Italian fashion is often criticized for not moving with the times, and discovering new emerging talent, but when it comes to technology, new and not so new, luxury brands on the peninsula have jump started this fall.
Leading the pack is Italian Vogue, which this month unveiled its very first “third dimension” cover. The September issue features Australian top model, Miranda Kerr, shot by Steven Meisel in 3D, making Italian Vogue the first fashion magazine to publish a cover and fashion story in this format.
The issue appears just days before the unveiling of Gucci’s radical new, iPad friendly luxury digital flagship, Gucci.com, which very smartly mimics it’s the layout and architectural style of its concrete and mortar stores.
She’s the reigning It Girl of Buenos Aires, the designer everyone wants at their parties and an accessories nut whose blend of wacky insouciance and classical glitz makes her a talent to watch.
Her name is not the easiest – Concepcion Cochrane Blaquier, to be exact – a mix of Anglo Irish, Spanish and French, with a reference to the Virgin Birth (Concepcion in Spanish) for good measure – and her style is equally eclectic.
I first noticed Concepcion in L’Abeille, a charming basement Art Deco dance-bar in Recoleta – BA’s toniest neighborhood – that looked as if Tom Ford had given it a makeover. Her style stood out among the squads of rich kids nibbling Uruguayan caviar and models voguing giddily; it helped she was wearing a bowler hat, as she stepped through the crowd in her own remarkable shaggy suede platforms.
Concepcion always cuts a dash, as do her shoes, a collection she’s been making for a couple of seasons for Prüne, in a line that retails as Prüne by Concepcion.
“Errors are valid,” insisted Vero Ivaldi at his runway show in Buenos Aires on Friday evening, summing up what was good and not so good about last week’s three-day runway season in this grandiose, yet rather grungy city.
One of the 15 designers to stage runway shows in BA, Ivaldi evoked everything from aviation and Amelia Earhart to asymmetry and choppy cutting in an erratic though ultimately charming show.
The season climaxed Friday night with Ona Saez, which featured a dramatic rock band and even a brief video appearance by the most famous Argentine of them all, Diego Maradona.
All shows were staged in La Rural, a giant fairground for the country’s legendary livestock industry, which, despite its rugged agrarian roots, turned out to be an elegant Belle Époque stadium and exhibition hall. Unfortunately, this meant that the architectural tour, which characterizes most fashion weeks in non-Western cities like Beijing, Moscow or Rio, did not happen.
Elisa Sednaoui is this summer’s It Girl in the fashion world’s It Gal capital, Paris.
She’s the gal Karl Lagerfeld kept on his arm at the house’s mega resort collection in St Tropez in May, the “goddaughter” of Christian Louboutin, the star of France’s spring cult movie and a beautiful face that sends the paparazzi into overdrive on red carpets. Not bad for a 22 year old.
Though she’s been studying acting for several years, and modeling for even longer, Sednaoui has more or less exploded onto the scene – with the critical acclaim of her debut film, ‘Bus Palladium.’
However, Sednaoui made her first “fashion film” this spring when she starred in “Remember Now,” a Lagerfeld directed short that premiered in St Tropez. The film stars veteran French actor, Pascal Gregory, as an elderly dandy returning to St Tropez after a three-decade absence and being offended at the new generation’s lack of knowledge of its past. Cruising around St Tropez in Karl’s Bentley convertible, Gregory points out the house of Colette, France’s most famous female novelist, to his date – Sednaoui – who responds: “Is she a famous singer?”
Hate to sound like some sort of salesman, but if you want to be cool, comfortable and ecologically conscious then get thee some clothes from LeAF; an environmentally clued-in and socially awarHate to sound like some sort of salesman, but if you want to be cool, comfortable and ecologically conscious then get thee some clothes from LeAF; an environmentally clued-in and socially aware brand that makes clothes in which one feels and looks, really rather good.
Spelled in its logo as LeAF – that’s for Love the Earth Fashion – the brand is the brainchild of two pretty mothers Marie Hélène Gautier, a French former runway model and Elle editor, and Debra Kellner, a Canadian ethnographic photographer and filmmaker with a particular obsession with India.
“We met taking our children to school in St-Germain-des-Prés, on the Left Bank. The chic surroundings are the origins of all the best stories,” jokes Gautier, recalling the encounter three years back.
Sarah Besnainou, a sensible yet sensitive sort, likes to think the delicate jewelry she designs could be a second-skin or even dentelle, using the French word for lace to capture the delicate mood of much of what she creates.
Something of a late comer to jewelry – Besnainou began her professional career working in Christian Dior’s advertising departments in Paris and New York, where she first began studying gems, almost as an after thought. But it was a diversification that became an obsession and five years after getting her gemology diploma, Sarah launched her fledgling brand Eternamé in January 2007.
In keeping with her designs sensual aura, Besnainou staged her latest presentation in a showroom apartment she christened, Boudoir, this past July in Paris. That’s where we caught up with her and – in between café and macaroons – she unveiled her latest ideas for a collection that has already been worn by as diverse a cast as thesps Sharon Stone and Diane Kruger, models Natalia Vodianova and Astrid Munoz, and singer Kylie Minogue, who favored multi-ring diamond Eternamé earrings.
Few important new trends emerged when Germany’s capital staged its latest fashion in early July, nor were there any really exceptional shows and hardly any supermodels of note to hit the catwalks, yet there can be no doubt about one thing – Berlin Fashion Week is booming.
The four-day, 30-show season was crammed full of parties, presentations and mega bashes – from smart displays in cool art galleries to Soho House rooftop sunset cocktails and after-hours parties, to massive 1,200 guest dinners and delightfully decadent late night dance parties in dingy wee bars. Eat your heart out Sally Bowles and Andy Warhol.
It’s a testament to Berlin’s success in building a fashion week that as mighty as a brand as Calvin Klein would stage a mega Mittel-European moment in the city. Klein’s synchronized soiree included a multi-collection presentation, fashion installation and the unveiling of its new women’s underwear model – Avatar star Zoe Saldana – on the evening of Wednesday, July 7, the opening day of Berlin Fashion.
Haute couture roared back into life in Paris this past week, with nearly two score of shows, a Lion King spectacular at Chanel, a Gossip Gal invasion, a surreal floral moment and a rich ragtag of discoveries and new talent.
The season’s epic moment was definitely Chanel, where models strutted beneath a 40-foot, lion – a witty insider joke by Karl Lagerfeld, referring to founder Coco’s birth as a Leo, and small statue of the jungle king, still remains in her private apartment. Some 30 sculptors took three months to build in aluminum the massive beast, whose paw perched on a massive pearl. Out of the pearl, swaggered the models in angular wool bouclé suits, double-breasted jackets cut with tails. Their every wrist adorned with an explosion of bracelets, bangles, wristbands and chains – mainly in faded gold, like the lion.
