What I wore this week: a naval jacket | Jess Cartner-Morley

January 27, 2017, 5:00 am

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The abbreviated shape looks more modern with trousers than a hip-length blazer, and adds briskness worn over dresses

Fashion craves newness, which is a problem when winter shows no sign of shoving off. I’m happy in polo necks and never fall out of love with ankle boots, but I’m swiftly running out of patience with coats. This problem is partly caused by the madness that is August in the modern fashion industry, when the shops are full of coats months before we need them. If we could push back the start of coat season this year until October, it might not feel like it has quite so thoroughly outstayed its welcome.

But back to the here and now. What you don’t want to do at this stage is buy another coat. You’ll get too little wear out of it to justify its purchase, but too much for it to feel new and exciting next autumn. More cheering to think about a new jacket. Because, while you will have to take a coat when you leave the house for the day for ages, there will be weekend days in the nearish future when the sun comes out, it’s mild, and you can go on a local errand without a proper coat, secure in the knowledge that you won’t get caught out shivering at a bus stop after dark.

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V&A hoping for another fashion blockbuster with Balenciaga show

February 1, 2017, 7:30 am

≫ Next: What I wore this week: a trenchcoat | Jess Cartner-Morley

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Museum aims to capitalise on label’s current buzz with celebration of original designer’s ‘uncompromising creativity’

To Christian Dior, he was “the master of us all”. Oscar de la Renta believed he was the only fashion designer “who never did anything in bad taste”, and his protege, Hubert de Givenchy, called him “my religion”.

While Cristóbal Balenciaga is revered throughout fashion history, his name has been overshadowed on the world stage by the blockbuster names of Dior and Chanel. But Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion – which opens at the V&A on 27 May– aims to change that, channelling the fashion week buzz around Balenciaga’s current avant-garde designer, Demna Gvasalia, in order to make 2017, the house’s centenary year, a fashion moment.

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What I wore this week: a trenchcoat | Jess Cartner-Morley

February 3, 2017, 4:59 am

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The dream is to wear a loose trench over loose separates, and to make it look airy in a bold, uncluttered, modern way

I spend a lot of time with ridiculously well-dressed women, in my work. But it’s not the ones rocking skin-tight Alaïa and heels, stopping six lanes of traffic as they arrive for breakfast at the Wolseley, who make me weak at the knees with girl-crush envy. It’s the ones with the effortless, understated style, who wear loose, neutral-toned separates that don’t scream fashion, and turn them into style magic. The ones who wear baggy trousers and look like they are in a Céline advert, rather than spend a grand in Céline and look like they’re in their painting clothes. The type who, when they drape a sweater round their shoulders, look like Grace Kelly strolling to a late-summer dinner in Portofino, rather than like a middle-aged woman who frets about coming down with a cold.

Because I’m not naturally this type of uber woman, I have a love/hate relationship with the trenchcoat. I was quite good at them back in the days when you wore them over a fitted dress. That was easy, because the neat shape underneath was a foil for the flapping lapels, and if you got in a crumpled tizzy you could belt the trenchcoat to smarten things up. But the sheath dress is well and truly over, and these days the understated types wear their trenches open over shirts and peg-leg trousers.

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So Cosmo: Devil Wears Prada for the Kardashian generation

February 4, 2017, 1:59 am

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A new reality series goes behind the scenes at Cosmopolitan and finds rival Carrie Bradshaws, a formidable editor-in-chief and a dash of tacky glitz. Sound familiar?

Opening shot of high heels clicking across a Manhattan street. Camera pans back to a slender woman of a certain age with an expensive, slightly avant-garde hairstyle tapping out emails on her phone as she enters an imposing glass-fronted office. Cut to same woman striding out of lift 60 floors up, powering through an open-plan office, firing off orders about which Manolos to put Jen in for the cover try.

The glossy magazine behind-the-scenes doc is a fully fledged screen genre all of its own. What started with The Devil Wears Prada spawned The September Issue and Absolutely Fashion: Inside Vogue. Only the White House and the Tudor court have proved greater catnip for the modern storyteller than the glass-walled office of an editrix.

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How Beyoncé slayed the lingerie set – just in time for Valentine’s Day

February 7, 2017, 9:01 am

≫ Next: What I wore this week: a yellow dress | Jess Cartner-Morley

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Matching underwear is over. It’s all about aspirational underwear for the female gaze

Beyoncé being the spiritual leader of 21st-century womankind – I lose track of whether the paperwork has been ratified by the ladies wing of the papal conclave, but I think we can take it as read – when she makes an announcement, the world listens.

