Why Botticelli's Venus is still fashion's favourite muse

March 2, 2016, 11:31 pm

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Erotic, youthful, ethereal: the Botticelli beauty who, 500 years on, continues to inspires Lady Gaga, Andy Warhol and Dolce & Gabbana

How long is a good innings as an iconic beauty, these days? Thirty years, like Cindy Crawford? Sixty-five, like Sophia Loren?

How about 530 years? That’s how long Botticelli’s women have been adored, desired and emulated. They have been muses to Bob Dylan and James Bond, Andy Warhol and Lady Gaga. Botticelli’s Venus, rising from her seashell, is a poster girl not just for the Uffizi, but in teenage bedrooms all over the world. (She even appears on an Italian 10 cent euro coin.) Flora from the same painting inspired Elsa Schiaparelli in 1938, while the figure of Flora as seen in Botticelli’s Primavera was brought to life on the Valentino catwalk last year.

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Chloé shows us a post-girly world

March 3, 2016, 1:03 pm

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A show inspired by Anne-France Dautheville, the first woman to motorcycle solo around the globe, gave Paris fashion week its first out-of-the-box hit

What has happened at the Paris-based, English-led house of Chloé is a microcosm of what has happened to fashion. Until a year or so ago, Chloé turned out solid, commercial collections based on a classically French, ultra-feminine style of dressing: blouses and elegant trousers, tousled hair and expensive sunglasses. Chic and pretty with a catch-all air of non-specific nostalgia, Chloé was bohemian in the most vanilla sense.

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Vetements show is cathedral of raw energy

March 3, 2016, 3:10 pm

≫ Next: Marc Jacobs: ‘I have the word Shameless tattooed on my chest'

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The most talked-about show of Paris fashion week heightens anticipation for Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga debut

The most talked about show at this Paris fashion week was neither chic nor pretty. There were no supermodels and zero red carpet gowns. But the crowds came ten-deep outside the American cathedral and half the front row – which included Kanye West – were wearing the label.

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Marc Jacobs: ‘I have the word Shameless tattooed on my chest'

March 3, 2016, 11:01 pm

≫ Next: What I wore this week: fancy tights

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The distinguished designer’s return to New York has been triumphant. Here he talks about sobriety, social media and how clothes help articulate our feelings

“You can ask me anything. I’m an open book. What do you want to know?”

That, right there, is who Marc Jacobs is. Maybe he doesn’t mean it quite literally – what smart, self-respecting 52-year-old is going to share his deepest secrets with a journalist he barely knows? – but the sentiment is heartfelt, no doubt about that. I Want Your Love, Chic’s 1979 disco classic, is playing in his office, seven floors above Spring Street in New York’s SoHo. Jacobs lights a cigarette and leans back in his chair. “I have the word ‘Shameless’ tattooed on my chest. I want to be as honest as I possibly can,” he says. “I sleep better at night.”

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What I wore this week: fancy tights

March 4, 2016, 5:30 am

≫ Next: Stylewatch: Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch on their wedding day

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If bare legs is at root a New York thing – cover-girl gloss underpinned with balls of steel – then the vogue for lace is very Parisian

I know from experience that nothing annoys you, my beloved readers, more than the suggestion that you might consider leaving the house without black opaque tights while there is an “r” in the month. I can wax lyrical about cocktail hour athleisure or hold forth on the preeminence of ponchos, and y’all are the very model of liberal tolerance. But breathe one word against a life lived in 70 denier, and I am met with fire and brimstone.

I am neither passionately in favour of nor vehemently opposed to opaque black tights. Sometimes I wear them. They have a no-nonsense sleekness, like blacked-out windows, that fits with how I feel about getting dressed lots of the time. But with some fabrics and colours, that same blacked-out window vibe can kill an outfit that needs the flesh and blood warmth of skin to lift it – this effect is magnified on camera, which is why I rarely wear opaques for these photographs.

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Stylewatch: Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch on their wedding day

March 4, 2016, 7:22 am

≫ Next: Five front row trends and what it means for your wardrobe

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Sunny blue and a trench coat. It’s true love, guys!