For evening, Lagerfeld wowed with a brilliant floral section – tiny alpine flowers made of bugle beads on strict skirts, remarkable faded jacquards used in opulent cocktails or carnations floating across sumptuous tapestry-style tops in micro sequins.
Call it cool cross dressing or getting in touch with your inner woman, but the biggest direction at the latest menswear runway shows in Paris, was the invasion of women’s fashion ideas into a modern gent’s wardrobe.
Givenchy put Victorian clergymen in skirts, Yves Saint Laurent showed a new male corset – a combination of a jock strap and a cummerbund – and there were enough harem pants on the French catwalks to fully attire the Sultan of Baghdad’s seraglio.
At Vuitton, shorts were so baggy they had a skirt silhouette; not so surprising seeing the house’s creative director Marc Jacobs took his bow in a “skort,” his signature look – a meeting of shorts and skirt, with pockets. At Rick Owens the key item was a T-Shirt so long it could function as a mini cocktail dress, while Damir Doma – the new Croatia-born darling of critics – focused on elongated shirts finished by buttoning around the thigh, sort of workerist dresses.
Prada
Miuccia Prada went rather utilitarian this season, with the sharpest cut suits in Milan; though they were a minority element in a show which starred jolts of bold colors – a mood that began with the Amazonian green translucent plastic invite.
Ski goggles appeared as necklaces and shorts and jackets came in active sport colors, though Signora Prada surprised many when she said the inspiration was fast food chain uniforms – from MacDonald’s to Miuccia.
The designer had a somewhat unfathomable obsession with baggy shorts, the sort one associates with German youth at Bavarian public pools, but then she wowed with a quintet of twirling top sweaters, finishing this clever show.
Arguably men’s fashion most influential brand for shoes, this collection also starred the brogue of next summer, seen with super thick soles encased in lengths of rope.
Can designers predict the weather? Sounds like an absurd idea, but a week in Florence drenched from start to finish with storms and the odd raging hailstone attack, and it turned out the most popular fabrics were water-proof cottons and technical, super woven nylons.
The most in demand stand at Pitti – the giant, twice yearly Florentine men’s wear trade show – was probably that of Brunello Cucinelli, the cashmere specialist from Umbria, and recent subject of a long feature story in The New Yorker. Remarkably, where the American weekly normally unmercifully teases fashionistas – try to check out its 20-page demolition of Pierre Berge in a back issue – Cucinelli received a rather sweet hagiography. Then again, the guy is a mega hit, boasting 20 stores in Saks US alone.
And what where our favorite looks on Brunello’s stand – a series of trim, nylon blazers in waterproof cotton.
“It’s all about legerezza,” explained Brunello, using the Italian term for lightness, as he pointed out a paper-thin leather blouson in a grey putty, the mono-color of the season.
One happening town that seems light years away from the West’s ongoing recession is Sao Paulo, which celebrated a coolly sophisticated fashion season this past weekend, in the midst of a remarkable Brazilian boom.
Some 12,000 visitors per day thronged into the Bienal, the modernist curvy showspace by architect great Oscar Niemeyer, where most collections are unveiled. And, while textile and apparel factories have been shedding workers for decades in Europe and the United States, there is a hiring boom in Brazil.
In the first three months of 2010, local manufacturers hired a whopping 36,000 workers, according to Fernando Pimentel, director of ABIT, Brazil Textile Industry Federation.
“When the economy booms, consumers widen their horizons and try out more and more local designers,” Pimentel explained.
Her name may never have been bandied about in Sex and the City, but when it comes cutting a dash when swimming, Lenny Niemeyer is surely the Manolo Blahnik or Christian Louboutin of the exotic strand or infinity pool.
Her annual beachwear runway show in Rio is the greatest annual catwalk display outside the global brand mega events of Milan, New York and Paris.
Lenny, is what everyone calls her in Rio, is the most accomplished designer in Latin America; she is a path-breaking career woman and silkily elegant host, who also happens to throw the best parties in this city. No mean achievement, given the city’s joie de joie legendary reputation for carnival and great all-night bashes.
If ever a city felt on a roll it is Rio de Janeiro, which is already busy knocking itself into shape for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, and these past six days has staged with some panache Fashion Rio.
It would be hard to claim that the season laid down a lot of trends that will sweep the planet in the next six months, but the 36-show season did boast of at least a half dozen fine collections and one truly great one.
That honor goes to the latest collection of Lenny, a brilliant swimwear line created by Lenny Niemeyer, who stages shows with the flare and sophistication, one normally associated with mega runway events in Milan or Paris.
Her setting was simple, enormous and ingenious; a giant tarpaulin hoisted on a score of ropes from the runway to the ceiling to create a looming sky above the models and audience of 1,200 at Pier Maua; the restored dockland warehouses where most shows are staged.
If any designer is having a busy spring it evidently is Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, who inaugurated a major exhibition in London, and created a dramatic public art environment in Paris around the famed statue of Henry IV.
On April 30, the designer nobleman de Castelbajac was unveiling his “An Encounter of the 5th Kind” expo in Selfridges, with five massive window displays in the giant Oxford Street store. Two weeks later, Jean Charles was celebrating the 400th anniversary of Henry IV, for which he encased the plinth and equestrian statue of the monarch in a crafty blend of neon and fire.
Henry IV is the king famed for his remark, “Paris was worth a mass,” made when he renounced his Protestant faith to convert, for the second time, to Catholicism and become the first Bourbon King of France. Polls show he’s still probably the most popular king in French history; yet another reason the city’s openly gay Socialist Mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, was so keen to remember his reign.
Leave it to Karl Lagerfeld to reinvent St Tropez on his own terms and aesthetics. With Karl playing the role of designer, film director, party thrower and prize giver at history’s chicest game of boules, the Chanel creative director took over the Mediterranean’s most famous seaside port last week to stage the house’s latest cruise collection, in an inspiring meeting of panache and beauty.
Lagerfeld kicked off the action Monday night with the premiere of Remember Now, unveiling his latest Chanel mini-movie to some 200 guests in a faded beauty a cinema in St Tropez’s main market square, Place des Lices.
Remember Now stars veteran French actor, Pascal Gregory, as an elderly dandy returning to St Tropez after a three decade absence and being offended at the new generation’s lack of knowledge of its past. When he points out the house of Colette, France’s most famous female novelist, the girl responds: “Is she a famous singer?”
Carlos Jereissati must be the biggest under-the-radar high power player in fashion. Few people recognize him in the famously chic Paris fashion meeting point, the Ritz Bar, or when he strolls around Place Vendome, the world’s greatest jewelry square. But expect that to change soon.
The quietly spoken, Jereissati is the man who rules over Latin America’s largest luxury retail empire. His family owned firm, Iguatemi, is a prestige-products behemoth with a dozen luxury shopping malls, and another half dozen in construction.