She made an announcement last week. You may have heard about it already. Being pregnant with twins was part of it, but it is another matter that concerns us here. In an aubergine bra and powder-blue knickers, she effectively pronounced the death of matching lingerie, dropping the bomb in the white-hot centre of the lingerie market a fortnight before Valentine’s Day. In an image with psychedelic arthouse styling calculated for maximum global reach, Beyoncé chose underwear with top and bottom halves in different colours, different styles, and different labels.

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What I wore this week: a yellow dress | Jess Cartner-Morley

February 10, 2017, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Raf Simons bids to make Calvin Klein great again with cultural popcorn

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The yellow dress is to the millennials of our uncertain times what red lipstick was to the women of the Blitz

There is a lot to be said for wearing something different. Standing by your principles is laudable in other arenas, but there is no virtue to be signalled by wearing navy, and in fashion, as in food, you miss half the fun if you refuse to try anything new. And the new new thing, is a yellow dress. It started almost a year ago, with Alicia Vikander’s strapless Louis Vuitton dress and Beyoncé’s (eponymous) Lemonade ruffles. Emma Stone wore one in La La Land and Natalie Portman to the Golden Globes. Emma Watson is incoming, in Beauty And The Beast.

I have no explanation for why the yellow dress is happening right now, beyond the fact that we are living in a time when the upset has become the new normal. Do not adjust your sets: the world is wearing yellow. Also, there is a hunger for good news. Optimism feels vital, and the sunny spirit of the yellow dress is the ultimate in dopamine dressing. The yellow dress is to the millennials of our uncertain times what red lipstick was to the women of the Blitz.

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Raf Simons bids to make Calvin Klein great again with cultural popcorn

February 10, 2017, 11:13 am

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The firm’s design chief has staked a claim on its place at the heart of Americana with Fonz boots, flag colours and prairie quilting

Raf Simons’ mission at New York fashion week is simple: make Calvin Klein great again. In the cultural battlefield that is the contemporary US, a sleeping giant just woke up to stake a claim for what Americana looks like now.

Calvin Klein is an American icon. Back in the glory days of the USA that Bruce Springsteen sang about in 1984, the name transcended jeans and underwear to become a byword for youth, sex and style. It morphed into part of the vernacular, from Brooke Shields’s infamous “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins” ad to a cameo role in Back to the Future. The newly appointed Belgian designer Simons, fresh from success at Christian Dior and Jil Sander, intends to put Calvin Klein back at the heart of Americana.

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Victoria Beckham's New York show restores some sparkle to family brand

February 12, 2017, 11:26 am

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Her catwalk show is now enough of an event that it can’t be overshadowed by scandal over her husband’s hacked emails

Brand Beckham has had a rocky time of late. In New York, it fell to the fashion branch of this modern family empire to restore some sparkle after the hacked emails that threatened David Beckham’s clean-cut image.

It is a reflection of how serious a player she has become in the fashion industry that – rather than being overshadowed by the scandal – a Victoria Beckham catwalk show at New York fashion week is now enough of an event to help shore up the family image.

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Trousers walk it on Bafta's red-carpet style parade

February 12, 2017, 12:57 pm

≫ Next: 'Up-to-date, but it doesn't scream fashion' – the verdict on Samantha Cameron's clothing line

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From Emma Stone to Meryl Streep, conventional dresses were out, with a ‘drouser’ the garment of choice for the politically and fashion conscious

Red-carpet fashion is traditionally a safe seat for the play-it-safe-glamour party, but in the turbulent times of 2017, even the frocks look different.

The fashion news of the night at the Baftas was the appearance of matching trousers under Emma Stone’s Chanel dress. The look – complete with shoes and one pearl anklet – was taken directly from Chanel’s most recent haute couture show. The only detail changed from the catwalk was that Stone, perhaps following Coco Chanel’s own style directive that before leaving the house the chic woman should try to edit one accessory, wore the outfit without its wide silver belt.

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'Up-to-date, but it doesn't scream fashion' – the verdict on Samantha Cameron's clothing line

February 13, 2017, 5:32 am

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Having left No 10, the former Smythson designer has launched her own label, Cefinn. Is it more Vogue than true blue?

