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Fashioning star wardrobes - The Hindu | 
The Hindu |
Fashioning star wardrobesThe HinduAbout the latest fashion trends for men, Kunal says: “Semi formals are in so it's all about wearing formal clothing slightly casually.” Kunal is the youngest designer to have debuted at the Lakme India Fashion Week ever. His style can be best described ... |
| | 2/22/2012 6:12:06 AM |
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Runway Fashion | Style.com
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Paris Highlights: Fall 2011 RTW
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Fashion Designers and Shows
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Mark Fast | Mark Fast's show today represented a welcome return to form for the designer. Put simply, the clothes here were realistic: Though Fast didn't stint on the skintight, barely there dresses for which he's best known, and though he did allow himself a few oddball embellishments, he also sent out a plethora of pieces that had universal appeal. Chief among these were the many knit garments in Fast's variegated stripes. The crop tops and fitted skirts had a sporty mien that lent a new dimension to his signature sexiness; meanwhile, the stripes added a graphic edge to the cozy, oversize wool cardigans and jackets. Elsewhere, the designer asserted some discipline over his feral fringes, saving the look for cool, hairlike shrugs and a few voluminous coats. Despite all the layers, this collection had a cleaner look than that of recent Fast seasons, and the clothes appeared better fitted and finished. The trademark hedonism remained intact, but it was expressed with a nice sense of refinement.
—Maya Singer | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Pringle of Scotland | In 1986, when Alistair Carr was 12 years old and living in Glastonbury, he had a girlfriend who dressed, he recalled, as a combination of skinhead rebel and Nan Kempner chic. She recently contacted him again, and that got Carr thinking about what she'd be like now. (He is still a little trepidatious about making actual physical contact.) So he styled a collection around Miss X. The models had hair tipped in intense color, like a punky dye job grown out. Here was her skinhead bomber jacket in textured red-orange leather, and a twisted twinset, the kind of outfit a small-town girl might adopt as an unwitting homage to big-city style. The box pleats of Miss X's school uniform were duplicated in skirts, jackets, and coats. Maybe she'd had a Princess Diana moment, because there was also a jumper with a piecrust collar, and a dress with a ruffle knit on sleeves and skirt.
This being Pringle, there was a lot of knitwear, from a classic cashmere rollneck (still the company's bread and butter, and looking smart in tandem with matching cashmere pants), to the trompe l'oeil cardigan effects that opened the show, to the chevron-patterned jacquards, which were influenced by the 1980's design group Memphis. Some of the most appealing pieces in the show were fuzzy candy pink and mint angoras lined in merino wool.
Carr toyed with color in a subtle but confident way, attaching a mint faux-astrakhan collar to a camel coat, color-blocking navy and orange in another coat. It was odd enough to successfully complement his inspiration, whomever and wherever she may be. A genius finishing touch was the baked bean cans in silver, created by the jeweler Husam el Odeh to wrap around the heels of Chrissie Morris' shoes. With a pair of those, you'd be living in the love of the un-common people.
—Tim Blanks | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Erdem | It's not just because today's venue, the new White Cube gallery space in South London, was so spectacular that you might think the art world serves Erdem Moralioglu well. Last Fall's scenario of the spurned lover who takes fierce revenge on her artist boyfriend was the basis of a breakthrough collection for him. This Fall, his woman had moved on. Now, he said, she buys art rather than destroys it. But she was still a creature of dark, distinctly adult appetites, and that made her—and her style—infinitely more interesting than the pretty-girl Lolita-land that Erdem entered for Spring.
It also offered him some provocative new elements to play with in his ongoing pursuit of the wrong in his work. Black rubber, for instance, the kind you'd buy in a sex shop, but delicately embroidered with lace, or used as a laminate for classic tweed. The proper made improper—so wrong, and Erdem loved how it unsettled him. He mentioned Hitchcock again, but a more appropriate cinematic reference might be Hitchcock's more lurid disciple Brian De Palma, exercising perfect control over random acts of violence. Kind of like Erdem, cutting his pin-sharp little dresses from a turbulent mass of floral print, scattering colored stones across dresses or stringing them around necklines—and making chartreuse and fuchsia his main color accents.
It will be interesting to see how many of Erdem's followers engage in this collection's dialogue between latex and lace. "I want to make my customer feel strong," he said post-show, even if the route he'd chosen was decidedly eccentric, in keeping with Peggy Guggenheim, the cultural doyenne whose style was on the designer's mind when he was working on Fall. Well, the art world hasn't let him down yet.
—Tim Blanks | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Burberry Prorsum | For Christopher Bailey, the title of his latest Burberry show, Town and Field, signified two worlds whose codes didn't match. And he wanted to try and make them. It was a kind of metaphor for Bailey's big challenge of the moment—merging Burberry's physical and digital aspects—which sounds like a much more daunting task than sticking herringbone bellows pockets on a tweed pencil skirt, one of the ways field met town in today's show. Another striking match was the brown corduroy jacket belted over a burgundy lace skirt with a substantial peplum.
The peplum and nipped waist were vintage details Bailey carried over from pre-fall, with its echoes of the thirties and forties, but where that collection tended more to the austerity of the war years, this one had a little more flounce. Another key piece was a pencil skirt with a big diagonal ruffle. It had some shimmy to counterbalance the peplum's occasional clunk. And it said "town" whatever piece of cropped outerwear it was paired with. So did floral-print faille and the tiers of fringes on Jourdan Dunn's cocktail dress. "Field" was represented by a herringbone jacket lined in shearling, a waxed cotton parka, and country critters like sparrows, owls, and doggies naïvely embroidered on shirts, and printed or appliquéd on oversize striped tees. A capacious bottle green cardigan was comfy enough for country life, but its stylish swing back gave it some urban smarts.
Such an item suggested that, Bailey's reservations aside, the division between city and country was really somewhat artificial in a collection that wove a story out of Burberry's outerwear expertise and Bailey's ongoing fascination with casually gilded youth. There's something almost melancholy about such an idea. Gilded youth will inevitably tarnish. Maybe that's why rain is a recurrent motif in Burberry-world. Today's show climaxed with an artful thundershower beating down on the transparent tent, while faux rain fell inside on the brolly-bearing models. Then again, perhaps the rain was just another metaphor, this time for all the money showering down on Burberry.
—Tim Blanks | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
McQ | Right away, a question presented itself at the McQ show this evening. Guests were still taking their seats, crunching the catwalk's carpet of faded autumn leaves underfoot, and suddenly the thought occurred: Hey, it's not fall anywhere right now. Where did those leaves come from? Did the Alexander McQueen team have them specially aged for the show in a gradually cooling greenhouse? Is there a prop house in London that keeps bags of leaves lying around for just this kind of event?
Backstage, after the show, the leaves question was posed to Alexander McQueen's creative director, Sarah Burton. She asked around, and got back the following answer: The leaves came from trees.
