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How to wear: ankle boots | Jess Cartner-Morley

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Interesting ankle boots turn a midi skirt or cropped trousers or jeans into an interesting look

I am starting to see what the Victorians meant about ankles. I have a bit of a thing for them myself these days. And it’s not just me: right now, they are a much-appreciated erogenous zone, sartorially speaking.

Ah, excellent point. You’ve noticed that you can’t actually see my ankles. But here’s the thing: you can see that I have ankles. Bear with me. What I mean is that you might notice my ankles, even though you can’t see them, because my skirt is of a length that shows ankle, rather than leg, so it points to these rather eye-catching boots. If I had been wearing this skirt five years ago, I would probably have worn it with dark-coloured high heels, because it wouldn’t have occurred to me to make ankles a focal point; but in 2019 it calls for a jazzy ankle boot.

Related: How to wear: the boat neckline | Jess Cartner-Morley

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Colour comeback: sunshine-yellow and fashion chemistry on the Golden Globes red carpet

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After the 2018 blackout, red-carpet stars revived vintage Hollywood style – though protest flared with many wearing ‘Time’s Up x2’ bracelets

Lady Gaga is not the first actor to wear Valentino on the red carpet, but she is probably the first to dye her hair blue to match her gown.

The award-season buzz that began around A Star Is Born last autumn pleased fans of fashion almost as much as it did movie fans, because of the intriguing prospect of seeing the world’s most fearless dresser on the biggest red carpets of them all. And Gaga’s first big moment as a nominated actor did not disappoint – at least on the fashion front.

By the standards of Gaga, who wore a dress made of raw steak to the MTV awards and red latex to meet the Queen, the periwinkle-blue Valentino ballgown she chose for the Globes was a relatively tame choice. Nonetheless, with a train longer than its height, the grandest of puff sleeves and a coordinated pastel up-do, it was a dress to steal any show.

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How to wear: smart-cold | Jess Cartner-Morley

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One can’t neglect standards just because the mercury dips. It’s too bad for morale

The trickiest dress code to get right isn’t smart-casual, it’s smart-cold. Smart-cold doesn’t get printed in invitations, but it is an unspoken dress code with which you will almost certainly have to grapple over the next two months. One can’t neglect standards just because the mercury dips. It’s too bad for morale.

It goes without saying that keeping warm is the most important issue here; smart-cold is never about shivering or wearing fewer clothes. But if you abandon all sartorial coordinates and dress only for warmth, piling on random layers and hats and scarves and gloves, you end up lumpy and bundled and chaotic. Snowman-who-got-dressed-in-the-dark is not a good look, and streamlining your outfit can help you feel more in control of your battle with the elements.

Related: How to wear: ankle boots | Jess Cartner-Morley

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Catherine Deneuve is selling her Yves Saint Laurent wardrobe – but that look will never go away

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The designer dressed the actor on and off-screen for decades. Although Deneuve is auctioning those outfits at Christie’s, they continue to inspire the likes of Versace and Burberry

Paris fashion week isn’t Paris fashion week without a sighting of Catherine Deneuve. In an ever-changing cast of nubile starlets, she is always there. Wearing a black patent-leather peacoat over a black polo neck at the Saint Laurent show, a year ago. Crossing the cobblestones of the Louvre in kitten heels to enter the Louis Vuitton show last September. Five minutes before the show is due to start you will likely find her outside, having a nonchalant cigarette; after it has finished, look backstage amid the gossip and the champagne.

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Victoria Beckham: ‘You have to be quite controlling’

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She juggles a global fashion brand, four children and one of the world’s most scrutinised marriages: how does the former Posh Spice keep the show on the road?

Along an Edward Hopper-esque cobblestone street two blocks from the Hudson river, outside a Brooklyn warehouse that is now a photographic studio the size of a baseball field, black SUVs are parked bumper to bumper. Inside, Mario Sorrenti, fashion royalty since he photographed a nude Kate Mossface down on a sofa for Calvin Klein’s Obsession in 1993, is perched on a wooden crate shooting the first Victoria Beckham X Reebok collection. Cara Taylor, the industry’s latest 17-year-old modelling sensation, a high school volleyball champ from Alabama whose fine curtain of wheat-gold hair falls across her cheekbones in the manner of a young Leonardo DiCaprio, wraps her arms around two other models, a boy and a girl, as Nonstop by Drake fades into All The Stars by Kendrick Lamar. Every couple of minutes, stylist Alastair McKimm, a Northern Ireland-born, New York-based godfather of luxe streetwear, darts on to set, minutely adjusting the hood of a sweatshirt with the beady eye of a society hostess plumping her drawing room cushions.

