Valentino AW13
Valentino AW13
Chanel AW13
Lanvin AW13
Christian Dior AW13
Celine AW13
Alexander Mcqueen AW13
Here is my edit of my favourite looks from AW13 at the Paris Shows. Winner of the best set award has to go to Chanel for the sheer epic branding of their globe pinned with CC flags on all their stores + the gifts are always welcome! Each season I love my update of their beauty range gifts. It’s a CC charm linked world for me.
Commons and Sense Chanel Special
Commons and Sense Chanel Special
My Chanel story for Commons and Sense is out this week. My love for all things Coco remains unabated! Here is a sneak preview. Hope you like it! For more of this shoot and the rest of the magazine, please go to:-
www.commons-sense.net
Meryl Streep as The French Lieutenant's Woman.
I have always had a base line love for Victorian literature. It was one of my favourite periods of literature for my degree. I loved how interior worlds, passions and sentiment were replicated and revealed. As we imploded as an Empire, the strict structures of the form gave way via World War One to Modernism and a fractured universe where nothing was as clear as the coded revelations of a generation before – except that these in their way had hinted at this very discrepancy – gathering momentum. Last week I read ‘Elijah’s Mermaid by Essie Fox, a latter-day proponent of what has become known as ‘Vic-Lit’, perhaps somewhat disparagingly, since the format favours the female. A modern mind interpreting the 19th century obsessions with mental health, female subjugation, Pre-Raphaelite aspirations and back-door brothels. The thread of the Thames, water, mermaids neatly interplays these motifs, as we dive through the novel, with the clarity of our seemingly more evolved empirical methodologies, our world of equal pay, equal rights, oh yes and page three…
Circling the masterpiece of ‘Vic-Lit’ I decided to enter the mother-ship, the maestro of the format, and this week am reading ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, by John Fowles. Having seen the film and loved the intertwined stories, I was surprised to find this was a Harold Pinter script invention, clever man, to highlight Fowles’ knowing narration, his pitch-point moments of standing back into the present day.
“Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves’ quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path.”
Genius, and as I try to break the deadlock of writer’s block for my weekly writing class, I yet again bow down to another technician’s searing talent…
Meanwhile, rather tritely, back on Planet Fashion, as I prep for my shoot next week, off to Oman for Vogue, I flick through style.com and notice that likewise of course there is always room for an epic cape, especially at couture, and especially when worn by a friend, in attendance of budding couturier Ulyana Sergeenko, whose universe like mine seems like a Russian epic filled with romantic swansongs and pre-revolutionary text.
Mary Queen of Scots Aged 17.
Mary Queen of Scots at the French court when she was married to the dauphin Francois. I have loved this image and her story, since I filled my head with Jean Plaidy novels as a child. These informed my time-travelling daydreams, which in turn inform my styling work. Her braids and curls, the pearls and gauze, the pride and the tragedy. My tartan regal offering for new year best wishes xxx.
SS13 St Laurent Paris
If like me you are partial to setting your own lighting with a wide brimmed fedora, to the complement of shiny leather with sheer chiffon and have recently taken to tying flamboyant pussy-bows over the most unorthodox of outfits in a way Mrs. Thatcher never envisaged her favourite of necklines, then Hedi Slimane’s premiere show as head designer for the newly renamed St Laurent Paris is for you too.
SS13 St Laurent Paris
A homage to Yves St Laurent’s archive of aspirational wearability, the collection confronted the icons of his past: the Moroccan tassels, the ‘Le Smoking’ suiting with it’s feminine/masculine interplay, combined with a veritable roster of references to YSL’s contemporaries who defined the rockstar cool of the house’s heyday.