I will still never forgive Samantha Cameron’s husband for calling that referendum, but I would definitely wear some of these clothes. The Zip Funnel Neck Midi Dress in Khaki (£290) is a good shape and length, has elbow-length sleeves that work well for daytime, and a pleasingly JW Anderson-ish zip from collarbone to hip. I am also quite keen on the Long Sleeve Peplum Top (£190), shown with jeans on the website. The Tailored Stretch Wool Blend Maxi Culottes (£210) look elegant and wearable.

There will be no scrum for these clothes. They do not scream fashion. They are clothes to quietly make the point that the wearer is up-to-date on modern life, generally speaking. They are mostly navy, black and khaki, accented with poppy red. (Oddly, there is one print, a window-pane check. This perhaps should have been edited out.) They are aspirational in a grown-up, lifestyle-orientated way. Like the right marble kitchen surface, or a Stiffkey Blue front door.

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What New York fashion week tells us about Trump’s US

February 14, 2017, 10:22 am

≫ Next: What I wore this week: statement sleeves | Jess Cartner-Morley

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From Raf Simons’ patriotic debut for Calvin Klein to Victoria Beckham’s in-control femininity – New York has shown the world a vision of a different US

For much of last year, the fashion industry’s most contentious issue was whether to move to a See Now Buy Now model, in which February’s shows would showcase spring fashion, rather than autumn. What innocent days those seem now. By the time this New York fashion week started, there was only one timestamp that mattered. This was Trump’s US, season one.

When the White House is publicly squabbling with Nordstrom on the first day of the catwalk season, there is no escaping that shopping is a political act. In this mini-universe, the powerful front row seats are still occupied by Hillary’s people – Anna Wintour, Sarah Jessica Parker, even Huma Abedin– and this week was an opportunity for this New York to present a different US to the world, which it did. I liked Prabal Gurung’s T-shirt printed with “NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED”, and the sweaters at Public School with “Make America New York.” Wintour, Diane von Furstenberg and other grandees wore Fashion Stands With Planned Parenthood badges, and Jonathan Simkhai handed out T-shirts printed “FEMINIST AF”.

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What I wore this week: statement sleeves | Jess Cartner-Morley

February 17, 2017, 5:00 am

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The new sleeve cuts through the white noise of endless versions of clothes we already have

I really, really love sleeves. With the caveat that this is fashion, so don’t hold me to it next year. Right now, they are a newfound passion. Some weeks I wear the things that demand our attention because they are on trend, and I smile in the photos but then I write rude things about why you shouldn’t wear them. But today I feel unadulterated love for the interesting sleeve.

There is an uncomplicated joy in a trend that pulls focus away from the body on to the actual clothes. My least favourite type of fashion is the kind that is talking in code about being thin. A crop top is technically a fashion statement, but really you’re talking about your abs. This is as treacherous and tedious as clean eating posing as something to do with vitamin intake. The statement sleeve is free of sneaky body-related agenda.

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Princess Diana's fashion legacy to be celebrated at Kensington Palace

February 17, 2017, 7:00 am

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Twenty years after her death, Diana: Her Fashion Story charts evolution of her image from teenage ingenue to international icon

Twenty years after their flower-covered gates became her unofficial shrine, an exhibition at Kensington Palace reframes Diana’s story, from the tale of a tragic princess to that of an empowered modern woman who shaped her identity.

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Fashion folk celebrate inclusivity in shadow of Brexit and Trump

February 17, 2017, 11:51 am

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Launch event and first catwalk show salute city’s diversity, as pragmatism comes to fore after industry shock at political upsets

London fashion week is really in the entertainment business these days. The livestreaming of Burberry’s upcoming catwalk show on Monday evening is being trailed with the kind of full-page magazine advertising that would befit the pilot of a buzzy new TV drama.

The extra-wide pavement outside the new Aldwych catwalk venue has been commandeered as a stage on which street style stars parade for their insatiable Instagram audience.

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Roland Mouret brings high-voltage to a grey Sunday in fashion week

February 19, 2017, 9:53 am

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Decade on from his Galaxy dress and just showing his collections in Paris, UK-based designer in celebratory mood in London

A decade on from creating the hit Galaxy dress that became a defining look of the noughties, Roland Mouret has celebrated the 20th anniversary of his label by bringing his catwalk show home from Paris to London for fashion week.