The designer of the Lucozade-orange trainers, sleek cropped tanks and oversized bomber jackets is perched on a director’s chair with a bird’s-eye view of it all. Victoria Beckham is wearing, as she always does, clothes from her catwalk label. Today, it is a military green sharp-collared shirt in stiff wool twill with shiny horn buttons tucked into matching high-waisted pleated trousers, accessorised with spike-heeled Balenciaga sock boots, a shiny red manicure and a bottle of San Pellegrino, which she sips through a straw so as not to smudge her lipstick. She hops down from the chair to pore over the monitors with Sorrenti or huddle with McKimm by the clothing rail. Beckham never raises her voice, but then she doesn’t need to, because everyone else stops talking as soon as she starts; she gives suggestions, rather than orders, but they are not queried.

People are interested in my personal life, and sometimes it’s things I don’t like. I’m not going to let it get me down

I’m sure when they are on stage, a part of me will feel a bit left out. Because a part of me will always be a Spice Girl

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Christian Dior in Paris: big-top showcase of technique and daring

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Maria Grazia Chiuri continues to show there is more to Dior than the full-skirted ‘new look’

In a striped circus tent in Paris, nine pairs of rope-muscled female acrobats twisted and braided around each other until each couple had moved from a standing embrace to a double-height figure, with one woman standing on the shoulders of another. Dressed in custom-made Christian Dior playsuits, they then walked in their teetering pairs to the centre ring, where they rearranged themselves into a human archway for the models who followed them on to the catwalk.

Related: Maria Grazia Chiuri on fashion, feminism and Dior: ‘You must fight for your ideas’

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Karl Lagerfeld misses Chanel haute couture shows in Paris

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Speculation grows over 85-year-old’s health after non-appearance for catwalk bow

Karl Lagerfeld was absent from Chanel’s haute couture shows in Paris, fuelling speculation over the 85-year-old designer’s health.

Shortly before 11am on Tuesday, when the first of the two shows had ended without an appearance from Lagerfeld, an announcement was made that he was expected at the noon show, but this proved not to be the case.

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Givenchy in Paris: Waight Keller embraces purity

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For her third haute couture show, Clare Waight Keller went ultramodern with latex and a white shell of a catwalk

Haute couture is a real-life industry based on making fairytale dresses. Clare Waight Keller’s credentials in the fairytale dress category were proved beyond doubt on 19 May last year, when the Givenchy wedding gown she designed for Meghan Markle was an instant fashion hit.

Having aced that test, Waight Keller now gets to have some fun. On Tuesday in Paris, in her third haute couture show, she collaborated with Atsuko Kudo, the London-based latex specialist who made Beyonce’s tour costumes, on liquid-shine leggings which were worn under sheer lace dresses in place of the more conventional petticoats. And instead of the exquisite opera clutches that are haute couture’s go-to bag shape, Waight Keller accessorised the collection with giant squishy backpacks edged with angel wings.

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How to wear: brown on brown | Jess Cartner-Morley

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Forget black and white, channel the 70s with chocolate, coffee and trenchcoat beige

My New Year resolution is to get better at vintage shopping. Vintage, charity, secondhand, call it what you want. I have always been green with envy at other people’s knack for truffling out bargains and treasures. I went into a vintage shop the other day, looked around and thought to myself, nope, nothing here. It was all too… brown. Too muddily neutral.

How wrong I was. Brown is exactly what we should be wearing, it turns out. Brown has always had a bad rep. Brown is mud and bus upholstery. It is the wrong kind of corduroy. (The cross-hatched scratchy kind, rather than the plush, jumbo cord kind.) It never seems properly fashion, somehow. Except, actually, it is as fashion as it gets. Forget black and white: according to Fendi and Chloé and Loewe, to name just a few, the colour combination of the season is brown on brown.

Related: How to wear: smart-cold | Jess Cartner-Morley

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First look inside Dior at the V&A: haute couture with a very British twist

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Designer Maria Grazia Chiuri talks about aligning the fashion house with modern feminism ahead of the exhibition opening

Close your eyes and think of Dior. What comes to mind? Christian Dior never had a pet movie star, like Givenchy had Audrey Hepburn; nor a longstanding muse, as Catherine Deneuve was for Yves Saint Laurent. So the odds are, that you think first of all of the New Look suit. The wasp-waist jacket with a full skirt have come to stand for Dior and, beyond that, for fashion itself – the very idea of a must-have New Look. This suit is the first thing you see when you enter Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams, which opens at London’s V&A Museum on Saturday.