Stonehenging with Anita and Keith
Cher
SS13 St Laurent Paris
Stevie Nicks
Patti Smith
SS13 St Laurent Paris
The Iconic Image of Le Smoking by Helmut Newton
From Cher, to Anita Pallenburg, from Stevie Nicks, to Patti Smith, this was a collection which successfully eased into the framework Slimane’s pivotal position as leader of a new era for the house, one which honoured it’s past with a collection suitable for the contemporary cool: trousers were Slimane-slim, cut to the ankle, while longer layers multiplied into cloakish bedevilment. As you might have guessed, I loved the show! Am so excited to see this iconography of magic via a silhouette where the cat-bows,the chiffon, the capes and the collars, add power to the resonating clean lines of an updated rocktastic silhouette. Bravo Hedi Slimane; Long Live St Laurent Paris.
Coco Chanel at 18 Place Vendome.
Last week saw me in Marrakech and the Atlas Mountains, this week I trip-hopped over to Paris for a shoot for Harper’s Bazaar China with the lovely and talented Alan Gelati at the Chanel jewellery boutique’s private space above the store on the Place Vendome. Gazing out across the square to the Ritz on the otherside, or poring over the amazing designs, yet again I appreciated just how clever Coco Chanel was. The jewellery from 80 years ago still seem utterly modern, with diamonds set to look like the cobbles of her childhood orphanage home, the cleverest of fastenings, her myth tied into their very design.
My Mother and Baby Last Week at My Allotment.
Browsing the Nowness website last week, I chanced upon the blog and work of New Yorker Ari Seth Cohen. He has spent the past few years photographing, partying and celebrating those more foxy than silver, more Iris Apfel than shrinking violet; more likely to dye their hair violet than give up their love of sartorial charm and swagger. Given I have been raised by my own hot rocker mother, a woman whose mantra is ‘darling never give up’, and whose pilates-flexed limbs mean like her mind she is forever young, I too celebrate all that is wise, yet fun, fabulous, yet proud of the lessons learnt by these charming stylistas.
Most of whom are a generation+ older than my mother, yet never forget that more is more and a dash of lipstick, a pair of red trousers or a quirky felt fedora add colour, passion and texture to everyone’s day. I like the feeling that the best is yet to come and we can all still have fun and play with fashion: sometimes we are told it all stops at 30, taking a look at these portraits and knowing my mother and the woman she is yet to become, I can only say, ‘oh really?’
Iris Apfel: 80+ and still upholding the more is more mantra.
We have Mary Portas revitalising the high street and Channel 4 with her new shop (and the tv programme Mary Queen of Shops tie-in) for the 40+ woman at House of Fraser, proudly defying women to be in their power and purchase what really works for them. At the Paris Fashion Week shows this week, it really struck me as I gazed covetously at the Chloe catwalk, that these were the kind of clothes I would love to wear, without worrying something or too much was hanging out, while yet feeling I was in the room with enough of a fabulous quota for me to feel stylish enough that I could hold my head a little higher, my shoulders a little straighter: as I do when I feel good…
Kinga walking the Chloe Catwalk SS12
‘Young woman you’re going to be an old woman some day; don’t worry about it, don’t sweat it, everything adds character’… Ari Seth Cohen’s book is due out next Spring. Amazon are already offering advance order reservations: and who said past 50 women are invisible?..
She's Amazing: I styled this lady for Sunday Times Style in emeralds and YSL: over 80, she had been modelling for 60 years and somehow was the most beautiful woman in the room.
Going through my own archive I found this shot from a story for Sunday Times Style with Kim Andreolli. Bedecked in emeralds and YSL, this mother of all models, who had been in the game for more than a lifetime, said that her daily dose of yoga kept her young, flexible and alert. I celebrate both her beauty and the hope that with a little yogic discipline we all can aim to reach so high for so long…
http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/
http://www.nowness.com/day/2011/3/23/1382/advanced-style-age-and-beauty
http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Style-Ari-Seth-Cohen/dp/157687592X
http://www.maryportas.com/
Christian Lacroix's Arles Wallpaper 'Vuelta' for The Designer's Guild.