How to confound those cynics who raise an eyebrow at the wedding of supermodel Jerry Hall to a billionaire 35 years her senior? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s not by taking a handbag the size and heft of a budget briefcase along when you say “I Do”. To be fair, this is not Hall’s wedding dress – we can look forward something rather more romantic on the steps of St Bride’s tomorrow – but one might have expected a couple with the combined media expertise of the new Mr & Mrs Murdoch to have been prepared for a level of scrutiny to greet their first photo as a married couple, and dressed in such a way as to present an appropriately romantic image. Murdoch looks rather smart in his sunny blue suit, whereas Hall looks all set for a shopping trip with the girls to Bicester Village. But the trench coat is elegant – and the knot is indeed tied, ha ha.

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Five front row trends and what it means for your wardrobe

March 4, 2016, 7:41 am

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Paris fashion week’s frow is awash with the Talented Mr Ripley loafer, the frayed-hem jeans and high-rise polo necks

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Dior's Paris catwalk upstaged by Blenheim Palace coup

March 4, 2016, 10:11 am

≫ Next: Easy Riders, anoraks and patchworked jeans – the rise of post-chic Paris fashion

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Label confirms it will exhibit next cruise collection at the Oxfordshire country house – 58 years after its last show there

It is a symptom of the current state of flux in the fashion industry that Dior’s autumn/winter womenswear show – the traditional biannual showpiece of the house, staged in a lavish mirrored venue in the Louvre according to the long-established calendar of Paris fashion week – was upstaged by the announcement of another Dior show.

The house will exhibit its cruise collection in Blenheim Palace on 31 May, two days before Gucci stages an equally blockbusting show in London’s Westminster Abbey. The news puts the historic buildings of England centre stage in the cruise catwalk schedule, which is rapidly becoming the most glamorous and high-profile season of the fashion year.

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Easy Riders, anoraks and patchworked jeans – the rise of post-chic Paris fashion

March 8, 2016, 8:52 am

≫ Next: Can you really wear pyjamas to a party?

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The most Instagrammed piece on the catwalk this week is a green Balenciaga anorak, while, in the front row, Kanye West is the new Catherine Deneuve. How did Paris get so hard-edged?

All you really need to know, to get your head around Paris fashion week, is this: the most lusted-after, Instagram-liked piece on the catwalk this week was an anorak. At Balenciaga, new designer Demna Gvasalia’s vision for the most ultra-chic, super-refined Paris label was distilled in an oversized anorak in a garish green-and-blue colour combination which was a long, long way from the pale greys of Avenue Montaigne or the matt black of the Boulevard Saint Germain. And the audience loved it.

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Can you really wear pyjamas to a party?

March 12, 2016, 2:00 am

≫ Next: How I dressed as a student: our writers on what they once wore

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The new rules are: there are no rules. But is it really OK to wear lingerie to the office or a tracksuit to the shows? Jess Cartner-Morley rips up the dress code

Earlier this year, when the headteacher of a Darlington primary school wrote a letter warning parents that the wearing of pyjamas was not welcome at her school gate, it felt like the last gasp of a dying age. The dress code is dead, having been slowly starved of oxygen by the ubiquity of informality. We are instantly on first-name terms, and no one dresses for dinner. A whole new industry around athleisure has sprung up, selling clothes you can wear all day Saturday, from yoga to dinner.

Hurrah! Right? Actually, I am not so sure. The white tie and starched pinnies of Downton Abbey might have been a bind, but at least everyone knew where they stood. Dress codes have now been ditched for a kind of rampant individualism, in which dressing for any occasion – work, a party, lunch, the gym – is a contest with no rules, an every-man-for-himself brawl.

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How I dressed as a student: our writers on what they once wore

March 13, 2016, 11:04 pm

≫ Next: What I wore this week: a winning outfit from two staples

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From M&S sweaters covered in fag burns to channelling the Charlatans and All Saints, every student has their distinctive look. Here, five Guardian writers discuss their college clobber

University is the time for experimentation. As you cross the rubicon of your student hall, your body twinges with the possibility of reinvention. You are able to create a whole new you, a you that is open to new experiences, opinions and philosophies. But the reality is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it journey into fad-dom. It’s a time when you will try veganism, brew your own beer and experiment endlessly with your personal fashion style.

As Channel 4’s student hit Fresh Meat nears its end, we asked some of our writers to take us back to their -undergraduate look.

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What I wore this week: a winning outfit from two staples

March 18, 2016, 6:00 am

≫ Next: What I wore this week: a summer dress you can actually wear

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Bring together a polo neck and a spaghetti-strap dress for a bona fide spring trend

I love buying summer dresses, because they remind me of being on holiday. So I am always on the lookout for ways to adapt them, since I have ended up with a warm-weather wardrobe stuck on the wrong latitude.

