awards nominees

October 15, 2015, 1:01 am

≫ Next: What I wore this week: over-the-knee boots

≪ Previous: Christopher Kane stripped bare

Victoria Beckham and Jourdan Dunn are among those in the running for gongs at this year’s British Fashion Awards

Hidden in the small print of the list of nominees for this year’s British Fashion Awards comes official endorsement of Victoria Beckham’s entry into the top tier of the industry: Beckham is one of the three candidates for this year’s top gong of womenswear designer of the year.

Beckham has twice previously been awarded brand of the year, in 2011 and 2014, and is a three-times nominee for the same award, but this is her first shot at the main prize. Seven years after her first collection, it represents acknowledgment of her label as a creative force as well as a commercial one.

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What I wore this week: over-the-knee boots

October 16, 2015, 5:00 am

≫ Next: When is it socially acceptable to wear black tights?

≪ Previous: From Victoria Beckham to Erdem: the British Fashion Awards nominees

‘If you choose to go about your day dressed like Julia Roberts in the opening scenes of Pretty Woman, then go you’

I know that whingeing about the hard life of a fashion editor isn’t a good look, but it is genuinely quite hard to write about how to wear this season’s over-the-knee boots. Because – can we take this off the record? – the point about over-the-knee boots is how to wear them without looking slutty. That’s the thought that goes through my mind.

But I can’t write about that, because to do so would basically suggest that looking slutty is intrinsically bad, that to dress provocatively is a crime or a character flaw. And that would be quite wrong, and not what I mean at all. If you choose to go about your day dressed like Julia Roberts in the opening scenes of Pretty Woman, then go you, because everyone knows she looks way better then than after she’s had the dullsville Beverly Hills makeover.

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When is it socially acceptable to wear black tights?

October 19, 2015, 10:46 am

≫ Next: Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian and Cecil the lion: the ultimate 2015 Halloween costumes

≪ Previous: What I wore this week: over-the-knee boots

When – or if – you wear black tights reveals a lot about your status, age, class and self-image. And it signals just how much you are prepared to suffer for your look

The million-dollar fashion question, the one I’m asked every day without fail from the third week of August for three months, concerns the date from which it is socially acceptable to wear black opaques. To which the simple answer is that the rule is the same for black tights as for oysters: only when there is an R in the month.

Quick shout out to the fishmongers, who are at this very moment are no doubt mobilising to point out that it’s not that simple: I know. (Something about breeding seasons or refrigeration; whatever.)

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Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian and Cecil the lion: the ultimate 2015 Halloween costumes

October 20, 2015, 9:59 am

≫ Next: Balmain x H&M: the high-street's answer to super-glam partywear

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Ironic lolz are in for this year’s fright night. Dress like a sexy witch if you want. Here are other ideas ...

Unless you pricked your finger on a spindle and fell asleep in a tower for the past century, you will have noticed that Halloween is a pretty major deal these days. The days when autumnal party thrills meant catherine wheels and toffee apples are long gone, my friend: fireworks are over and ironic lolz are in. And yes, you need a costume. And no, that cat-ear headband you’ve had hanging around since Katy Perry wore one in 2013 will not cut it, because that was 2013 and modern Halloween is all about showing the world that you are up to speed on your internet memes. Essentially, this is where all those lunchtimes spent aimlessly sucking up clickbait pay off. Here are 13 (geddit!) ideas to get you started:

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Balmain x H&M: the high-street's answer to super-glam partywear

October 21, 2015, 5:13 am

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Olivier Rousteing’s forthcoming collection for high street brand H&M is a riot of beads, gold and (fairly) affordable partywear

The aesthetic of the Parisian house of Balmain embraces the pearl-encrusted pomp of the courts of Henry VIII, the lethal shark-fin shoulders of a Carrington cocktail party in Dynasty, and the megawatt sex appeal of the Kardashians. This is fashion at its most brazen.

Which goes some way to explaining how Balmain has the front to put a £400 price tag on an H&M dress. When the high street diffusion Balmain x H&M collection goes on sale on 5 November – the final push of a campaign masterminded by designer Olivier Rousteing and slugged out on the internet via the social media firepower of his photogenic Balmain army of supermodels – the collection will include a dress embroidered from neck to hem in three lengths of cylindrical black and white bugle beads and thousands of tiny gold and diamante gems, arranged in an intricate and figure-flattering pattern, which will sell for £399.99.

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