Iguatemi’s reputation is such that top league luxury labels like Gucci, Tiffany, Christian Louboutin and Diane Von Furstenberg have teamed up with Jereissati when opening their first boutiques in Latin America.
Moreover, in an age when global growth is increasingly being driven by a quartet of countries that economists refer to as BRIC – Brazil, India, Russia and China – Jereissati’s chain – with annual sales of around 2.8 billion dollars – is quite possibly the biggest luxury BRIC business.
Black Armani sharpeners for black Armani pencils; Armani olives, chocolates, shampoo, body lotion and slippers, all of them in black too. Armani restaurants, actually six of them, of varying cuisines and cultures. One gets all this – and lots, lots more – in the very first hotel by Giorgio Armani, which opened last Tuesday in the tallest building on the planet, Dubai’s spectacularly soaring Burj Khalifa.
Named, Armani Dubai, the hotel is his ambitious first step to build a chain of uber luxury inns, and the Italian designer is already actively looking at sites for similar resting places in London, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Berlin.
“It’s been five years of hard work, but we’ve finally made it. It’s a reality,” Armani beamed at me when he arrived around midnight on Monday, April 26th to celebrate the opening. And, in typical Armani fashion, what did the 75-year-old designer do as soon as he walked through the entrance of his 160-room hotel? He went on a one-hour inspection tour with a posse of some 25 – staffers, hotel managers, family and friends. His eagle eye alert, his tongue issuing edicts – tone down that lighting, move these couches a couple of vital inches, tell that bell hop he needs to stand over there…
One fashion brand enjoying a quiet renaissance is De Fursac, a cleverly tailored Paris-based chain that’s carefully been injecting a larger dose of fashion into its makeup over the past three seasons.
The new direction is very much thanks to the arrival of a new design director at De Fursac, Guillaume Lemiel; a gentlemanly figure hailing from the south west of France.
What once was a venerable resource for clean cut, high-quality conservative men’s wear, is now an interesting destination for contemporary tailoring. It’s quiet French chic with a smart soupcon of modernism.
De Fursac is never going to start a fashion revolution, but by streamlining silhouettes, upping interior detailing and getting exclusive fabrics from some of Italy’s best mills; the brand is now generating cool state of the art gent’s fashion.
“My style has always been in details, things not so easily seen at first glance. I always work from the base; a jacket is a jacket with sleeves, torso and lapels. They should not have three sleeves, but should always be wearable, ”Lemiel tells me over coffee in De Fursac’s boutique on central rue Richelieu, one of some 20 free-standing stores it boasts.
While somewhat provincial by birth, Lemiel hails from a small town, near the redbrick city of Toulouse; he is hyper cosmopolitan by fashion preparation.
Think of him as the last big fashion moment right before the Eyjafjallajokull volcano scrambled world travel. We’re talking about Ralph Lauren, who wowed everyone with his Tuesday, April 13 opening in Paris of his spectacularly lavish new flagship store, easily the grandest on the Left Bank, where the five-floor boutique is located smack in St Germain.
In a remarkable week even by Lauren’s standards, Ralph hosted a movie star dinner for 140 the next day in the cobbled courtyard restaurant of his flagship, located in a 17th century, cut stone mansion, across the street from Café Flore, Paris’ most celebrated literary locale.
And, in a brilliant triple whammy for Lauren, French President Nicolas Sarkozy awarded the 70-year-old designer the Legion of Honor on Thursday in the Elysees Palace.
Sarkozy praised Lauren as “a great designer and a great friend of France,” whose careful restoration of the protected St Germain mansion underlined his “longstanding attachment to France and, today, our country is expressing its gratitude to you.”
Raf Simons
Our vote for the most dashing, relevant and important men’s collection to wear next fall goes to Raf Simons. His Indie Patrician collection was a new paradigm in men’s tailoring. By pairing drainpipe pants, with a narrow lapel but broad shouldered double-breasted jacket and finishing them with white buttons that looked almost sprayed on, Raf came up with the most novel suit in several seasons.
His wrapped jackets; where the buttons are hidden and the jacket crossed over the center of the torso, created a great new multi dimensional look, and his color blocking and use of collages – clearly inspired by Simons’ early training in furniture design – marked a new élan in men’s fashion. In a word, if you want a sartorial prize for hipness this autumn, then get thee to a Simons’ boutique.
Z Zegna
The defining collection of the Milan men’s season, which traditionally is staged just before that of Paris, was Z Zegna. For its Creative Director, Alessandro Sartori, this Fall 2010 Z Zegna collection confirmed him as a major design leader in menswear.
Here’s our take on the 10 Best Runway Shows in the International season that started in New York in February and ended last month in Paris.
Chanel
Chanel imported 300 tons of ice from Scandinavia for their latest show, so models could walk through icebergs in a canny commentary on global warming, and the most PETA friendly collection on any catwalk.
Every model wore fake fur in this show staged on an icy blue and white ice arch set inside Paris’ Grand Palais in an exceptional piece of staging. Chanel’s Siberian polar explorers looked stunningly beautiful in a leather bomber jackets with huge white faux fox trim, head-to-toe patchwork polar bear cat-suits, fox trim on wool boucle suits.
If there is any young European designer that have managed to ruminate visually on the eternal dynamic between fashion and art it is surely Jan Taminiau, a Dutchman, whose exotic oeuvre makes any of his shows cool, one-of-a-kind events.
Taminiau first came to my attention three years ago with a show staged rather dramatically in a splendid old glasshouse on a Paris day of vicious rain and squalls. Yet that seemed to sum up the contradictory impulses in this designer, whose fashion is all about unexpected and contradictory beauty.
Entitled “Follies”, the collection featured Taminiau’s obsession with volumes and his other key signature, adaptability. Several looks appeared twice on the runway, as what appeared to be two-piece outfits were really dresses whose uppers were first dragged up to the neck, next flipped down to created voluptuous curvy cocktails. Throughout the show, which also featured glossy, femme fatales in aged gold negligee dresses and models with wild, disheveled hair, lightning crackled outside.
“There’s always elements of romanticism and nostalgia in my shows,” Taminiau tells me over lunch near his Paris showroom.
Brunello Cucinelli doesn’t like to boast, but he can justly claim to be the instigator of a new aesthetic in fashion, a clever mix of sporty chic that combines two major Italian impulses – honest toil and a love of art and everything connected to it – with a distinct love of Americana, especially its views on marketing.
Yet to hear Brunello, a man whose label has so far skipped runways yet is nonetheless set to hit a quarter of a billion dollars in sales this year, his best preparation for life was that other Italian tradition – far niente, or doing nothing.