Oh my, my old mentor Monsieur Lacroix’s lyrical magical hand once more lights my heart. Ooh la la Lacroix, I LOVE this wallpaper cacophany of colour which he has designed for more reasons than I can say: decorative maximalist perfection.
http://www.designersguild.com/
John Galliano: Aka the Deposed King of the Catwalk
The fashion world and tabloids alike have been alive with the sorry tale of John Galliano’s drunken anti-semitic rants. It seems that repeatedly over recent months, Galliano has been sitting alone in the corner of a Marais bar, where after a few drinks he’s taken to pouring venom and anger at anyone who would listen. Being a bitchy queen on a I hate ugly people tip is one thing; displaying anti-semitic beliefs is quite another. The off with his head reaction of Sidney Toledano, Head of the House of Christian Dior, has been swift in it’s verdict: Galliano has been dismissed from the House this week, along with a terse statement regarding ‘his odious behaviour’. A man given to overcoming his demons with ritualised routines of gym, gym, gym, at a guess, I would suggest he had been slacking for a while at the office: such behaviour is never isolated and indicates instead a total breakdown.
This whole story makes me feel extremely sad: only a year after Alexander Mcqueen’s suicide, somehow fashion has shown it’s ugly sister side. Both designers were fashion’s Cinderellas: boys from London council estates made good, whose talent and hard work, won them great deserved accolades. Both clearly alone, isolated, removed from reality and driven to the most tragic of conclusions.
Given that Mrs Burstein from Browns has always been cited and celebrated by Galliano for launching his career, that Sidney Toledano worked with him at Dior and even that the brand recently chose Natalie Portman to be the face of its latest perfume campaign, I find it hard to believe that in his heart he is truly anti-semitic; he always seemed so courteously aware of how far his career had been served and helped by people of the Jewish faith. Anyone who has been to his shows, will remember that each season, he always takes a catwalk bow in Mrs. Burstein’s direction, in homage to her support. An individual’s personal/inner racism is always hard to comprehend and certainly these catcalling rants are ugly, unnecessary and horrid; made all the more ridiculous by the fact that none of the people shouted at, were in fact Jewish. As the Marais is the traditional Jewish quarter, from where so many people were marched to the camps by the Nazis in the war, of course only adds to our revulsion.
Mrs. Burstein from Browns, who famously launched John Galliano's career, when she bought his whole graduation collection for the store.
However, it seems to me a pathetic cry for help: a man consistently regarded as one of the most courteous and talented in the industry, so lonely and removed from reality that he is striking out at strangers, while drunk alone in a bar.
Where were his friends? Where were his colleagues? Why was no one stopping him? Why did noone feel that they could talk straight to him and stop all this? Why does it seem that fashion’s few true geniuses are so lonely and disturbed that they act out: Mcqueen with his awful, lonely suicide; Galliano with these repeated career suicide racist rants. Repeated behaviour to strangers: this would suggest that on a level he knew he would be caught out eventually.
Entering the Paris police station, mobbed by photographers, clearly not looking well...
Sidney Toledano is right to be disgusted, act quickly and dismiss John Galliano; it is not acceptable to behave like that. No one is such a star that this is ok. But what worries me nearly as much is that the fashion industry inculcates such removed from reality madness in those at the top of the pile. The very people we look up to: those who show true creative genius, seem to be those who most need the simple, nurturing support which us lesser mortals call a happy family life. From the first shoot I assisted on where we shot one of his beautiful bias cut dresses for The Face, to a recent nomads story I styled for Please!, inspired by his brilliant AW10 show, Galliano’s work has consistently inspired my own, his shows always a Paris highlight.
Images from my recent Please! shoot, inspired by the John Galliano AW10 collection. Photographer: Thomas Lohr.
Sadly it is these tacky, tragic lonely rants by someone clearly over the edge of a nervous breakdown and displaying all the tacky symptoms of a cliched racist, are how he will now be remembered. I hope he gets the help he clearly needs to overcome these issues and his family and friends help him back to sanity.
John Galliano show AW10