Sometimes the answer to a seemingly knotty question is staring you right in the face. So it is with McQ, a brand that has coexisted uneasily with Alexander McQueen since its launch not quite six years ago. Tonight, showing McQ on the catwalk for the first time ever, Burton resolved everything that had been vexing about it: As she explained, the way to make McQ work was to start with the assumption that clothes should be beautiful, at any price. The clothes on the leafy runway were indeed beautiful; Burton shook out the key elements of the McQueen aesthetic—the romance, the dark glamour, the mind-blowing tailoring—and, rather than dumbing them down, expressed them in an accessible way. The showstoppers were the nipped-waist evening dresses, appliquéd with multicolor flowers and floating on a sea of tulle, but even the simplest pieces were refined in their construction and felt luxe in their details. To wit, in the collection's group of military-inspired menswear, a Persian lamb collar on a trench gave the coat a sense of specificity and richness, while the battered knit of an army crewneck provided the sweater with that McQueen grace note, a sense of time.
Unsurprisingly, the women's looks were more fanciful. The show started on a note of plainness, with felted wool outerwear in blocked combinations of tan and hunter green. But the drama in the womenswear amped up quickly, with heavily embroidered sculpted skirts and coats giving on to bustier-chested evening dresses topped with gothic black lace. Even the outerwear silhouettes became more vivid: One excellent look was the precisely tailored coat in Black Watch plaid with its dramatic flare. Finally, the last look appeared: a New Look-style dress in white, which nearly matched the pallor of the model wearing it. That model was Kristen McMenamy, and she proceeded to give a little dumb play, seizing a rope from under the leaves and pulling it to lead her to the slowly illuminated forest that had been created at the back of the runway. There was a small building set amid the trees—a woodshed perhaps? Or a mausoleum?—and McMenamy followed the rope all the way into it and disappeared. Just when you were thinking this was some kind of metaphor for death, a neon light flipped on in the cabin: the Core Club. A four-on-the-floor dance beat picked up. Are they raving in heaven? A question for another day.
—Maya Singer | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Fashion East | As is widely acknowledged, the London fashion industry is second to none when it comes to supporting and developing new talent. Fashion East, among all the local programs for emerging designers, remains the keenest talent spotter; director Lulu Kennedy has excellent, eclectic taste. The trio of designers on the Fashion East runway this evening certainly represented a motley crew: First up was Maarten van der Horst, an accomplished tailor and a bit of a ham; next down the runway was Marques'Almeida, a brand almost dirgelike in its grunginess; the final act was Fashion East veteran James Long, a menswear designer and knitwear specialist who has definitely earned a solo spot on the London fashion week calendar next season.
Van der Horst brings a lot of wit to his clothes, and a great deal of technical know-how. For this collection, his second, he put a sexy spin on menswear shirting, turning crisp poplins and striped cottons into tailored bodysuits, and setting them off with cheesy satin florals. The bodysuits weren't altogether convincing, but the satin stuff worked, in particular the collection's quilted blazer-style jackets in white-on-white and red printed florals. Van der Horst definitely has a strong point of view, but he's still in the process of fleshing it out.
Marques'Almeida doesn't lack for point of view, either: Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida distress denim with a single-minded gloominess. The look is striking; this season's skate-inspired black and yellow clothes, all oversized and ripped to hell, had a kind of desolate grandeur. The collection was a little one-dimensional, but these pieces will be pulled a lot by fashion editors, and some of the more circumspect looks, like the frayed skate shorts and decayed knits and leathers, will attract shoppers. (Pieces from the debut Marques'Almeida collection for Spring 2012 were picked up by Opening Ceremony—a store that's no slouch at seeing a niche market.)
James Long was taking his third, and final, turn on the Fashion East runway this evening, and the collection he showed was proof that he's used his tenancy to hone his womenswear to a fine point. This was a strong, well-made, distinctive collection, commencing with a series of hugely appealing intarsia knit dresses limbed with gold. Long showed that he can do more than just knits: His printed velvet pieces were knockouts, and the quilted leather jackets with hand-knit sleeves were both beautifully executed and a lot of fun. Onward and upward.
—Maya Singer | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Giles | The tale Giles Deacon began to spin for Fall was that of a stately country home accidentally ablaze on an arctic winter's night. "I just had this idea of someone rushing out of a beautiful house," Deacon said backstage before the show. "It's burning down, and what are you going to take?"
One very acceptable answer to that could be these clothes. This collection yielded some truly beautiful things, romantic with macabre bite, pumped up by a couturier's eye for detail. What's impressive is how they fit Deacon's new direction of well-made clothes for women of means, while still nestled comfortably into the narrative at hand.
Deacon set the darkly enchanted tone with the first exit: a high club-collared tuxedo accessorized by a menacing black plumed scarecrowlike helmet—this season's version of Spring's swan headpieces, also made by Stephen Jones. He quickly segued from governess strictness to lady-of-the-house softness. A painterly print echoed a burnt tapestry; it was cut into a chiffon blouse, tucked into a matching skirt of sharply razored organza ruffles that spilled dyed-to-match feathers at its hem. The thorns from Deacon's frozen garden were transformed into laser-cut satins and a rich metallic lace. And in this fairy tale an icy blue brocade tapestry—populated, if you looked closely, with unicorns and other mythical creatures—seemed to have been ripped from the wall and transformed, through some sort of fashion wizardry, into a strapless mullet-skirted dress or an evening jacket to elegantly cover up a burnt and water-stained tulle gown. Catastrophe was rarely so chic. And though the collection might have skewed a bit prim and proper for those who love Deacon's antic side, inside it still burned with a magical and mischievous spirit.
—Meenal Mistry | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Michael van der Ham | Click sometime soon on Net-a-Porter, and you can catch a milestone of Michael van der Ham's young career. His Spring collection scored him that retail big whale for the first time, quite something for the Central Saint Martins grad whose first collection wowed the fashion set but seemed virtually impossible to produce. Since then, van der Ham's work has been to refine the cacophonous but clever collaging he's made his distinct signature and to nudge it forward. For Spring, he told the story with prints. This season he explored knitwear, another highly sellable category, which helped streamline his ideas, as in a color-blocked T-shirt and skirt, both with wavy stripes.
Van der Ham cited Veronica Lake and the Ziegfeld Follies as inspiration. Perhaps that old Hollywood gloss accounts for the amped-up luxury here. It stood out most in all the metallic—the gold lace that was appliquéd on a semi-sheer jacquard in soft skirts and burnished silver bouclé tops. As for those Follies, they came through in the blousy drama of the abstract prints worked into some dresses, and you struggled a little to let these grip you in the way that van der Ham's work can do. That wasn't an issue for the chic trio that closed the show; their components of top, skirt, and back of dress had an easier-to-parse simplicity. But not all was as it seemed. As two walked by you, you saw a flash of bright underskirt through a slit. They were like the three wise women, leading the way to a promising new direction.
—Meenal Mistry | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Belstaff | Sometimes it's up to the Americans to show the British where they stand with their own history—while also being just that little more reverential toward it. Belstaff is one such case in point.
Belstaff was established in 1924, and capitalizing on the vogue for motorsports in the twenties and thirties, it became the pre-eminent maker of high-performance waterproof sporting garments for both men and women. In his debut collection for the brand, the American chief creative director, Martin Cooper, has infused his offering with the romance of the machine age, when the motorbike and the motorcar were very much the pursuit of the wealthy. And very accomplished it is, too—particularly as he was only appointed seven months ago.