Though he received no training in fashion, his eponymous label has boomed into a highly influential look – a subtly toned, cashmere sporty casualness that US retailers regard as gold dust and which consumers have embraced avidly.
If there’s a great debate in Paris fashion at the moment it’s between two directly opposing camps, executive suite chic versus warrior women cool.
Drawing up the battle lines, we numbered in the managing director’s corner Lanvin, Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent and Valentino, as well as a fledgling house like Anne Valerie Hash.
Leading the opposition with more wicked fare were Haider Ackermann, Karl Lagerfeld, Gareth Pugh, Sharon Wauchob, Rick Owens and Limi Feu.
At Vuitton, models paraded around in the dresses and skirts cut demurely below the knee. They may have worn corsets, the better to make their boobs pup up; but apart from the saucy touch this was a reined in Fall 2010 collection by Vuitton’s Creative Director, Marc Jacobs.
His finale was a quintet of grand gowns, for Chrissakes, and Elle MacPherson, the veteran supermodel who manages her own lingerie empire, wore the last look.
Madonna famously sang that, “music turned the bourgeois into rebels.” This season in Paris, however, designers are demanding a choice – you’re either bourgeois or rebel.
In the establishment corner representing restrained, and often severe, chic one notes, Yves Saint Laurent, Celine, Stella McCartney, Dries Van Noten, Chloe and most spectacularly Giambattista Valli.
Leading the rebellion, we can count on Balmain, Givenchy, Chanel and Balenciaga in the Fall 2010 collections that end this weekend.
In at least one case, the same designer manages to be in both camps. Take John Galliano, who sent out equestrian chic at Christian Dior and then went crazily nomadic at his own signature collection.
John’s invading hoards collection was one of several that tapped into a slew of ethnic cultures to develop a new exotic global traveler look, as did Jean Paul Gaultier, who took us on a world tour in his show.
Though no one could accuse the past long weekend in Milan of having been a stellar season, it was an eminently worthy one if your vision of a cool modern woman is that she should be a super heroine.
The final presentation of Sunday night, Versus, captured that rather well. Two score of emerging teenage models paraded round looking like Wonder Women entering a night club; while the season’s most innovative collection – Jil Sander – was inspired, believe it or not for house based in minimalism – by Lara Croft.
Even this city’s greatest avant-gardist, Miuccia Prada, sent out Sixties referenced clothes on models whose bouffant hairdos recalled the spouses of astronauts in, “The Right Stuff.” And you know something is going on when Italy’s most famous knitwear house, Missoni, sends of Celtic punk princesses, dolled up as if for an after party if – and let’s re-write history here – the Highland Clans had defeated the English at the Battle of Culloden.
They celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in Prague this winter; they heralded a Velvet Restoration in Manhattan last week.
Velvet, which in politics suggests a supple hand and not a clenched fist, in fashion it means something more suggestive – denoting opulence, propriety and a certain sensual richness.
The word originates from the Latin villus or shaggy haired; and that sense of comforting fashion, ideal for our never ending Great Recession, where women need the entire succor they can get, was evident all season. It also underlines the return to a certain Edwardian gentility, for never before this century have we seen so much demur fashion on New York catwalks.
“She’s a very well turned ankle,” used to be my gentlemanly uncle John’s discreet compliment of a lady’s figure, though this past weekend in New York has been all about hiding this attribute of female anatomy in a season that indicates a certain return to covered-up chic a new mysterious formality.
It was also a season overshadowed by the death of Alexander McQueen, news of his parting began circulating just as the first looks hit the runway the 10 a.m. show of BCBG Max Azria on Thursday. His memory haunted the whole weekend.
The return to reserve was subtly more apparent in the work of that ever-impressive duo of Flora Gill and Alexa Adams at Ohne Titel, where most looks were anchored by ribbed knits that reached to the ground covering up multi strap leather spike heels. Paired with strikingly well cut jackets whose back trim always wrapped over the behind, this was a ladylike twist in the triumphant downtown warrior gal look Ohne Titel has always been about. “We wanted something Victorian,” explained Flora, summing up the new sense of restraint we’ve seen in Manhattan.
Welcome to the age of the eco warrior damsel. Maybe we should put it down to Avatar, and a deep-seated longing, in the midst of the global downturn, for a more Arcadian vies of the future.
If that means strings of models are going to look like leggy humanoids, then so be it, was the concerted opinion of quite a few couturiers in the collections stage in Paris this January.
Jean Paul Gaultier stated the mood quite openly. Yes, he’d seen James Cameron’s movie, loved it and the whole collection flowed from there. And at Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld dreamed up a floral trimmed futurist mood, backed by the sort of soundtrack. And you know what Giorgio Armani’s favorite material in his Spring Haute Couture 2010 collection, “liquid metal” silk, an ideal fabric for re-constituting a natty Na'vi lady.
Talk about dressing for battle. If there was a defining garment on the Paris runways during the recently completed Men’s Fall 2010 season, it was the “Great Coat.”
It was as if everyone was girding for conflict, not an actual fight, but handling the Great Recession with a little bit of style and aplomb; so we got a mega return of the Great Coat, though in the classiest of materials, with graphic lines and collage-style finishes and a silhouette that was high-tech, yet also rather Edwardian. The Great Coat, by the way, is a deep pocketed, hefty coat of military origins that was one of the first garments mass-produced in the Industrial Revolution. This season in Paris it marched refined, bonded, striped and frequently in contrasting colors, of torso and arm.
Take Louis Vuitton, which looked east to Vienna, in a show inspired by Egon Schiele and, wait for it, Franz Kafka. But far from paranoia, we got the most authoritative of collections, where the clothes were more engineered than cut. The house’s men’s Designer, Paul Helbers, managed to set the agenda for the season with some very natty bonded calf leather coats, a great cross between high tech creative on a global mission meets, Gattaca cool kid. Helbers is no slouch at accessories either. His nattiest idea was a riding boot dissected at the ankle with horizontal zips and trimmed in gold just above the heel. Shown in contrasting colors of teak and anthracite, these were instant collector items.
Think of it as an example of class struggle on the runway. Milan divided into two camps, patrician and posh with lots of emphasis on Italian craftsmanship or workerist and funky, where the buzzword was “authentic.”
Sometimes the two currents appeared in the same event. Take Dolce & Gabbana, who staged their show before a giant screen showing excerpts of Baaria, the new Italian epic of three generations of a Sicilian family, beginning a century ago. Every single model wore boots in this 20th Anniversary show from this duo, pitting Sicilian peasant of their native island in cable woolen cardigans against the dandified aristocrats in strict black velvet suits. The sense of revolt was clear in the finale, when 100 models walked dramatically off the catwalk.
“We would have shown you the whole movie we loved it so much, but at three hours it’s too long for a runway show,” cracked Domenico Dolce.