Making summer clothes work year-round is not as easy as it sounds. Theoretically, you just put on a summer dress and then layer a cardigan on top. But no, doesn’t work. Layering done like that looks like a compromise, not an outfit. Clothes have to look deliberate to look dynamic.

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What I wore this week: a summer dress you can actually wear

March 25, 2016, 6:00 am

≫ Next: Take the money and run: the rise of the £1,000 tracksuit

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Catwalk fashion has a grown-up, wearable approach to what a summer dress should look like in 2016

I don’t know about you, but skipping through meadows chasing butterflies is not something that takes up a huge proportion of my time, not even on bank holiday weekends in spring. Am I the only one whose leisure hours do not stretch out beneath fluffy clouds, like Lily James in a Disney film, with a schedule that reads: pull on flimsy dress, skip around under fluffy clouds, lie down in long grass for picturesque nap?

I ask only because I had a free half hour the other day and quite fancied a quick retail hit, but was thwarted by the fact that every dress on the shop floor was from the chasing-butterflies school of summer dressing – pale, floral, flimsy, with ruffles and ribbons just asking to trail prettily on a light breeze.

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Take the money and run: the rise of the £1,000 tracksuit

March 25, 2016, 6:31 am

≫ Next: Temporarily break up with your clothes (and other ways to spring clean your wardrobe)

≪ Previous: What I wore this week: a summer dress you can actually wear

Previously the uniform of the underdog and the outsider, the tracksuit is this year’s power suit. But if you want the hottest brands, you’re going to need your credit card …

The rules of power dressing have been turned upside down with the rise of 2016’s most-wanted two piece suit. It will set you back around £800, and ensure kudos from the cognoscenti – but the similarities with Italian tailoring end there. This year’s power suit is a tracksuit.

A hooded cotton polyester sweatshirt and matching cuffed tracksuit bottoms by the white-hot Paris label Vetements will set you back a cool £790, but the set is already sold out in most sizes. The singer and actress Selena Gomez, who with 71.3 million followers is currently the most followed person on Instagram, and who recently enlisted the services of top Hollywood stylist Kate Young to overhaul her image, was photographed in this tracksuit at fashion week; Rihanna has been snapped wearing it at the airport.

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Temporarily break up with your clothes (and other ways to spring clean your wardrobe)

March 31, 2016, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Stylewatch: Beyoncé launches Ivy Park in a leotard

≪ Previous: Take the money and run: the rise of the £1,000 tracksuit

Spring cleaning your wardrobe can be a bit of a chore, but from breaking up with a top to operating a one-in, one-out policy, it’s worth making a dent

Hands up who needs some motivational help to spring clean their wardrobe? *Puts own hand up*

Help is at hand. Fanny Moizant, founder of fashion resale site Vestiaire Collective, is a woman who practises what she preaches, clearing out her wardrobe and selling most of it on at the end of every season. And while I’m never going to be that woman, I want to break out of my current state, which is that I open my full-to-bursting wardrobe and think: I’m not wearing any of this old rubbish. But then when it comes to a clearout, I hoard it all anyway.

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Stylewatch: Beyoncé launches Ivy Park in a leotard

March 31, 2016, 12:30 pm

≫ Next: Beyoncé stamps her unmistakable brand on sportswear fashion

≪ Previous: Temporarily break up with your clothes (and other ways to spring clean your wardrobe)

The singer’s long-awaited clothing line is imminent. Read right, this image – posted on her Instagram – tells us what to expect.

Hmmm, are you going to the gym tonight? Take a look at Beyoncé in a leotard. I bet you’re going to the gym tonight now.

Bey just officially launched her long-awaited Ivy Park athleisure line, which goes on sale in two weeks. The first official shot shows her in a black leotard with the Ivy Park logo, and white piped edges.

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Beyoncé stamps her unmistakable brand on sportswear fashion

April 1, 2016, 7:19 am

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Singer’s new Ivy Park label is a fusion of empowerment and enjoyment, just as she is

It is a stone-cold fact about the modern world that where there are emotional buttons to be pressed, there is a lucrative business opportunity. The festive season, for instance, is now officially ushered in by a fight to the death between retailers over who can make the general public cry the most with their Christmas ad.