Having spent 16 years at Burberry prior to his appointment, rising to the position of design director of outerwear there, it's quite clear that Cooper knows well what it takes to fuse British heritage with contemporary desirability for both sexes. "I did rediscover the brand through the archive, those iconic garments from the twenties onwards," he says. "I wanted a holistic approach for both sexes, and 80 percent of the concepts are the same for the men's and womenswear."
Perhaps this is why there's a certain toughness in the womenswear that adds to its merit, eschewing the girlish folderol that can sometimes creep in when designers approach a fundamentally masculine, utilitarian history. Saying that, some of the standout garments were the dresses, particularly a silk "oil slick" print tea dress and its sheer-backed black georgette counterpart. Reworked to often feature skyscraper heels, the boots are among the most desirable elements of the collection, alongside the reworked outerwear staples. The iconic four-pocketed Trialmaster jacket appears in many fabrics for both men and women, with a particular emphasis on the exotics, crocodile and python. The intense sense of luxury does seep through absolutely everything, and yet Cooper and his team have been clever in not dissipating a sense of practicality and performance, particularly in the menswear.
For us British, this brand, with its roots in Stoke-on-Trent—hardly a town of sonorous high romance—might conjure up images of oily bikers in roadside cafés. Yet the new Swiss and American owners, Labelux and Harry Slatkin, see the more romantic, luxurious side of its heritage. And they mean business, opening up two flagship stores on Madison Avenue, New York, and Bond Street, London, later this year. If Belstaff is anything like our luxury car industry, it is better off in outside hands—and this seems like a decidedly safe pair.
—Jo-Ann Furniss | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Acne | The key word at tonight's Acne show was ambition. If last season's
collection introduced a new sense of scale to the brand, then this one
doubled down on it: Acne maestro Jonny Johansson seized on a trio of
body-obsessed artists for inspiration, blenderized the references, and came
up with a vision for Fall '12 that was directional, remarkable, and rather
strange.
The key figure in Johansson's art trio was undoubtedly the photographer
André Kertész, from whom Johansson took his cues for the collection's
distorted silhouettes. (The other artists cited were erotic sculptor Hans
Bellmer and the painter Hanneline Røgeberg, who inspired the collection's
palette.) Johansson achieved distortion in a variety of ways. There were
coats sculpted out of shiny shoe leather, shaved down in special machines,
that held the arms slightly aloft from the body. There were fitted dresses
paneled together from flesh-toned pieces of fabric in organlike shapes, and
cropped, puckered knits. Most intriguingly, there were a variety of trousers
that simultaneously raised and sank the waistline, such as the pair of
burgundy pants that appeared to be slung low on the hip, over a matching
zipped girdle; in fact, it was all one garment. A mannish burgundy suit,
trimmed in black elastic, was the most winning representation of this idea.
At times, it was hard to figure out how this collection would play on the
street. Johansson is certainly challenging his consumer, but he also
presented them with some silhouette-shifting ideas that won't be too hard to
digest. The low-slung cut of the pants here will make an impact, for one, as
will the collection's wide belting and oversize jackets and coats. On the
whole, this collection served notice to anyone who still primarily thinks of
Acne as a denim brand: They're playing a new game now, and they intend to
play in the big leagues.
—Maya Singer | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Matthew Williamson | The square sequin embroideries at Matthew Williamson looked almost exactly like circuitry. And though the reference didn't always hit you over the head, a sort of space-age chill settled itself over Williamson's traditional embellishments, color, and glamour. Though when it comes to a bona fide chill, there wasn't much here in the way of things to keep you warm. If only a girl could afford the go-for-broke fabulous pastel rainbow fox coat that opened the show. Then again, this year New Yorkers have all but skirted a real winter. You have to ask: Are coats always necessary in a Fall collection?
Williamson's cocktail dresses are his bread and butter. Here they came in two shapes, a great straight-cut organza T-shirt with those circuit sequins, sometimes turned slightly more casual layered over a long-sleeve top. On the sexier, more structured side was a silhouette with slashes at the ribcage and a skirt that was cut into and paneled like a machine. It was an idea that reached its full potential in a blessedly unadorned but sparkly midnight jacquard.
Williamson is celebrating his 15th anniversary this year, which perhaps accounts for his futuristic focus. At times it was a clunky marriage of worlds—see the brocade skirt pieced with gold leather and worn with a Star Trek-like turquoise turtleneck and organza T-shirt. A gold silk blazer over ice blue trousers, in contrast, hit the right note. When it came to evening, Williamson splashed swishing gowns in baroque prints with great zigs of bright comic-book color. It made his models look like superheroines, about to take flight to the ball.
—Meenal Mistry | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Belstaff | Sometimes it's up to the Americans to show the British where they stand with their own history—while also being just that little more reverential toward it. Belstaff is one such case in point.
Belstaff was established in 1924, and capitalizing on the vogue for motorsports in the twenties and thirties, it became the pre-eminent maker of high-performance waterproof sporting garments for both men and women. In his debut collection for the brand, the American chief creative director, Martin Cooper, has infused his offering with the romance of the machine age, when the motorbike and the motorcar were very much the pursuit of the wealthy. And very accomplished it is, too—particularly as he was only appointed seven months ago.
Having spent 16 years at Burberry prior to his appointment, rising to the position of design director of outerwear there, it's quite clear that Cooper knows well what it takes to fuse British heritage with contemporary desirability for both sexes. "I did rediscover the brand through the archive, those iconic garments from the twenties onwards," he says. "I wanted a holistic approach for both sexes, and 80 percent of the concepts are the same for the men's and womenswear."
Perhaps this is why there's a certain toughness in the womenswear that adds to its merit, eschewing the girlish folderol that can sometimes creep in when designers approach a fundamentally masculine, utilitarian history. Saying that, some of the standout garments were the dresses, particularly a silk "oil slick" print tea dress and its sheer-backed black georgette counterpart. Reworked to often feature skyscraper heels, the boots are among the most desirable elements of the collection, alongside the reworked outerwear staples. The iconic four-pocketed Trialmaster jacket appears in many fabrics for both men and women, with a particular emphasis on the exotics, crocodile and python. The intense sense of luxury does seep through absolutely everything, and yet Cooper and his team have been clever in not dissipating a sense of practicality and performance, particularly in the menswear.
For us British, this brand, with its roots in Stoke-on-Trent—hardly a town of sonorous high romance—might conjure up images of oily bikers in roadside cafés. Yet the new Swiss and American owners, Labelux and Harry Slatkin, see the more romantic, luxurious side of its heritage. And they mean business, opening up two flagship stores on Madison Avenue, New York, and Bond Street, London, later this year. If Belstaff is anything like our luxury car industry, it is better off in outside hands—and this seems like a decidedly safe pair.
—Jo-Ann Furniss | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Christopher Kane | Given his track record to date, Christopher Kane could probably retire the award for Most Arcane Influence. His latest was a career best: Al Pacino's gay serial-killer thriller, Cruising, which inflamed the early eighties. Kane imagined the kind of girl who might infiltrate the lurid sex clubs depicted in the film, quietly playing voyeur. She'd have to be a very odd bird, indeed—and a pretty tough cookie, maybe like the girl in a photo from Joseph Szabo's Teenage series, another personal favorite of Kane's.