Sometimes the two currents appeared in the same event. Take Dolce & Gabbana, who staged their show before a giant screen showing excerpts of Baaria, the new Italian epic of three generations of a Sicilian family, beginning a century ago.
If this past week was a good one for any designer it was Oskar Metsavaht, the coolest designer in Brazil and hippest guy in Rio di Janeiro, the city which just staged its first fashion season since being awarded the honor of tagging the 2016 Olympic Games.
La Cidade Maravilhosa, or Marvelous City as it likes to call itself is on something of a wonderful roll, as is Oskar who staged the debut runway collection of his junior accessories label New Order in Rio, before following that, three days later with a show of his main label Osklen in rival city Sao Paulo. Few creative minds in fashion better represent their own city than Oskar, whose whole aesthetic and oeuvre is linked to Rio, its surfing culture, beach beauty, curvilinear architecture and close contact to nature.
He’s the local equivalent of Western mega successes like Richard Branson, one of those dashing figures that effortlessly attract attention and good company. Sometimes called the “Tom Ford of Latin America”, who like the Texan has achieved success in several métiers, not just fashion.
These past few days in Rio de Janeiro, fashion was a metaphor of Brazil’s emergence a new global leader.
Beside giant visiting French battleships, with Brazil’s Minister of Culture playing the opening concert and with the city hyped up by just winning the right to stage the 2016 Olympics, Rio kicked off its 2010 runway season last week. It was a self-assured display of fashion that told us to expect Gothic, curvilinear shapes, semi-lingerie and frilly, very definitely sexy fashion, often with a conceptual twist, on women six months from now when it next turns autumnal and chilly.
By a curious accident of the international fashion calendar, Rio is the city that first actually presents – on runways – the first looks for Fall 2011. That’s true even if Rio, being in the southern hemisphere, inverts the season, so their next winter or “Inverno 2010” actually starts in June this year.
According to the Brazilian designers we’ve seen in the first four days, women are going to be wearing Chess figure shapes, pawns or more often lady knight silhouettes, with peaked shoulders, nipped waists and curvy hips. We’ve already seen that silhouette last year, and plenty, in Europe, but it did say something about feminine authority, and seemed visually a re-affirmation of independent women proudly showing off their healthy and fit shapes, and not enveloping them in burkhas or body-hiding attire.
Three decades ago when I first got interested in fashion as a posh punk living in the Lower East Side, I read an article in the Village Voice predicting that the most important musician of the future would be the record player. I thought it faintly absurd yet, of course, it is exactly what eventually happened, from Rap and Hip Hop re-inventing sounds by re-assembling its parts in music, to designers dissembling past trends, the better to make them cool and new. So one defining icon of fashion in the Noughties is the DJ, whose mélange of sounds, and key technique of sampling, is a leitmotif for much of what happened in the world of style in the decade just ended.
That much was apparent every time one attended the biggest fashion moment in New York in the past ten years – Marc Jacobs’ mega catwalk events, staged in the Downtown Armory before an audience of 2,000, perched on multiple rows of bleachers, peering down at the scores of celebrities in the front row. To be fair to Jacobs, whatever influence he rifled through, from thrift shop finds to latterly, thanks to his sojourn in Paris with Louis Vuitton, revamping Rei Kawakubo, Pierre Cardin or Yves Saint Laurent, he always managed to make his shows his own. Though, ironically, his soundtracks were rarely a mélange of samples, almost the exact opposite, single rock hits or single classical works put on an extended 15-minute loop.
Turns out you can have a second life, and a successful one at that, after fashion. Take Tom Ford, whom after turning one brand into the label of the Nineties and brilliantly launching his own signature collection, with his left hand has just come out with a debut movie. And, you know what? The film, entitled A Single Man, is a finely judged cinematic meditation to which one can doff one’s hat.
Ford has been quietly unveiling his debut film, A Single Man, at a private screenings on both side of The Pond and showed it last week in Paris to an audience of critics, friends and cinema aficionados. I’d like to think I made all three categories.
The film has already won rave reviews and awards. When Ford premiered A Single Man at the Venice International Film Festival, it was nominated for the Golden Lion and its lead actor Colin Firth won the prize for Best Actor.
There’s a newly, rather up-market, faintly homely, but generally chic moment wafting through fashion these days, which is all about equestrian chic.
Few things summed that up better than this past weekend at the Gucci Masters, a four-day celebration of high-level horsemanship, which marked the first time the Italian label has sponsored a “horsy” event in over a generation.
Gucci Masters was the highlight of the Paris Horse Show, which drew over 170,000 visitors and 400 exhibitors, though the space of the actual show jumping arena is restricted to 4,000 people, in keeping with the sport’s and brand’s elite origins.
Rarely in the history of fashion, has so much been spent to entertain so many for so very little. We’re talking about the sprawling, multi-million soiree staged by H&M to launch its latest designer hook-up – lingerie by Sonia Rykiel. Sonia’s slips, as the French call them; were cute and commercial though tad formulaic, as was this whole event, a lesson to brands worldwide in how throwing a whole lot of money at a launch is often counter-productive.
Consumers got their first look at the one-off collection on Saturday, but the latest partnership between the Swedish fashion retail giant and a bold face name designer was unveiled at this bash last Tuesday. H&M prides itself on democratizing fashion, but this affair was as hierarchical as the British social system, with the place crawling with heavy-handed security staff and an “elite” given VIP passes into an upstairs gallery from which they could look down on 2,000 or so, hoi polloi “rent a crowd” below.
Moreover, why take one of the world’s most distinguished buildings, the glorious Grand Palais, a massive neo-classic structure with an enormously beautiful glass roof, and then make it look like a cross between a New Jersey funfair and a cheap Chinese theme park version of the Moulin Rouge.
If any sleepy French brands seem poise for a sudden reawakening it just might be Carven, which thanks to its recently installed Artistic Director Guillaume Henry is enjoying something of an under the radar Renaissance.
“I’m interested in clothes that have charm, not aggression. I want women to feel good about themselves when they wear Carven, not be an extension of a designer’s ego,” Henry tells me over coffee at Carven’s rue Royale showroom.
Henry’s take on fashion is very much casual chic with a twist, where his fashion manages to be easy-to-wear but still edgily gentile. It’s a smart play for a house like Carven that had a reputation of creating fashion for adventurous career gals, women who worked but partied too.
It’s award season again in fashion, but for up-comers not the reigning stars, a moment, when, from New York to Zurich, the fashion establishment anoints fledgling designers with industry kudos and enviable cash prizes.
Last Monday in New York, Sophie Theallet, who is best known for dressing First Lady Michelle, won the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award, a prestigious prize that also includes a year of mentoring. Four days earlier in Zurich, Alexander Wang won the 2009 Swiss Textiles Award, making his the second American design house to nab central Europe’s most valuable fashion distinction. In London, the British Fashion Council and British Vogue announced on November 3, the creation of a joint award for fledgling young U.K. designers.