And that dress was back, too – in spirit, at least. “When I think about the Galaxy dress now, I see that it was all about the women who wanted to wear it,” Mouret said backstage after the show at the National Theatre on Sunday, referring to the curvy, back-zipped dresses that made him a star.

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Lady Macbeth cuts a swathe across London fashion week

February 20, 2017, 7:20 am

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Formidable women influence proceedings at runway shows for Berardi, Erdem and Roksanda

The namedropping is pretty highbrow at London fashion week these days.

Lady Macbeth, Mark Rothko, John F Kennedy, Virginia Woolf and Eugène Delacroix were all referenced by designers before 11am on Monday morning, and Michael Nyman was there in person, playing the piano in a piece composed to accompany the Roksanda collection. Burberry are making Henry Moore the star attraction at their show later on in the day, with a catwalk that will double as the opening night of a sculpture exhibition.

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Burberry joins forces with Henry Moore as label becomes a creative force

February 20, 2017, 1:52 pm

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Christopher Bailey of Burberry says Moore inspired a collection to ‘sculpt the body’ at show which doubled up as opening for Moore exhibition

To the left of Henry Moore’s monumental bronze sculpture Mother and Child was Penelope Cruz; to the right was Tinie Tempah. Anna Wintour was seated across the runway from Draped Reclining Mother and Baby. Welcome to the new age of highbrow ambition at London fashion week.

“In the human figure one can express more completely one’s feelings about the world than in any other way.” Moore was talking about sculpture, but Christopher Bailey of Burberry talks in similar terms about fashion.

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Tweed, thorny florals and Lady Macbeth: fashion goes for a hard Brexit

February 21, 2017, 10:45 am

≫ Next: Milan fashion week: Gucci embraces its brilliant absurdity with fluid show

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London fashion week featured tartan, corsets and formidable women as a new take on British identity came into focus

I was early for Burberry on Monday evening, so as I waited I spent some time gazing at the monumental bronzes in the Henry Moore exhibition being hosted in the show space at Makers House. I’m no art critic, so what do I know, but they felt to me to be as much depictions of rolling hills and dales as they were of women. The graceful but uneven humps, the Durdle Door peepholes, the silent, gruff Jurassic grandeur. Surely, I thought, I’m looking at the British landscape, as well as a reclining nude? Moore’s wartime drawings of Londoners sleeping on tube station platforms have a straight-up Blitz spirit patriotism, but there is a sense of nationhood in these sculptures that reminded me of the radical roots of the ramblers and Stanley Baldwin talking about England in 1924: “The tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning ... the wild anemones in the woods in April.”

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Milan fashion week: Gucci embraces its brilliant absurdity with fluid show

February 22, 2017, 11:10 am

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Alessandro Michele’s collections, celebrating diversity and gender fluidity and featuring a fabulously mixed cast arrayed in geek chic, have the fans flocking

The current incarnation of Gucci is either completely absurd, or utterly brilliant. After two years with designer Alessandro Michele in charge, it is beginning to look as if it must be both.

The slogan T-shirts, Sesame Street colours, stick-on pearls, triangular silhouettes and woodland animals straight from nursery wallpaper do not adhere to any previously known rules of stylish dressing – and yet the label gains more fans with every season. In the last quarter of 2016, during which Michele’s third womenswear collection was on the shopfloor, growth accelerated from an already impressive 17% to a new high of 21%.

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Halima Aden: Milan fashion week's star of the season

February 23, 2017, 6:48 am

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The first hijab-wearing woman to be signed to IMG models, the Somali-American made her catwalk debut for Kanye West’s autumn/winter 2017 Yeezy collection. Now she’s stealing the show at Milan

A woman dressed in western clothes and a hijab is a common sight across Europe’s capital cities – a fact now reflected on the catwalk at Milan fashion week.

Halima Aden, a Somali-American model, is fast becoming fashion’s face of 2017, currently stealing the show at fashion week from the catwalk superstar Gigi Hadid.

Getting great tips from a supermodel sure does help ❤️ meeting @candicehuffine , @parisjackson , and @gigihadid on the set of @crfashionbook prepared me so much! I can't thank them enough for the warm hugs, kind words, and most of all AMAZING tips ❤️❤️

This is for you ❤️ #MuslimGirlsCan

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