Anyway, all of that—the lurid, the sinister, the scandalous—came together in a collection that used extraordinary technique to induce visions of darkest sin. Kane reveled in it. He took to moiré, for instance, because it reminded him of "the inside of a coffin." He compared the red he used to "a vial of blood." It was one component of a morbid, synthetic palette—black, purple, hectic blue—which, when it shaded florals or leopard print or that moiré, brought to mind Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil or Huysmans' Against Nature, masterpieces of nineteenth-century decadence. The big black blooms flocked in black velvet on purple tulle mesh said all that and more. The thick black leather cording that belted and hemmed sheathlike dresses implied more up-to-date transgressions.
The collection couldn't have been more of a 180-degree from Spring's mesmerizing airiness, but the lacquered, oily artifice of these clothes exerted its own kind of attraction, at the same time as it daringly courted revulsion. Once again, Kane beaded and embroidered flowers, but where they were heavenly last season, here they were hellishly tangled and clotted, paired with cashmere knits densely threaded with wire. Maybe that was a mad mirror image of the pinstripes that opened the show. And were they a subtle evocation of Wall Street, another New York-in-the-eighties benchmark—and another world where bad things happen?
—Tim Blanks | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Antonio Berardi | The Salander-ish hair at Antonio Berardi came as no surprise. His muse is powerful and smart and certainly uses her clothing as a sort of armor. However, the initial reference for this collection was on the other end of the aesthetic spectrum from the antiheroine hacker. Berardi was looking at the rococo sculptor Giacomo Serpotta, whose molding work he vividly compared to "a wedding growing out of the wall."
You'd hardly call these clothes florid, but you saw Berardi's inspiration in all the arced seams—not a single straight line in the bunch, he claimed—and curving contrast panels, which he used to hint at the body-con curves for which he's known. (The effect was quite striking in the hourglass shape set into the back of two coats.) He gained his hourglass-loving reputation years ago, and he's eager to shake it: Today he showed his skill with other shapes, particularly those full, fifties-inflected A-line skirts with kick pleats. For day they came in a bouncy neoprenelike fabric that's actually a silk and linen weave backed with bouclé and cut against the grain. Its great matte finish and the way it looked sculptural but not stiff gave the first half of the show its sharp modern beauty. And to hear Berardi talk about it is to be reminded that he is a masterful technician.
Masterful but not perfect. Though he does killer cocktail, Berardi admitted that full-on evening isn't his strong suit. Perhaps it's because his ideas are best served in smaller doses, but his gowns felt dragged down, whether by peplums or weighty fabrics. But in all that was a slight stumble during a strong step forward.
—Meenal Mistry | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Peter Pilotto | Spring/Summer 2012 was a breakthrough season for Peter Pilotto, and you could hardly blame designers Christopher De Vos and Peter Pilotto for wanting to repeat its success. There were times, though, early on in today's show, when you wondered whether Pilotto and De Vos were repeating themselves a bit too much: The first looks that appeared on the catwalk this morning came off like stretched-out, streamlined versions of last season's clothes. Even the prints appeared identical. But as the show progressed, and new ideas integrated themselves into the collection, you began to appreciate the wisdom of the Pilotto boys' decision to begin with the overtly familiar, and build. This collection articulated a thought process and affirmed the designers' steady, incremental approach.
The new ideas, this time out, mainly manifested themselves in print—the Peter Pilotto stock-in-trade. Inspired by recent trips to Asia, they created a pattern based on Japanese "light trucks," vehicles studded with thousands of lights, and another one abstracted from Chinese opera masks. The latter had a floral sensuousness, and made for some uncomplicatedly gorgeous garments; the light-truck print was trickier, but it looked good set off by swathes of deep blue velvet. Along with attenuating their silhouette, Pilotto and De Vos also developed last season's wrapped and haltered bodices by playing with more intricate crisscross and cutout effects. And there was another update in the beading of the garments—a three-dimensionalizing of the print, as Pilotto put it—that followed on last season's more dappled embroidery. The most interesting new ideas in the collection, however, came in the form of its furs and puffer coats. The laminated wool puffers were done in the signature Pilotto prints and made in collaboration with the Austrian outerwear brand Schneiders; the fox furs came vibrantly striped, and they were really striking. All in all, this collection didn't set forth any dramatic new proposition, but it was a confident elaboration of the Pilotto look.
—Maya Singer | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
A.L.C. | "Nostalgic in a modern way," is how Andrea Lieberman described her latest collection for A.L.C. Often multiple nostalgias mixed. The slim checked wool trousers in look 24, for example, conjured up the late-sixties ska era for the designer. The outfit's accompanying leather bomber with a street-ready coyote-fur hood recalled "the late eighties—like when the New York downtown crowd and hip-hop scene came together at clubs like Area and Madame Rosa's," as Lieberman put it. Not that you'd necessarily need to be conversant in the club-going ways of decades past to get in on the action. The DB navy peacoat, shown here with a curly lamb lapel, hit on the oversize, borrowed-from-boyfriend outerwear trend that will be everywhere in the fall. A string of covetable (admittedly non-PETA-friendly) cropped jackets featured various combinations of kangaroo fur, shearling, and baby calf hair. And still-selling silk pajama sets came in both macro and micro paisley prints. Nostalgic or not, Lieberman has a strong sense of the now. Whatever memories these clothes spring from, girls today will be able to make their own in them.
—Brittany Adams | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Joseph | Joseph's grunge-inspired Resort collection came out of pretty much nowhere
to become a blockbuster for the brand: Those checks and diaphanous florals
have been in stores for a while now, and the demand for them shows no signs
of abating. The Joseph collection for Fall seems to have been designed using
the same formula that made Resort such a winner: In place of the grunge
toughness, there were biker leathers and a military inflection; rather than
the feminizing florals, there were ruffles and lace. And as always with
Joseph, the collection was studded with top-notch knits and the kind of
coats and jackets you wear to the point of disintegration.
One of the fresh ideas that designer Louise Trotter introduced this season
was sweater dressing: The collection was full of ribbed tops, dresses, and
skirts that were made to be layered. Another new element was ponyskin, which
looked particularly good in a muted leopard print used in coats, pencil
skirts, and bags. Elsewhere, Trotter traded in the punchy, Joseph-signature
intarsia handknits for Peruvian-inspired ponchos and fringed sweaters with a
more muted charm. All in all, this was a collection well stocked with
knockout pieces—curly coats and camo fur, zigzagged angora-blend
turtlenecks, ruffled dresses, and track pants in a soft gray lace-printed
silk—that were delivered with the typical Joseph understatement. But this
time, when the collection starts flying out of stores, no one is going to be
surprised.
—Maya Singer | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Thakoon Addition | For his main Fall collection, Thakoon Panichgul was inspired by neon, but there was darkness lurking under that light: It was the glow of Amsterdam's red-light district, as reimagined by the artists Ed and Nancy Kienholz for their piece The Hoerengracht, that provided the juice. There were peacock-feather prints and appliqués—for pride and vanity, cardinal sins both—and a basket weave detail lifted from confessional screens. That girl's all grown up, and naughty, too. But at Addition, Panichgul's kid-sister line, things are still sweet and nice. "It's a little groovier this season," the designer said in his showroom, and patterned poncho tops, culottes, and wide-legged jumpsuits backed him up.