“This fund aims to help our most talented designers to become the global fashion brands of our future,” said Vogue Editor, Alexandra Shulman of the award. Entrants will be limited to designers with an established, U.K.-based business, a recognized client list of U.K. and international retailers and credible support from key media both in the U.K. and abroad.
There’s an old adage in fashion: never take over a house right after the founder has left. Leave someone else to be the buffer with history, tradition and the weight of expectations.
An instructive lesson in the case of the great Roman fashion house and designer Valentino, whose immediate successor, Alessandra Facchinetti, went through more than a little stylistic turbulence, and whose ultimate Creative Directors, the joint team of Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli, are suddenly looking like highly fancied dark horses to be The Next Big Thing in fashion.
So, while through no plan of their own, Chiuri and Piccioli were probably fortunate enough to have followed initial successor Alessandra Facchinetti, who acted, in effect, as a “shock absorber” between them and the original Sir Val.
Think of Walter Steiger as the haute couturier of modern shoemaking.
This bespectacled Swiss – who has made shoes for everyone from Oscar de la Renta and Calvin Klein to Karl Lagerfeld and Thierry Mugler in a remarkable five-decade career – recently opened his first couture boutique.
Located around the corner from the Bristol Hotel, the boutique and its elegant workshop have already created dazzling sequined boots for Beyonce, seen on her current tour.
When I call to visit, his craftsmen are creating a crocodile lace up for Lapo Elkann, the Italian luxury entrepreneur and Fiat heir, whom US Vogue once devoted 20-pages to, in a story which named him, “possibly the best dressed man in the world.”
“Lapo will surely wear this crocodile pair with jeans, which is the comble de chic,” smiles Steiger, using the French term for, “the height of style”.
Xenophobism might be rife in Russia, gallery owners are attacked for allegedly showing decadent art and “foreigners” the subject of regular attacks by fascist skinheads, yet Moscow’s impressive Biennale does offer a glimmer of hope, better yet a beacon, especially seeing its theme – “Against Exclusion.”
This capital city’s two previous Biennale’s featured lots of Western art, this season goes much further, showcasing works from every continent, from Congolese muralists or Aboriginal “spirit” painters to a chicken breeder artist from Belgium or a series of remarkable Afghan “war rugs,” led by the distinguished collector Jean Pigozzi.
The nerve center of the Biennale is the Garage, a striking former bus depot designed by the great Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov, whose diamond windowed private house on the Old Arbat, one of the few in the Soviet Union, remains a Mecca for all true architecture aficionados. The whole season kicked off on September 24th in the Garage, whose founder is Dasha Zukova, who is also the Editor-in-Chief of Pop magazine.
Designers, a visual lot, aren’t generally wordy sorts but their ability to foresee the future should not be underestimated, which felt the case last week in Moscow, where local runway shows had an ebullient mood, aptly so, as half way through Russian Fashion Week, the economy here officially moved out of recession.
The seven-day season had plenty of rockin’ western collections from ex model, Erin Wasson’s first foreign show to a catwalk display by C’N’C, the diffusion line of Milan’s Costume National, to Keith Richards’ daughter, Alexandra Richards, spinning the discs at the RFW closing night party. From rock star wedding looks, to oligarch dame styling this season in Moscow was about a return to exuberance in New Russian Dressing.
Take the bountiful Russian bling moment in the runway show of Julia Sarkisova, an oligarch’s wife, whose front-row was packed by equally well-financed gals, cheering on her every look. The collection did owe a lot to two Western labels, Roberto Cavalli and Balmain, but Sarkisova injected enough of her Muscovite pizzazz to be justified in calling these clothes her own.
If anyone ever dreams of doubting the commitment of this writer to discover new foreign fashion moments, then they should wake up and apologize when they discover the location of the latest fashion week just attended – Tashkent.
That’s Tashkent, as in the most famous capital on the ancient Silk Road, Tashkent, as in a one week long festival of art, crafts, fabric, music and fashion, bankrolled by the most eligible woman in Asia.
Her name? Gulnara Kairmova, the beautiful six-foot tall, fashion plate, multiple change of dress, once wanted by the US on an arrest warrant for skipping out of the country, daughter of the President of Uzbekistan, Islman Karimov.
The fashion battle lines were drawn last week in Paris between two competing visions of fashion; call it the rumble between boudoir and the bureau – between utility chic and a festival of flirtation.
In the right hand corner, celebrating femme fatales were several heavyweight contenders, like Dior, Lanvin and, above all, Balmain.
Weighing in for a lady like reality check for Spring 2010 were Chanel, Chloe, Celine and Dries Van Noten, where the idea was a certain energetic gentility.
Enough has been written already about the huge influence of Balmain, as under the direction of Christophe Decarnin the house’s steamy, disheveled rock chic look, is copied everywhere from Sydney to Sao Paolo.
It was all about flash, rather than cash in Milan last week, when the Spring 2010 collections were the most revealing and exposed we can remember, the key element in most wardrobes, the bra and the unspoken muse of the catwalk, Italian TV showgirls.
No man is an island and neither is fashion, as the Milan collections revealed last week, with the skimpiest, and most revealing, collections we’ve seen in many stylistic moons.
No front row in Milan is complete without super smiling local TV stars with names like Alessia Ventura, Michelle Hunziker or Frederica Fontana, continually portrayed in gossip magazines by paparazzi shots of them in bikinis.
So this season it was all about open, naked, and exposed. Even at the intellectual labels.
The reason everyone insists that one must come to London is because of the thrill of the new, to see challenging shows by emerging designers who really take risks and invent something new. But after five days spent in the UK capital, my over-riding memory is of seeing collections that continually reference the past, as designers dipped into their grannies’ closets and British history for inspiration.
Take the morning show of Luella Bartley, the most recent winner of the British Fashion Council’s “Designer of the Year” award. One style fitted all at Luella, who sent out bouffant dresses, in polka dot or faded flower prints, or best of all, volume frocks in a puckered silk floral style. They all looked very fine in a formal and nostalgic sort of way, but in the end reminiscent of things, a upper middle class English mum might have had in her wardrobe in the late Fifties, especially if she had ever caught in her local cinema a screening of William Klein’s “Who Are You Polly Magoo,” still the greatest “fashion” movie ever made.
Another collection that impressed, even more so, was the second runway outing of Kinder Aggugini, which attracted rock royalty and the real thing, Yasmin Le Bon, wife of Duran Duran singer Simon, and Lady Helen Taylor, a cousin of The Queen.
If New York designers looked anywhere for inspiration, in the season that has barely ended it would be to their own very city, and its increasingly sporty culture – but most specifically to the buildings and environment that surrounds.