So it says something about how tightly wound we are about women’s bodies and fitness that even campaigns for running leggings are conceived with that I’ve-got-something-in-my-eye feeling in mind. A commercial for the activewear label Under Armour, entitled I Will What I Want, shows American ballerina Misty Copeland in a dance studio and on stage, soundtracked by the rejection letters she received at the beginning of her career; it has clocked up 10m views on YouTube. The Adidas All In For #mygirls campaign, the Nike Better for It spots and Always’ award-winning #LikeAGirl campaign have all hit the same emotional sweetspot of physical health and female empowerment. Fourth-wave feminism is on a workout high, while still uneasy about how much female self-esteem is bound up with our bodies.

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What I wore this week: a pie-crust blouse

April 8, 2016, 5:00 am

≫ Next: What I wore this week: a boy/girl divide top | Jess Cartner-Morley

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I almost gave up on this blouse. What you can’t see in the picture is the pile, out of shot, of things I tried on with it and gave up on

I can’t pull off “ironic” fashion. Man, I wish I could, because I love it on other people. I see Chloë Sevigny photographed at an East Village party in high-waisted bleached “mom” jeans, and I want to be her. I go gooey-eyed just looking at Alexa Chung rocking a pie-crust blouse in the front row. But on me, it never quite works. It’s partly an age thing, but not only. (Sevigny is 41.) Maybe I have the wrong hair for irony. Or the wrong eyebrows? Somehow, the ironic, awkward, tongue-in-cheek note I’m visualising as very-Miuccia-Prada just looks plain awkward, on me.

But I am nothing if not a trier, which is why I’m here today in not just any pie-crust blouse, but a pie-crust blouse designed by Alexa Chung for Marks & Spencer. It goes on sale on 13 April, a date that will no doubt go down in fashion history as Peak Irony. To be honest, though, it nearly didn’t happen. I almost gave up on this blouse. What you can’t see in the picture is the pile, out of shot, of things I tried on with it and gave up on. High-waisted pale Mom jeans, which brought out the nursery-school-assistant-Princess-Di tones of the blouse, not in a quirky way, just in a weird way. A pair of stiff culottes, whose proportions made me look like a lamb chop wearing one of those white fringed paper hula skirts with which butchers ornament racks of lamb.

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What I wore this week: a boy/girl divide top | Jess Cartner-Morley

April 15, 2016, 5:00 am

≫ Next: The Queen at 90: a constant style icon

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In 2016, when we have men modelling skirts in womenswear ad campaigns, making a big deal about traditional sartorial gender divides seems passé

Is this a shirt or a blouse? Hmmm. It is cotton and crisp, with a shape dictated by its own seams and creases, rather than by the body wearing it, and it has blue stripes, all of which say: shirt. On the other hand, its primary distinguishing feature is a large bow, which is most definitely blouse-territory, and said bow throws the centre of gravity of the piece off-centre, which again says blouse, rather than shirt. (Masculine clothing tends to be more symmetrical than women’s. A shirt is embellished with a straight-down-the-middle necktie, in contrast to the floppier collars and brooch potential of a feminine blouse.)

Dunno. What do you think? Really? OK, so it’s a bit of both. So this is the point, normally, where we dream up a name for this new shirt-blouse hybrid. Um, the blirt? The shouse? Needs work. And anyway, not the point. In 2016, when we have men modelling skirts in Louis Vuitton womenswear ad campaigns, making a big deal about traditional sartorial boy-girl divides seems a little passé. Much more modern to shrug and say they’re just clothes, right?

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The Queen at 90: a constant style icon

April 21, 2016, 5:38 am

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As the Queen enters her 10th decade, we look back at the classic, unchanging style that makes her a beacon of style

That there is absolutely nothing unexpected about the Queen’s choice of clothes to mark her landmark 90^th birthday is precisely what is extraordinary. This Keep Calm and Carry On consistency is what makes her unique among modern figures. The merely famous parade their power by the impact they can make with a new look – Taylor Swift with her bleached crop on the latest cover of American Vogue, Justin Bieber’s dreadlocks– but the Queen demonstrates her status by staying exactly the same. Instead of relying on the attention-grabbing power of constant transformation, her image works a deeper magic. By never changing, she blurs the distinction between the flesh-and-blood woman, and the head on the postage stamp.

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