There were echoes of the main line in some of the shapes, like the high-waisted, wide pants, but overall the muse was Addition's usual gamine. For Fall, she'll wear "teddy bear" faux furs (the best of them in a bomber, trimmed with military-trench details); ultra-fitted blazers with asymmetrical, slightly flaring backs; and loose silk dresses, whose prints mimic knit stitches. There was more leather than ever before, in response to buyers' demands: a single-breasted blazer in cadet blue on one hand, and tiny, quilted short shorts on the other—the sort you might get if you had your old 2.55 retooled into hot pants. The collection continues to expand, and so does the brand: Panichgul revealed that he'll soon be in need of more space than his current digs afford, thanks largely to the sales of Addition. And the showroom buzzed with buyers. Addition's not grown up yet, but it certainly is growing.
—Matthew Schneier | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Dion Lee | Before his presentation today, Australian designer Dion Lee explained—rather meekly—that he saw his London fashion week debut as "an introduction."
Suffice it to say, London fashion week was very pleased to meet him. Lee is incontrovertibly the leading light of fashion Down Under, and as his new collection confirms, he is certainly ready for a larger stage.
It's tempting to describe the appeal of Lee's clothes in terms of their technical accomplishments: the geometry of the silhouettes; the innovative, architectural quality of the construction; the unexpected materials artfully deployed. You can't avoid talking about those elements of Lee's work, and they form a tremendous part of its appeal. In this collection, for instance, he created strands of high-visibility fiber, and wove them into light-reflecting knits, and draped them off sheaths. (Perfect for cycling back from a party at night, maybe.) Another dress, suspended from nearly invisible mesh, appeared to hang on the body as if by magic; elsewhere, garments made from layered tulle and organza looked as though they were held together strictly by light. There is a cool intelligence operating here.
But what makes Lee really interesting, and eventually, perhaps, significant, is that his intellect doesn't work at cross-purposes to the unavoidable sexiness of his clothes. There is something deeply Australian about that: For whatever reason, designers from Oz seem to have a totally non-vexed relationship to sex and body-consciousness, and Lee embraces that, mitigating the potential aridity of his designs by integrating vampy notes. This collection felt relatively small in its ambitions and incredibly precise in surpassing them. Now that Lee has introduced himself, it will be fascinating to see what he does when he starts dreaming big.
—Maya Singer | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
No. 21 | | Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left. | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Alberta Ferretti | | Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left. | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Gucci | | Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left. | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Roksanda Ilincic | Last spring, Roksanda Ilincic took a sporty
approach to classically elegant clothes. Today, she did the mirror reverse:
an elegant eye cast upon sporty clothes. As a description, "sporty" might
even skew a bit formal. After the show, Ilincic described her source material
as "weekend or leisure wear, the kind of thing you put on when
you're cozy at home."
The humble and often maligned sweatshirt and sweatpants had a moment to bask
in their cozy glory. The former came in charcoal jersey pieced with navy
silk and often a luscious fox hood. In one look, she turned it into a
blouson and paired it with a matching New Look-ish jersey skirt, and in another, it was a hoodie tucked into a skirt with a blue-gray astrakhan panel in front and a dyed-to-match fox hem. Put that in your pipe and smoke it,
Juicy. Elsewhere, she shot navy melton through with gold thread and cut
it into a jacket with puffer sleeves. And in keeping with the puffer panoply
on the rest of London's runways, Ilincic did one with gracefully rounded
shoulders in a silk ink slash print. There were few of her signature dresses
on display—and little in the way of serious evening—though she assured that
the sales collection back at the showroom is massive.
Luxed-up comfort is undeniably a crowd-pleaser. Who doesn't love being able
to wear your slouchy Sunday afternoon digs to Friday night dinner? But these
ideas were easily best when administered with a light hand—a crepe
dress with raglan wool sleeves or a blouson bomber paneled with a bit of
astrakhan. Often, the concept—and an excessive amount of fur—threatened to
overpower Ilincic's inherent sense of elegance. For exhibit A of said
elegance, see the exceedingly simple white wool dress that closed the show,
a winner any day of the week.
—Meenal Mistry | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Peter Jensen | "Thelma" was the title on the invitation for Peter Jensen's latest presentation, and given his predilection for idiosyncratic muses, the imagination ran riot. A straw poll came up with a draw between Thelma of Thelma & Louise fame and the fifties character actress Thelma Ritter. But Jensen was actually looking much closer to home, at Thelma Speirs, who for the last three decades has been half of the formidable millinery duo Bernstock Speirs, and also a DJ girl about town. "I love being around her," Jensen said before the show. "She'll wear jeans and a mink coat during the day, then dress for dinner at night." She also posed naked for a magazine last year, so right away there was that subtext of subverted propriety that is Jensen's own specialty.
His muse was parked front-row center, so it was easy to compare his version with the real thing. All the models sported gray hair, like Thelma's. The first outfit was a cropped jacket worn with cuffed jeans, just like she was wearing. A sweater in Jensen's signature rabbit graphic paired with plaid pants also featured Speirs' non-gender-specific style of daywear. As far as dressing for dinner went, Thelma was very taken with the final dress, a column in cream and black crepe, accessorized with a "necklace" of flocked headphones attached by a string of pearls to the bodice of the dress. (The pink flocked loafers were a quintessential Jensen touch.) Bernstock Speirs—who else?—provided the rabbit-ear hats.
But where Thelma ended and Jensen began faded into unimportance as the show rolled on, simply because the aesthetic that the designer has so painstakingly evolved over his years just outside the spotlight was perfected here. Familiarity with it definitely helps. What might otherwise seem utilitarian (choose any smock-over-long-sleeve-shirt silhouette) and even schoolmarm-ish prim was continually undercut by an amused lightness of touch, surreal little flourishes (glittery belts; a gold fringe; a scatter of beading; a log cabin print; a beaded, flocked white shirt collar doing double duty as a necklace), and a twisted color palette that went deep on brown, chartreuse, and fuchsia.
Jensen is a generous designer, or at least kind. There has always been the sense that he might be dressing the girls no one else pays much attention to. No longer. Alexa Chung was at the presentation. She immediately picked an outfit—a black velvet dress with a beaded chiffon insert over a cream crepe blouse—to wear to the Brit Awards tonight. And she swore she'd be back for everything else.
—Tim Blanks | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Mary Katrantzou | Mary Katrantzou's thank-yous today included a shout-out to Antony Price, the British fashion legend whose claims to fame included dressing Roxy Music and their cover girls. Price was a specialist in the dramatic silhouette, and Katrantzou had clearly been doing her homework, because she recaptured that drama. "I'd already done the peplum and hourglass," she said backstage. "So I was looking for different silhouettes to emphasize embroidery and embellishments." And, Katrantzou scarcely needed to add, to frame those extraordinary prints that have propelled her lickety-split to the top of the London fashion class. Hence a godet skirt, so difficult to engineer print-wise that she made only four of them. Or frothing torrents of chiffon. Or a strictly corseted shape she'd extracted from some historical research (specifically Elizabethan England) without, she was quick to add, "crossing into the territory of costume."