Take the final big show of the week, Calvin Klein. The use of volume, and the manner in which fabric jutted, twisted and curled around the body in this collection recalled the latest, curvy and globular architectural work by the likes Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry. Most strikingly, the pale grays and soft whites used in the show were uncannily similar to the IAC headquarters on the Hudson River, designed by Gehry.
The tensile forms of Hadid also came to mind when viewing the Spring 2010 collection of the brilliant design duo of Flora Gill and Alexa Adams at fledgling label Ohne Titel. Their inspiration was “Egyptian reliefs and sculptures,” and many looks seemed like Art Deco conversation pieces and statues, with a highly modernist tinge, that had sprung to life.
Just when I was wondering where one could go to find an authentic, new, New York nightlife experience, a club where a gent could carouse with a little class and humor, when along came Andre Balazs and opened his roof top club in The Standard, whose opening party Saturday night confirmed it, in one slick swoop, as the coolest watering hole on the planet.
If that sounds a little too flattering and obsequious, even “lusingatori”, as the Italians say, then we’re sorry, but right now Boom Boom as it’s known, at least temporarily – of that, more later – has no real rival.
Edging past a good score of super models – leggy Frankie Ryder, haughty Lily Donaldson, pouting Devon Aoki, blooming and pregnant Karolina Kurkova, and sizzling Astrid Munoz, I could not help being a little impressed by the gathering. Madonna tight in one corner with squeeze Jesus Luz, Calvin Klein posing with Donna Karan, and Steven Klein dishing with Daphne Guinness.
Location, location and location is the famous dictum in real estate to divine the worth of property, but it’s also pretty revealing in the world of style.
That much was clear last week during “design season” at the opening of a huge, new 7,000 square-foot boutique in Paris’ Golden Triangle between the Champs Elysees and Avenue Montaigne by Sicis, arguably the best mosaic maker in the world. Sicis, you see, has taken over the recently shuttered Paris flagship of Versace, the mosaic maker’s violet grape on golden background looking perfectly at home in the Romanesque pale gray and white marble floors Versace had left behind.
It’s been half a decade since the great Suzy Menkes predicted that the hotel would one day be “the new handbag”, but judging from these past days in Paris which hosted the giant trade fair, Maison & Object and a slew of ancillary boutique openings and central city launches, the apartment will be the new shoe.
One of the great boom businesses internationally these past few years is the “Pop Up” store, though, like most people, this is a retail phenomena one tends read far more about than actually experience.
For those who have never heard of this marketing marvel, Pop Ups are temporary stores, frequently with time specific merchandise, designed to target fashion forward shoppers, assumed to be obsessed with limited edition of collections.
Though not a new phenomena, it’s used by luxury brands which is relatively recent, and, somewhat ironically, the claim for being the first Pop Up is generally given to mass marketer Target, which opened a temporary 1,500 square-feet store in Rockefeller Center to celebrate Isaac Mizrahi’s affordable women’s line on Sept. 4, 2003. Its life cycle – a mere six weeks, yet Target judged the brief boutiques, a success. One year later it towed a barge-boutique up the Hudson River for the following Christmas season.
If anything sums up fashion’s continuing fascination with football it’s the latest deal with a major league club and a significant design brand – the partnership between Ferre and FC Lazio inked this month.
The house of Ferre might be mired in Chapter 11, desperately struggling to fend off its creditors and effectively on the auction block, but Milan-based Ferre still smartly sealed an agreement with Roma-based Lazio. A massive ten months, for global football has just begun. The 2009-2010 season will climax next year with the World Cup Finals in South Africa, scheduled to kick off on June 11, 2010.
From opening elite bars in giant European stadia and using star players as brand ambassadors to selling everything from underwear to boots, to sending goal scorers out on your catwalk or dressing teams for formal functions, designers are increasingly connected at the hip with global soccer.
Few locations far from a runway better illustrate the link between music and fashion than Space, the Ibizan institution that many regard as the best dance club in the world.
Space celebrated its 20th anniversary this past weekend, with the short of churning craziness for which it has justly established its reputation for hosting intense dance bravura.
Divining a dress code in Space is a tricky issue, as the plethora of aesthetic, musical and pan European tribes that frequent the massive club don’t inhabit anywhere near the same style universes. All human clubbing life was there for Grace Jones’ recent concert – Vogueing Catalan muchachos, shoulder wiggling London lads in singlets, on the tips of their toes French magazine stylists, German techno addicts, hair-jelled Romans, Swedish poseurs in gold sequined cargo pants – I kid you not – and, even, Wall Streeters uprooting to Beijing.
Bono – an individual of some accomplishment who can lay claim to quite a view métiers, including, among others, rock star, global philanthropist, agit prop propagandist extraordinaire, humanitarian and father, has now bagged a new distinction; this summer in Europe, he’s the owner of the planet’s coolest jacket.
I should know, as I tried it on.
Backstage it was at U2’s techno-froth and fantasy show in Nice, a sort of “homecoming” for the band, all the members of which own Mediterranean property east of Garibaldi’s favorite Ville. The coat, known as the Laser Jacket, is the star fashion turn of U2’s current 360° tour, a rock matador’s coat of light, that shoots porcupine spines of radiance through dry-ice.
Made of cunning combo of deconstructed black leather shirt jacket and LEDs, and powered by its own back battery pack, the singer’s shinning sheath seemed to have a life of its own as he stomped and pirouetted through the encore performance of ‘Ultra Violet (Light My Way)’. Some 240 lasers laced along the sleeves and torso illuminating the singer, exaggerating his every move.
I was thinking what books I am going to relax over in the shade near the pool this month and the one which tickles my fancy right now is Russian Style, a coolly produced tomb by Evelina Khromchenko, the hipster from Moscow.
The busiest gasparda – Russian for lady – east of, well, the Seine or the Channel, must be Khromchenko- fashion editrix, TV star, guru and style setter.
She feted the launch of her book in July in Paris with a fete in the bookstore of her publisher Assouline in St German, which attracted everyone from It Gal Olympia Scary to Dasha Zhukova, main squeeze of Russian billionaire, and Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, whose portraits are in the book.
Russian Style is cunningly well delivered view, which heralds the new generation of Russian designers at the same time as it reveals just how much of the country’s iconography and taste has seeped into Western culture without of really noticing.
If there’s been a growth industry in the past decade, one that has exploded across the globe, it is developing fashion weeks. Just like every independent democracy has to build an impressive parliament, no self-respecting country can truly call itself stylish any more unless it boasts a proper, multi-show runway season.
Call it the endless season, but as any front-row critic can attest, every day of the year, except maybe Christmas, a fashion season is taking place somewhere – from Riga to Reykjavik or Rio to Yerevan. I even once sent a writer to cover a weekend of shows in Medellin, the Columbian city that is the cocaine capital of the planet – she reported back that the models practically ran down the catwalk.