On Monday morning, as the exhibition installation was in its final stages, the head of Dior had arrived from the Eurostar, ready to host the opening parties. Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior’s first female designer, was wearing jeans, black boots, and a thick-ribbed navy sweater under a clean-lined navy cashmere coat. Maria Grazia, as her team call her, wears her short hair bleached and slicked back, her eyes heavily rimmed with kohl, her knuckles encrusted with heavy jewellery. She is not the wasp-waisted, full-skirt type.

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How to wear: fake fur | Jess Cartner-Morley

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The new way to wear fake fur is to channel your inner teddy bear and try on a Borg jacket

Forget about looking like a fox. Or a mink or a chinchilla, come to that. The new way to wear fake fur is to channel your inner teddy bear and embrace the surprise fashion hit of this winter, the Borg jacket. Borg means that your furry coat is nubbly rather than fluffy, with the porridgy texture of an old-fashioned cuddly toy rather than the silky, feline pile of most fake fur. A kind of faux-sheepskin, it was major in the 1980s but fell out of style and was, until recently, relegated to lining parkas (it is densely woven, and therefore very warm).

It is no accident that the Borg jacket has come into vogue in the year when real fur has finally begun to slide into the history books. London fashion week went fur-free last year, a sign it is going the way of dinosaur hide. As the real thing becomes less than aspirational, so fake fur has become less literal. A Borg jacket is a fake fur, but old Hollywood glamour this ain’t. And the only animal it resembles is the kind that was born stuffed.

Related: How to wear: smart-cold | Jess Cartner-Morley

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Tom Ford's classic glamour is now served with side of modesty

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It’s not time to be super-sexy, says designer as he dresses supermodels in polo necks

When Tom Ford sends the supermodel Joan Smalls on to the catwalk in a silk blouse chastely fastened to the chin, and puts Gigi Hadid in a polo neck rather than have her velvet blazer expose even a hint of cleavage, you know the world has changed.

Ford made his name in the 1990s by pushing to the limit the mantra of “sex sells”. His tenure at Gucci reached its apex with an advert in which the brand’s logo was shaved into a model’s pubic hair.

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How to wear: a sensible trenchcoat less sensibly | Jess Cartner-Morley

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The trench just got fun – and about time, too

Ignore the trousers for now. Yes, that’s right, ignore the shiny, zippered, ketchup-red trousers. They are only here to make a point about the trenchcoat. A trenchcoat is a timeless classic. Everyone knows that. It is perennially chic, it takes you anywhere, it is age-appropriate. It is eminently sustainable: buy one and it will last you decades.

This is all marvellous and sound and useful. But just because the trenchcoat is a practical, dependable, sensible piece to own, it doesn’t mean it has to be practical and dependable and sensible all the time. It is allowed to have a bit of fun now and again. It doesn’t always have to be in the mood for a white shirt and straight-leg jeans, or a pencil skirt and a fine-knit sweater. It can be in the mood for, say, shiny, squeaky, zippered, ketchup-red trousers.

Related: How to wear: ankle boots | Jess Cartner-Morley

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New York fashion week shines light on new talent and embraces AI

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A futuristic Rag & Bone show sits alongside Kate Spade’s homage to the late designer

The buzz about this New York fashion week was that there wasn’t any. With Calvin Klein sitting out the season and Rodarte the latest brand to jump ship – the designers escaped the New York winter to show in sunny Los Angeles last week – this was set to be the fashion week nobody was talking about.

But the absence of marquee names has freed up the spotlight for new talent and innovative ideas. One of the hottest tickets on Friday was the first show by the little-known Tokyo-based costume designer Tomo Koizumi, to whom Marc Jacobs lent his Manhattan boutique as a venue. Invitations were issued at the last moment for the standing-only show.

Related: Tom Ford's classic glamour is now served with side of modesty

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Fashion’s first major trend of 2019 is here – and it’s frilling

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Frothy frocks are everywhere on the red carpet and catwalks this month, but the look’s biggest boost comes from Rihanna and a certain TV assassin, who are already killing it

You may not have heard of Tomo Koizumi, whose show last Friday evening in New York was the first out-of-the-box hit of fashion month. In fact, if you have, give yourself a million fashion points for being quick off the mark. I hadn’t until a few days ago, when a friend showed me a screengrab with Koizumi’s name, and a time and a place for his last-minute show. Now I am obsessed with him.

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Date dressing: how fashion in the age of MeToo redefined sex appeal

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What women wear has always been part and parcel of sexual politics. But, 18 months after MeToo was born, has fashion’s centre of gravity moved away from sex?

