WHAT I DID IN PARIS

Posted by Fashion Editor at Large

I was sitting behind Suzy Menkes and Hamish Bowles at Uniqueness by Alessandra Faccinetti (and Pinko). Their silhouettes could make a great fashion print.

Suzy & Hamish

Some of my favourite looks at Valli. 

I've been posting every day over at Sportsgirl so I though I'd pop the links up here so you can see everything I got up to in Paris- Enjoy!

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Oh, and apparently we're not the only ones who've been imagining what K-Mid might wear from the latest round of shows, hmmm

THE HAT YOU NEED

Posted by Fashion Junior at Large

One of the many highlights of my trip to Paris last week was discovering Bernstock Speirs and their super cute hats. The FashEd is already a big fan and I'm not surprised as their Bunny hat seems to me like a Summer version of the much admired Marie Mercie hat which she is so in love with. We're noticing a playful, childish mood come through for next Summer so we're tipping this as the accessory you never knew you needed. And the perfect model is Thelma Speirs herself who began the business in 1982 with partner Paul Bernstock and has been having a great time doing it ever since! Drop by their store on Brick Lane on buy online.

Trust us when we say yellow is the colour to go for...

The Bunny hat is £45 and come in all sorts of colours

 If you're partial to something a little more classic, then Bernstock Speirs also have the most darling boater hats for next Summer. Just add a prom skirt for flirty, feminine, Mary Poppins-y charm.

Boater at Emporio Armani

John Galliano SS12

Catwalk images- catwalking.com. All other pictures Fashion Junior at Large

SS12: UNDER THE SEA

Posted by Fashion Junior at Large

JW Waterhouse's The Mermaid. This season's collections are moving the image on

As one might expect from Spring/Summer collections, we have seen a myriad of references to all things seaside related during this fashion season; Mulberry took us on a seventies day out at the British beach, Daks (amongst others) was all fifties riviera, Craig Lawrence used sand as his starting point and Jonathan Saunders was all about Miami. But in Milan and Paris, some of the key collections have left the familiarity of the waterside and plunged to the mythical depths of the ocean to draw inspiration from sea creatures, shells and mermaids. 

Givenchy SS12

At Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci served up a streetwise version of mermaid-ness. There was the irridescence of a pearl scattered seabed and a scaled effect which echoed a translucent ocean dweller but the addition of a blazer and flash of leg meant these did not descend into being unwearable back on dry land.

Givenchy SS12

At Versace, Donatella referenced her brother's signature baroque prints and presented a sexed up modern mermaid,who looks like she might be off to the Marine Bar to sit on a shell and scout out the sea horse talent.

Versace SS12

Versace SS12

Versace SS12

At Alexander McQueen, it was all about drawing comparison to the textures of coral and pearl for Sarah Burton. Padded hips and fishtails, not unfamiliar features of a McQueen collection, leant themselves to the creation of  a mermaid silhoutte. The lace caps, called fetishistic by some, emphasise the other worldly, sea bed effect.

Alexander McQueen SS12

Alexander McQueen SS12

Alexander McQueen SS12- This looks like it's slicked in sea water

Finally, at Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld drew on one of the house's most important symbols, the pearl, and paid homage to its oceanic origins not only in the clothes but also on the pure white, ocean floor set. The pièce de résistance was Florence Welch, singing from inside a giant clam shell, 2012's incarnation of the Mermaid fantasy. 

Chanel SS12

Chanel's ocean floor set at the Grand Palais

Florence serenades the audience from her shell stage as the models encircle the set, spines encrusted with pearls.

All images, aside from The Mermaid (from JWWaterhouse.com), from Catwalking.com

PARIS FASHION WEEK: ALL ABOUT MCQUEEN

Posted by Fashion Editor at Large

The Alexander McQueen show this evening was a spectacle of demi-couture as fine as any Parisian maison could create, though this finery is all pretty much handmade in London, England. Sarah Burton, fresh from the most unpredictably brilliant, fame-making 18 months of her life was in typically low-key form backstage, while onstage her work was breathtaking in its scope of technique and the clothes were extraordinarily beautiful and haunting. This served to remind us that McQueen is dead, but that someone lighter and easier in her skin than Lee, holds the key to unlocking the brands future.

It gave me cause for thought, though, that Burton and the Alexander McQueen business is putting out a message of pure high fashion drama, with not an easy-to-wear piece, or new season fashion message in sight. This collection was all dresses. I'm not complaining, because I know full well that the selling-collection and the McQ line lookbooks will slip into my in-box soon, and that there will be clothes for everyday life in there. But where does this leave normal folk interested in seeing what the McQueen fashion message is to be for Spring Summer 2012? I say enjoy the beauty, there is not enough beauty in the world. See for yourself.  It worked on us. We arrived at the McQueen show tired, we left on a high.

Furthering my attempts at photography with the new zoom lens, I give you the McQueen show, Fashion Editor At Large style.

Sarah sandwiched between Francois Henri Pinault (majority shareholder of Alexander McQueen) with his wife, the actress Salma Hayek. Salma said to her post the show "you have made me very happy"

Two tired but very happy Sarahs: Burton of McQueen, Mower of US Vogue, who is due to recieve her MBE next week.  

 

PARIS FASHION WEEK: A LITTLE BIT OF THE NEW CHLOE

Posted by Fashion Editor at Large

I've been posting my daily doings during Paris over at my antipodean friends Sportsgirl's website this week, leaving the blog free for the things that fall between the fashion news so competently reported by newspaper, web and magazine ladies of the press. Of course I am one such, but unlike most of my contemporaries my blog is an aside from my journalism work, and therefore purely personal with no advertisers or editors to please.