Katrantzou also extended her repertoire in other ways. For the first time, she focused on a single color top-to-toe, like the crayons on her invitation. And she'd chosen deliberately banal subject matter to match the colors. Green meant grass, for instance, rendered as an ornamental lawn working its way down a floor-length gown. Yellow was expressed in a mandala of No. 2 HB pencils, erasers attached. They were rendered in rubber by the Lesage embroidery atelier in Paris—not only the first time Lesage's artisans had worked with such stuff, but also their first collaboration with a London designer. Clocks, hedges, telephones, spoons, and forks also provided source material. The bodice of a rococo red velvet dress featured a red typewriter, its keys providing a coiling abstract geometry on the skirt.
The serial patterning was so intense at times that it made you feel like the one person who couldn't make out the 3-D image in those Magic Eye pictures that were a minor craze a few years back. As everyone else shouted, one after another, "Oh, yes, I see it now," you'd be chewing on your pen in a blind rage. But Katrantzou's conceits were so beautifully conceptualized—here never more so than with the bathtub that foamed with crystals and pearls—that her elevation of the quotidian to the sublime was, once again, easily one of the finest pieces of theater in London fashion week.
—Tim Blanks | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Osman | Osman Yousefzada keeps barreling forward into uncharted territory. Last season, his rigorous shapes softened into something looser and sexier, and this time he allowed himself the high drama of highly decorative fabrics.
He started small. The first look out was a typically austere ensemble of a crisp white shirt and pants with mere glints of rich brocade in the collar and in a pair of lace-up booties. You imagine that the power woman who loves Yousefzada's talent for making precise, Philo-esque smart clothing might allow herself such a flourish, or perhaps the flash from the lining of a properly minimal crepe and leather pop-over dress. But credit the designer for keeping lines sharp even when he let fly from head to toe in the more baroque fare, such as a portrait-collar jacket or cape with chic little matching cropped pants.
Backstage, Yousefzada cited as inspiration the photographic collection of philanthropist Albert Kahn, who sent bands of photographers all around the globe between 1909 and 1931 to create a visual record of the world. But in a way, this brocade-centric collection mirrors Yousefzada's own story as a British-born son of Afghan immigrants, both traversing the same Silk Road. He pared everything away at the beginning of his career to give himself a fresh slate and avoid the ethnic pigeonhole. But this squaring of his East–West exchange is a welcome evolution.
—Meenal Mistry | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
David Koma | The message from the first few looks out at David Koma seemed to be: Don't mess with me. The technical fabric looked bulletproof, and the sculpted greyhounds that formed the wedge heels of pointy shoes appeared ready to come to life and attack.
Koma had a handful of references: Louis Icart's Deco greyhound paintings, Boldini's paintings of Marchesa Casati, Thierry Poncelet's portraits of dogs in aristocratic attire, twenties-era menswear, and the minimal side of sixties fashion (a bit o' Courrèges, a touch of Rabanne). If that sounds like a lot, quite often it was. Alas, Koma's in growth mode—he debuted knits here with Hawick Cashmere—and bursting with ideas.
As the look evolved into something less ballistic, there came a flurry of body-contouring cutouts, peplums, specialized geometric jacquards, and rectangular silver buckles set into dresses and coats. You also saw the hardware on those high—almost canine and far from comfortable-looking—collars. Things lightened up slightly by the show's end, particularly with the appearance of a joyful candy-striped silk and a slightly mod pop bounce. You almost wished he would have developed those ideas into a full collection and perhaps achieved some of the sophisticated coherence he's shown before.
—Meenal Mistry | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Meadham Kirchhoff | How did this happen? Once upon a time, Ed Meadham and Ben Kirchhoff were the angry young men of English fashion. They used their runway as a stage for expressing feminist rage, romantic torpor, alienation. Now they're hosting an interplanetary disco. What?
None of the above should be read as a complaint. Quite the contrary: For Meadham Kirchhoff, jubilation is its own kind of political stance, a way of telling all the depressed, enraged, alienated misfits out there to screw the world and come join the party. There's no revenge sweeter than turning a frown upside down. After today's show, Kirchhoff described the new collection as being inspired by the club he wants to go to, if only it existed; he and Meadham used their slot on the fashion calendar not only to illustrate that fantasy but to enact it. There were colored lights on the runway, models throwing glitter in the air, and an audience of Meadham Kirchhoff cultists jamming along in the seats. It would have been fitting if the show had concluded with a spontaneous dance-off.
OK, the clothes. There was a lot to take in here, and the obvious highlights included the rainbow-hued chiffon dresses, the sequin bustiers, and the showstopping, paradigm-shifting multicolored furs. The furs worked almost like an intarsia knit, with cartoon insignia made by piecing together various cuts of dyed fur. Yet the most impressive thing about this collection may have been its deep bench of accessible pieces, like the denim with cartoon appliqués, or the silvery brocade tailoring, or the nubby graphic sweaters, or the trousers in a yellow and black lumberjack check. There seemed to be a rationale beyond the commercial in these pieces; namely, Meadham and Kirchhoff are extending a hand to all the people for whom a dress made out of tinsel, say, is a bit de trop. It's their party, and seriously, everyone's invited.
—Maya Singer | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Emilio de la Morena | Emilio de la Morena fans were in for a shock today. The designer has earned a fervent following for his kicky frocks, with their sexy winks of skin, punchy color combinations, and fit-and-flare cuts; meanwhile, the first look at the designer's Fall 2012 show was a head-to-toe black ensemble comprised of narrow—gasp—trousers and a belted wool mantilla. Quite the 180, suffice it to say.
But the change in direction was welcome, and not just because it saw de la Morena trying on a new, long and lean silhouette and experimenting with leather and daywear. The biggest change here had to do with the intent in the clothes, and the feeling behind them. De la Morena is by nature an intellectual designer, and in past seasons he's shown a tendency to abstract himself with references from art and architecture. This time out, he worked from the heart, seizing on his Spanish roots. And so, for all the superficial severity of this collection, there was a nice warmth of tone. Much of that came through in the collection's mix of textures—wools, leathers and patent leathers, slinky silks, cabled hand-knits. There were also textural gestures—ruched leather detailing, leather in a marbled print—that added to the collection's tactility.
Somewhat surprisingly, de la Morena showed a real knack with his tailoring. His kick-pleated coats and jackets were really sharp, and though the leather trousers could have used some finessing, the slim wool pants were well-done. And he had an interesting thought in applying daywear materials to his evening pieces, making gowns with high-waisted skirts of tailored wool. Not everything worked here, but there was a lot of promise on the runway; it would be nice to see de la Morena continue to refine his new ideas.
—Maya Singer | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
Holly Fulton | With her eye-popping graphic style, more-is-more approach to color and
embellishment, and overall campy attitude, Holly Fulton practically dares
you to hate her clothes. Somehow, that proves impossible. The collection
Fulton showed this morning was a case in point: Rainbow-hued and covered in
ecstatic hothouse-inspired patterns, the clothes had a certain irrepressible
chic. They were about as hard to dislike as a milkshake.
In some ways, this was Fulton at her most circumspect. Embellishment was
kept to a relative minimum; silhouettes were simple and sophisticated.