  • Read more from the spring/summer 2019 edition of The Fashion, our biannual fashion supplement

Let’s talk about sex, shall we? Fashion and sex, that is. First things first: any conversation about sex needs to be an honest one, so let’s cut straight to the chase. Sex appeal will always be an integral part of fashion, even if sexy has become a less straightforward compliment after MeToo. So please, there’s no point pretending that we are too woke to care about looking hot these days. We still care. Nobody is taking vows of sartorial chastity here. But perhaps we are making some progress in how we think about sex and fashion if we are more conscious of whose rules are being played by, and whose needs are being met. As long as the survival of the human race depends on sex, looking attractive isn’t going out of fashion. But there is room for evolution.

It is Valentine’s weekend, and dressing for date night is the hot spot where the rules of attraction meet the rules of social convention. Which means that some Valentine looks might just be a little different this year, in the MeToo afterglow. The neckline might be altered, or the skirt might be a new length. Or maybe the clothes are the same but you might wear different underwear or decide against the high court shoes with toe cleavage, and look – and feel – different as a result. The way we dress for date night through the years reveals so much about our changing attitudes to sex. Braless under a silk blouse in the midst of the sexual emancipation of the early 70s. Spike-heeled and armoured in sequins in the competitively charged, battle-of-the-boardroom 80s. Unravelled and lipstick-smudged in the fog of 90s grunge when a Saturday night was more about getting high than getting laid.

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How to wear: burgundy with blue | Jess Cartner-Morley

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This colour-blocking combo is top of fashion’s Premier League

You say West Ham; I say Milan streetstyle. You say Aston Villa; I say fashion influencer. You say Burnley… yup, you get the picture. It’s the one painted in claret and blue.

Actually, it’s burgundy and blue, if you don’t mind. Or eggplant and denim, if we’re going full New York fashion week. Whatever you call it, the point is that, of all the modish combinations that have had their moment in the sun since colour blocking first became A Thing, burgundy and blue is the one that has stuck. Every fashion season, a new duo gets thrown up – I am pretty sure I wrote a column in praise of pink with orange at one point. Sorry about that, dudes. Most of them stay on the fashion page, without making the transition to real life. Burgundy with blue, however, gets seen and photographed at fashion week, every season without fail, because it works.

Related: How to wear: brown on brown | Jess Cartner-Morley

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Anna Wintour: a rare face-to-face with the most important woman in fashion

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The editor-in-chief of American Vogue talks to Jess Cartner-Morley about Michelle Obama, fake news and only spending 20 minutes at parties.

Portraits by Tyler Mitchell

• Read more from the spring/summer 2019 edition of The Fashion, our biannual fashion supplement

One morning last August, Anna Wintour was playing tennis with her coach in the 40-acre grounds of her Long Island summerhouse. She noticed he seemed a little distracted: “But his wife was about to have a baby, so I thought he was nervous about that.” Then it struck her that they had attracted an unusual number of spectators. The house was brimful with family, but it was earlier than most people get up on a weekend. (“I’m a morning person,” says Wintour, for whom anything later than 5am constitutes a lie-in.) As she prepared to serve, she heard a car pull up. “I am pretty OCD about guests and where they are sleeping. I thought, I’m not expecting anyone else, I don’t have any more rooms. Who is this? And then I thought – that looks like Roger [Federer, with whom Wintour is good friends]. And that looks like [his wife] Mirka. And that looks like their twins.” Wintour’s daughter Bee Shaffer, it transpired, had arranged for a Federer-Wintour family tennis tournament, “which was the best gift a daughter could give a tennis-mad mother. I got to play doubles with Roger for the first time in our very long friendship, against my two nephews.” Twenty-five floors above Manhattan, behind the ebonised mahogany Alan Buchsbaum desk from which she has ruled the fashion world for three decades, she leans back in her chair and smiles at the memory. “We won, of course.”

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Alexa Chung’s crisis dress code: tights and rollneck

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The model-turned-designer reveals a darker, more thoughtful take on a troubled world in her latest show

“I feel like I’ve aged about a thousand years in the last six months,” said Alexa Chung backstage after her second London fashion week show.

The progression from being a model and muse to designing capsule collections and, as of last year, to staging fully fledged catwalk shows has been “unbelievably intense. The behind-the-scenes mechanics of running a business are insane. Which is maybe why this is harder and less frivolous and kooky. Things are a bit less of a laugh these days.”

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Victoria Beckham's naughty side returns at London fashion week

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Designer brings leopard print, plunging necklines and heels to her second show in the capital

A decade at New York fashion week transformed Victoria Beckham from a pop star into a serious fashion designer. After six months back on the London catwalk, she is again in touch with what she calls her “naughty side”.

In her second London show, Beckham flirted with a return to the body-conscious silhouette with which she made her name as a designer. In recent years, she has distanced herself from curvy party dresses in favour of fluid skirts, chunky knitwear and tailored coats.

Related: Victoria Beckham: ‘You have to be quite controlling’

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