Paris Fashion Week has been pretty brutal, really. The schedule is insane, and the heat, well, I'm not going to moan. But it is downright weird to feel the sun searing your skin in October in Northern Europe. I've just come from the Chloe show, an excellent debut by Clare Waight Keller, who fresh from having her third child managed to make the collection different enough from her predeccesor Hannah McGibbon, yet still Chloe and, cruciallly, gave it a fresh new vibe that was more woman than girl.

Here are a selection of my photos from the Chloe show. Forgive the quality, I've got a new lens and am still trying to get it to focus on the right object.  Though in the below instance, its interesting and amusing to see the faces of the audience, who seem to be doing everythign but watching the show (though of course they are, another model is coming along out of the picture.)

The designer used a pleating motif through the collection

Mixing nude and geranium pink was the order of the day at Chloe

Photos: Fashion Editor at Large

PARIS FASHION WEEK: KANYE'S PLEA

Posted by the Fashion Junior at Large

One of the most hyped events of Paris Fashion Week was Kanye West's debut collection which was shown on Saturday night. There had long been rumours about who the musician might be collaborating with for his first foray into design after a longtime FROW presence. And he dived straight in at the deep-end with a full-on catwalk show at an imposing venue (the grand library of a French lycee opposite the pantheon) on the Saturday night of the Paris schedule. Basically, this was always going to be a BIG DEAL.

Kanye with Chanel Iman and Sky Ferreira (WWD.COM)

For the vast majority of Fashion Editors, the clothes haven't quite lived up to the hype. At The New York Times, Eric Wilson said 'What Mr. West eventually showed was confusing'. Tim Blanks on Style.com wrote that 'what we actually saw was something that looked like a baby Balmain vision of womenswear'. While Lisa Armstong's headline read 'Kanye West's Paris Fashion Week debut was rap with a capital C'. And it wasn't just Fashion Editors having a dig, Malcolm Harris, a designer with connections to the worlds of art, film and music writes an open letter to Kanye begging him to go back to what he does best. All over OUCH.

People were confused by Kanye's use of fur in a Spring/ Summer collection

The models were sent out in clothes which didn't fit

Kanye seems to have pre-empted his critics with the speech he gave at the after-show party. WWD reported his words and we thought we'd post them here in the spirit of true fashion justice.... What do you think?

“Thank you for anybody that didn’t believe, because they motivated us to break our boundaries,” he said.

“We don’t know what the reviews will be, we don’t know what they will say, but I got a chance to go to Italy and feel those fabrics. I begged Louis Vuitton to let me do more shoes after my shoes sold out in two weeks, and they did not. I begged Nike, I begged this company to let me do it. And I took out motherf---ing loans to get the best models, to get the best designers, to get the best venue. I gave you everything that I had.

“This is my first collection. Please be easy. Please give me a chance to grow. This is not some celebrity s---. I don’t f--- with celebrities. I f--- with the creatives in this room, the amazing people who spend every day of their life trying to make the world a more beautiful place.

“The amount of people that tried to get me a celebrity f---ing deal. They said, ‘You need to do boot-cut jeans, or you won’t sell.’ Shut the f--- up ! Or Hedi Slimane in the motherf---ing Mercer, sitting with me, saying, ‘Stop giving them your ideas, Kanye. Do your own thing.’ Hedi Slimane! To feel so frustrated. And I thank anybody who came to this party, everybody who supported, everybody who believed, because people thought it was a joke, and maybe people still do, but I can only grow from this point”


 After ranting this, he asked the DJ to play "Try A Little Tenderness" by Otis Redding. Bless his cotton socks.

EDVARD MUNCH AND THE STREET STYLE THING

Posted by Fashion Junior at Large (in Paris)

A tuileries poser (see fashionologie.com)

Back when I was a reader of this blog, I recall an account of the blogger's catwalk phenomenon that occurs before each show at the Tuileries during fashion week. This morning, I actually experienced this a tiny bit for myself as I accompanied the FashEd to Viktor and Rolf. Although it was pretty remarkable, I knew it had been well documented here and elsewhere before so didn't think much more of it. That is until I paid a visit to the Edvard Munch exhibition currently taking place at the Pompidou Centre.

I think we all recognise this holding the camera at arms length to capture a self-portrait. Classically known as the 'my-space' pose

 His obsession with taking his own picture and painting his own portrait struck a chord in the context of the slightly bizarre Tuileries scene where people know that if they dress right, the street snappers will come running- they're turning themselves into subjects just as much as Munch did himself, even if they don't actually end up taking the picture. In exactly the same way as today's subjects, Munch would experiment with different looks, settings and angles.

 Of course, he wasn't trying to show how stylish he was, nor was he attempting to become some kind of star simply by taking cool photos of himself but he was most definitely exploring a facet present in us all to some degree; our fascination with our own image.

 The exhibition notes explain that Munch took to painting himself at least once a year so that by the end of his life he had over 40 self- portraits, not to mention many more pictures taken on his Kodak Bull's Eye camera which he purchased in Berlin in 1902. I couldn't help imagining what Munch might have made of today's prolific self-portraiture as facilitated by blogs, tumblrs and twitter. But most of all I thought he was a great example of how this level of wonderment about our own image and that of fellow humans is really no new thing. He was perhaps one of the first people to have opportunity to properly indulge it. And now we are positively swamped with chances, we can spend all day posing and snapping if we really want to.

All Edvard Munch photos by Fashion Junior at Large at the Centre Georges Pompidou, until 9th January