Working with a canvas of A-line minidresses, turtlenecks, boxy jackets,
tailored sheaths, and pencil skirts, Fulton applied her prints in a
painterly way, working with the garments' shapes. That made for some
knockout evening looks, such as a hot pink, butterfly-print sheath with a
crisscrossed, body-baring bodice, and a high-necked, frond-printed
turquoise minidress with a tasteful drip of crystal on the sleeve. There
were also a few looks with a hot rod placement print and shots of patent
leather that, however redolent of Spring '12 Prada, fit easily into the
Fulton idiom and just plain worked. Elsewhere, Fulton sent out some very convincing daywear, in
particular her artful intarsia-knit cardigans and sweaters. For all their
punch, the knits were really very accessible. Decorous, almost. Only the
most militant minimalist could hate them.
—Maya Singer | | 2/22/2012 10:16:10 PM |
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Where the Wild Things Are | There were beauties and beasts at Mulberry yesterday, not to mention some very clever party planning. Having organized their post-show soirée at the Savile Club just a few doors down from Claridge's, site of the label's runway show, creative director Emma Hill and co. cannily repurposed the morning's stage dressings, placing bunches of padlock-shaped gold balloons in various nooks and throwing hairy goatskins (a nod to the Fall collection's Where the Wild Things Are vibe) over leather couches.
Mulberry's takeover gave the likes of Michelle Williams and Elizabeth Olsen a reason to party at a place where the fairer sex is only allowed in after six. During her team's initial walk-through, Hill recalled, "we were probably the youngest people by about 40 years." (One member interpreted Hill's workaday outfit of tights and denim to mean she was a gymnast.) Then again, this is the first time the brand has put its show on the official London fashion week calendar—maybe, in a way, Mulberry is ready to join the establishment.
Alexa Chung lingered at the raw bar downstairs as guests were summoned up to dinner, declaring the oyster shucker's chain-mail glove "a good look." Michelle Dockery, somehow looking even more luminous than she does on Downton
Abbey, stumbled on the grand staircase as a photographer's flash went off. "Delete that," she half-joked. Happily, Lana Del Rey made no missteps during her after-dinner concert. Hill, recalling the time the trending songstress (and namesake of Mulberry's latest bag) performed for the brand in Los Angeles, enumerated what might be Del Rey's most impressive trait:
"the ability to silence 40 editors." This time, too, you could have heard a pin drop the moment she took the stage.
The opposite was the case over at Vivienne Westwood's after-party at The Box, where you couldn't make out anything Damien Hirst was saying to his host, Francesca Hammerstein, even if the two of them were sitting right next to you. Florence Welch cheered exuberantly for the club's hopped-up burlesque—a slightly more conservative version, it should be noted, than in
New York—from her table near the stage. In the back, meanwhile, Westwood shook her head in disbelief as two young gentlemen performed extraordinary feats of strength and balance in their underwear. Wild things, indeed.
—Darrell Hartman | | 2/20/2012 12:00:00 AM |
Fast Company | Belstaff has undergone a reorientation of sorts since changing hands in June, and the motorsports-inflected heritage brand shifted into high gear last night with a spirited party at Mark's Club, the late, legendary London restaurateur Mark Birley's private club just off Berkeley Square. Inside the Mayfair town house, guests sipped Champagne surrounded by portraits of dogs and horses, tuxedoed waiters shuttled shepherd's pie and bacon sandwiches up to the likes of Poppy Delevingne and Tallulah Harlech, and most everyone in the place tried to get a word in with co-hosts the Earl of March and the Earl of Mornington. (The latter happens to be next in line to be the Duke of Wellington.) In the words of Belstaff's new CEO, Harry Slatkin, "I guess this officially makes us British."
"Again," he might have added. Since acquiring Belstaff from the Malenotti family, Labelux has been steering the 1924 brand back to its roots. That's meant many trips to the archives for creative director Martin Cooper, who said he's been studying the original performance fabrics and steeping himself in a time when "you had English aristocrats buying motorbikes and open-cockpit airplanes as toys." Cooper is also working on a lower-priced capsule collection with the Earl of March, whose country estate, Goodwood, is the site of one of the country's major classic-car races.
If the size of the crowd was any measure, it's a revamp everyone wants to be a part of. Squeezing into the second-floor parlor, Eddie Spencer-Churchill couldn't resist teasing Lord Mornington's wife, Jemma Kidd, for inviting him to a standing-up dinner party with "a thousand of her closest friends." The Countess shooed him off, as if to say: different occasion, different speed.
—Darrell Hartman | | 2/19/2012 12:00:00 AM |
Family Dinner | "I would like to thank everyone here for coming out to support me tonight; it means everything to me." So said what must have been a very jet-lagged Victoria Beckham, who had just returned to London from her New York shows, to a very intimate gathering at Harvey Nichols. The retailer was toasting the arrival of her Victoria, Victoria Beckham line.
Roland Mouret and British Vogue's Alexandra Shulman flanked the designer during dinner, but Anja Rubik, Charlotte Dellal, Gordon and Tana Ramsay, and War Horse ingenue Celine Buckens were also in the crowd, along with a few members of VB's family. No David, but dad Anthony, mom Jackie, sister Louise, and niece Liberty were in attendance, and to hear her mother tell it, Beckham's design process is very much a family affair. "Victoria is 37 years old and still calls me at least twice a day for advice. Motherhood? If you think it ends when they reach their teens—forget it. It is a lifelong commitment. For not just my daughter, but for all of us." Hear that, Harper?
—Afsun Qureshi | | 2/18/2012 12:00:00 AM |
H&M Goes Hollywood | Last night's Marni at H&M launch party drew a mix of A-listers and next-gen talent to a private residence in L.A.'s Los Feliz neighborhood. Among them, Drew Barrymore reconnected with Molly Shannon, Rashida Jones caught up with Annabelle Dexter-Jones (no relation), and Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain mingled with Lily Collins. Marni's Consuelo Castiglioni, H&M's Margareta van den Bosch, and Sofia Coppola, who made a short film celebrating the collaboration starring up-and-comer Imogen Poots, were the evening's hosts.
"I think she captures boredom in modern-day society so well," Poots said of Coppola. "I knew that she'd bring something extra and character-driven to what could just be otherwise perceived as one-dimensional." There was nothing boring about this fête—not with Bryan Ferry (whose song "Avalon" is featured in the video) playing some of his biggest hits, and not with all the pretty girls wearing Marni's geometric prints.
"All the elements that make Marni are in this H&M collection: the brocade and the patterns," the designer said of the capsule pieces, set to hit stores March 8. "It's really everything that I like."
—Alexis Brunswick | | 2/18/2012 12:00:00 AM |
Rock of Ages | "I wonder if anyone's going to come?" a PR girl admitted to worrying before the L'Wren Scott dinner at Rose Bar last night, citing fashion week exhaustion and the rain as potential causes for a poor turnout. That would have been a fair concern for both the Scott dinner and the Nur Khan Electric Room concert session taking place across town, except for one thing: When there are rock stars on the bill, the crowds always turn out in full.
Amber Heard, Ellen Barkin, Terry Richardson, and Jen Brill were all present and correct when Scott walked in on the arm of Mick Jagger. During cocktails, the Rolling Stone retreated to a corner of the room while Scott made her rounds. "I think the three Es sum up how I'm feeling: enthusiastic, excited, and exhausted," she said, adding one more E to the list: eat. "I had caviar and potatoes at lunch today; then I went home and ate some more."