This July it was the turn of Berlin, at the center of a busy European fashion harvest, sandwiched in between the men’s seasons in Milan and Paris and four days of Paris haute couture shows in Paris.
They have been predicting the death of haute couture in Paris for a couple of decades, but judging from the number of brands, boutiques and editors who hitched a ride with the season this month, the old dear has plenty of life in her left.
Everyone from America’s two most famous brands – Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein – Europe’s coolest store, Paris’ edgiest grand jeweler and Russia’s hippest Editor-in-Chief staged soirees and parties during the four day season, generating as much buzz as the actual runway displays by the likes of Chanel or Christian Dior.
Take Calvin Klein, a fashion house that has never thrown a couture collection. Yet, on couture’s opening night, its two ready-to-wear designers, Francisco Costa and Italo Zucchelli, hosted the dinner of the season in the Michelin two-star restaurant Apicius.
Men’s fashion, unlike women’s, can be a restrictive world, where most designers pull their punches, convinced that the average guy, even one who regularly subscribes to a monthly fashion men’s fashion magazine, won’t wear anything too radical. That’s especially true when it comes to anything too innovative in terms shape; guys don’t want to, literally, stick out too much.
This season, in the Paris menswear runway shows that ended June 28, however, the catwalks were crammed with fluid, flowing, away from the body clothes. In an edgy “Out of Africa” moment, djelabas, kurtas, extended priestly robes and billowing coats all sailed down the runways.
Take Dior Homme where Kris Van Assche sent out lightly layered, faintly fluttering fashion for men, in an inside-outside collection.
Horsehair, normally employed on the inside to define the shoulder, instead embellished a jacket; trousers were cut amply at the thigh and tight at the ankle. The whole collection had a strangely airy bulk.
“Upbeat, optimistic and transparent,” Calvin Klein’s menswear designer Italo Zucchelli told me backstage in Milan, pointing to bomber jackets in whisper light layers of fabrics where contrasting weaves gave the clothes an uncanny three-dimensional depth.
One of the most acclaimed shows of the recently completed Milan men’s fashion season, Calvinism for next spring 2010 is all about transparence and, almost, full disclosure.
At Prada, the other stellar runway event, see-through was a theme as well. Leather shoes and pork pie hats were perforated and dusters and bomber jackets made of see-through mesh materials more commonly associated with sneakers and fishing gear.
Sometimes, the transparency was more, well, celestial, at Jil Sander – where designer Raf Simons created shirts that almost floated by, bearing Arcadian, Sistine Chapel style celestial images culled from Japanese painter Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita.
There are few better rendezvous of fashion and art than Pitti, the twice-a-year Florentine fair where little expense is spared in marrying la mode with modernist art, Renaissance painting and absurdist performances.
It sure helps that Pitti’s bold face events are generally staged in some of the great works of architecture and finest gardens ever attempted anywhere.
Last year, I feasted at a Hugo Boss event in a magnificent villa designed by no less than Michelangelo, downing Bistecca alla Fiorentina before drummers and acrobats from Burundi and Gabon, stood in human columns of four men and, in a brilliant sleight of hand, they were lit by gas jets emerging from a 1936 pool built by legendary Italian garden architect Pietro Porcinai. The only thing missing was the models did not manage to walk on water.
The next evening night Diane Von Furstenberg hosted a show and un diner champêtre, i.e. in fresh air, in the finest private garden of the Tuscan capital, where Tony Parker, Eva Longoria, princes and princesses of the Corsini, Torlonia, Borromeo and Pucci families and Western Europe’s greatest dandy, Lapo Elkann felt pretty good about ourselves.
It may come as a surprise but, quite literally, the best possible luxury frequently has no price at all. Take one weekend in May, when a slew of us – grandees, aristocrats, plushy and wealthy or just caustically witty – were whisked off in limos to the expansive countryside of champagne for 24 hours of haute gamme pampering courtesy of the nec plus ultra of champagne – Dom Perignon.
The first hint was a text message from my good pal – night owl, jewelry designer and Rajasthan princess, Nupur Tron, summoning me for an escapist weekend. The next was a black invite with golden lettering inviting me to “a moment of exception” to see the abbey where Dom Perignon invented champagne before some fine dining in Chateau de Saran, a splendid hill top hunting lodge with a vast view over Chardonnay vineyards.
The chateau was built in the 19th century by the Moet family, of Moet Chandon, who created a splendid home with over a dozen beautifully appointed, highly ceiling rooms, a private venue for distinguished guests that have included everyone from Lenny Kravitz to Johnny Depps’ lady love Vanessa Paradis.
Frequently the best introduction to any country, or culture, is simply dining with a designer, especially one as charming and assured as Collette Dinnigan, who invited me into her Paddington meets Provencal home in Sydney last month.
An amalgam of several town houses and plots, her home in Paddington – a charming Victoriana inner suburb – boasts a chic pool surrounded by towering banana trees, bougainvillea, giant vines and high walls to keep the curious out. Two days earlier, I got a inkling into her yearning for privacy; when I attended a mega Mac event in a downtown nightclub, and Dinnigan was very much the biggest wattage star of the event. Four years ago, the Australia government even featured her on a stamp, for Christ sakes!
In public Dinnigan is always civil but a tad distant, and I understood why as young fashion students queued up to be snapped with the star, and total strangers, literally, gossiped to me about Collette’s private life. Specifically her parting from local TV entertainment reporter Richard Wilkins from whom she separated two years ago and with whom she had a child, four-year-old Estella, who is in bed by the time I arrive chez elle.
As a dedicated follower of fashion, no month is complete for me without attending at least one runway season, and nothing could underline my commitment to style than the distance I went to my latest obeisance to great runway gods – I flew all the way to Australia. For this spring’s key fashion season, you see, is in Sydney.The last time I came to Sydney’s fashion week in 2001 women at shows Down Under wore big hats and floral frocks, like they had just come from placing a bet at the country’s biggest race , the Melbourne Cup, and were squeezing in a runway show before the next gallop. I imagined all their clutches held betting stubs. This visit, however, the audiences at the Rosemont Australian Fashion Week looked pretty hip and contemporary in their designer black leggings, jersey silk harem pants and Oz high heels from brands like Siren and Tony Bianco. A decade ago I didn’t enjoy a single fashion moment in Sydney, this time I had three.
The opening moment was deep in the bowels of an underground car park in Sydney’s East Village, King’s Cross, a remarkable display of assured cutting and subtle layering by 23-year-old Dion Lee. Using perforated leather for shoulders and bubbled skirts, and black silk twill in micro cocktails Lee made a great collection of architectural fashion. Ironically, his inspiration was car crash sculptures by American artist, John Chamberlain.