At the bar, Scott's close friend Daphne Guinness was chatting with the artist Walton Ford. After we commented on Guinness' striking ensemble, Ford said, "It's amazing. She's one of those women who will have her bathrobe on when you get to her house and will tell you she'll be ready in five minutes. In five minutes, she comes out dressed like this." To which Guinness remarked, "Oh no, I'm old-school, really. I just don't want to put too much thought into it. If you do that, it doesn't really go well." At that, they were summoned to the dinner table: "I hope I'm seated next to Mick," one guest confessed. Don't we all, honey.
Meanwhile, a far less subdued affair was kicking off at Hiro Ballroom, where Guns N' Roses was set to perform as part of Nur Khan's DeLeón Tequila-sponsored music series. As eager fans including Justin Timberlake, Matt Damon, and Jimmy Fallon started to pour into the smoky room, Khan told us, "I first saw Guns N' Roses play with Metallica. I forget what year, to be honest." When Axl Rose and co. finally took the stage after midnight, it was indeed a jungle, complete with leather bodysuited dancers doing acrobatics from the ceiling, flying tequila shots, and a knock-down-drag-out set that included "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "November Rain."
—Kristin Studeman | | 2/17/2012 12:00:00 AM |
Last and Best | The Last Magazine has evolved in the three-plus years it's been around—and not just what's on the page. "We decided it's really nice to sit down and talk to people rather than dance all night and have the police shut us down," Last co-founder Magnus Berger said last night at the downtown mag's celebration at Acme.
There was that sort of party, too, later on in the restaurant's basement. But the dinner upstairs beforehand had the friends-and-family synergy that fuels this particular breed of trend-predicting culture outlet: Richard Chai installed in a back booth, Julia Stegner chatting over brie-on-toast and Arctic char with Jacquelyn Jablonski. (The latter appears in a spread in the latest issue shot by Steven Pan, who happens to be Stegner's
ex-boyfriend.)
Of course, get-togethers held at the end of fashion week tend to have a less frantic vibe. "Thank God it's over!" Phillip Lim exclaimed. "I'm re-socializing"—not to mention planning a vacation to the extremely fancy Amanyara resort in Turks and Caicos. Stegner, who walked Altuzarra and Zac Posen this season, was hefting one of the oversized magazines well before she headed out. "It fits nicely under your arm—it's a nice accessory," she decided.
So were the Prism sunglasses that served as the first course. The eyewear brand co-sponsored, along with Kanon Organic Vodka, and designer Anna Laub had opted to gift sunglasses to dinner guests rather than put together a traditional presentation. Acme, with its mirrored walls, was the perfect venue for trying them on, and certainly a place that's welcomed those who wear sunglasses at night. "I'm actually not OK with that look," Laub admitted. "But tonight I'm making many, many exceptions."
—Darrell Hartman | | 2/16/2012 12:00:00 AM |
P.S. We Love You | "I am so not cool enough to be here," Rachel Zoe said last night on her way out of Le Baron, where Proenza Schouler's Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez were hosting their after-party. Zoe was calling it an early night because of her Tiffany's gig this morning and a week and a half of Oscars prep waiting for her back in L.A. But the nightclub was plenty crowded without her. Terry Richardson and Jared Leto were running around together taking pictures on the staircase. And nearly everyone who passed through the hot spot's doors took a spin on the dance floor, Jack and Lazaro included.
"I feel so relieved—every season we have major drama backstage," said McCollough. "I don't know why, but this time we didn't at all." The drama came afterward with the crush of fans eager to congratulate them.
The designers have a two-week vacation in the not-so-distant future to look forward to. They aren't the only ones who could use one. "All I want to do this weekend is sit in my pajamas and watch Downton Abbey," said one reveler posted up at the bar. "Is that too much to ask?"
—Kristin Studeman | | 2/16/2012 12:00:00 AM |
Obsessed Much? | From the old freight elevator ride up to the loft on Cleveland Place to the winding, black-curtained entryway, arriving at Miu Miu's bash for A Woman Dress last night felt a little like walking into a haunted house. And that was rather fitting, considering that the short film on show was a twisted tale of women and their do-anything-for-it obsession with the label. The clip starred the girls of electric pop group Au Revoir Simone.
Although it felt more like Halloween, guests were in a Valentine's Day spirit. "I love this holiday, even when you aren't in love," Leighton Meester told Style.com. "I saw the Vera Wang show earlier today, the Empire State Building is all lit up—how can you complain?" Everyone looked happy except, that is, the Miu Miu PR team. "Someone stole the sunglasses earlier and they're still trying to track them down," a photographer reported, referring to the new Miu Miu Culte shades that had been on display. Guess someone's love affair with the brand is a little too intense.
—Kristin Studeman | | 2/15/2012 12:00:00 AM |
Business or Pleasure? | Fashion isn't all fabulosity—it's big business, too. That's the raison d'être of The Business of Fashion, Imran Amed's Web site devoted to the dollars and sense behind the seams, which celebrated its fifth anniversary last night with a party co-hosted by Phillip Lim and Julie Gilhart at Chelsea's Hôtel Americano. But guests were exploring the more playful side of the biz. A white board and camera was set up for the live-est of live-tweeting on the theme "What Do You Love About Fashion?" (Scrawl your answer on the board, take a photo in front of it, and tweet it to the world.)
One thing to love: Fashion is a business with a packed party schedule. Fashion weekers' itineraries last night were so crazed that even Diesel honcho Renzo Rosso himself couldn't make it to the opening of the brand's new Black Gold store in Soho earlier than halfway through. When he arrived from the W party uptown, he had Johan Lindeberg and Jefferson Hack waiting for him on the sidewalk. Hack croaked out a greeting, having temporarily lost his voice.
No time to recuperate—the train swiftly made its way to the Gramercy Park Hotel, where Claire Danes was hosting pal Narciso Rodriguez's celebration. While the designer himself greeted guests sipping a drink named after him ("I must have a Narciso!" one guest crowed), Gloria Estefan was coaxed onto the dance floor to shimmy along to her 1985 hit "Conga." The dance floor was packed, too, at Rodarte's bash at Acme, where generations boogied together. Ikram Goldman and Michelle Harper represented the adults—well, the sort of adult who'd pull up her Peter Pilotto dress and vintage YSL couture underskirt to delightedly reveal a pair of Pilotto panties, as Harper did—and Tavi Gevinson and Harry Brant, the under-21s. All in all, stress relief done right. Kate and Laura Mulleavy's stylist, Shirley Kurata, admitted that producing a show is so taxing, "sometimes we think, I can't wait for the show to be over so we can get to the party!"
Speaking of relief: It was February 14, after all, and Colette, Araks, and the Ace Hotel took up that challenge with a V-Day "Sex Party" at Le Baron, where party favors included racy lip appliqués and arty condoms. (Careful! They were, according to the packaging, "NOT MEANT FOR USE.") The second floor in particular was elbow to elbow, with Terry Richardson and Jared Leto among the crowd. Leto also ended up at the Top of the Standard's erotic-themed bash, which paused at 1 a.m. for a crowd-pleasing striptease by Dita Von Teese that ended with her doing a wet frolic in a giant martini glass. Just another night on the job. Her business is pleasure.
—Matthew Schneier (BoF, Rodriguez, Rodarte) and Darrell Hartman (Diesel, Colette, Standard) | | 2/15/2012 12:00:00 AM |
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E! Online - Fashion Police
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