This summer, London was the centre of the world. Fact. And we
loved every minute of it. But guess what? It's over. Brutal, yes, but
these are the fashion pages. Didn't you know, sugarcoating makes you fat?
Which brings us to New York fashion week, where anyone who's anyone in the industry – that's me, Suri Cruise, Ricky Martin – has spent the past few days. Now, there is plenty to gripe about in the fashion-week system. All this environmentally unsound galumphing around the globe is arguably unnecessary in the age of live streaming. The New York-London-Milan-Paris axis of power is surely ludicrously outdated now, when Beijing has three times as many Gucci stores as New York. Not to mention the worst part, which is of course that the packing is an absolute nightmare.
But there is still something very positive to be got out of the fashion circus, because it forces us to see the world through a different lens. Fashion is always about how we feel about ourselves and our lives. The point of wearing actual clothes, rather than swathing yourself in an animal skin, or whatever, is that clothes transform you from your naked, private self to a functioning member of society. So when you are at another city's fashion week – not just clicking through the photos on style.com but actually there, with their weather and their food and their smells and their news on the radio – it gives you a little peek inside the head of that place. (I think it might be called perspective, except run up in modish chiffon/neoprene blend and with a hefty pricetag.) When you put that together with being able to have bacon and maple syrup for breakfast, you've got a pretty compelling argument for New York fashion week, in my book.
Marc Jacobs's New York catwalk shows are peerless in capturing the spirit of the city. The energy in the audience, and backstage, has to be experienced to be believed: the most talented artists, the most outrageous drag queens, the most beautiful girls. Imagine the Chelsea Hotel lobby in its heyday, updated and live-streamed. If you could bottle the atmosphere in that show, you could sell it, to be dabbed on the wrist like a New York version of Chanel No 5. In the old days, you used to turn up at Jacobs's shows at the time on the invite, only to be told casually that the shoes hadn't turned up yet (I always assumed "shoes" was code for "coke", but let the record state there was absolutely no evidence for this) and that we should go and have a drink and come back in an hour. So an hour later, you'd have an audience pumped on lethal Gramercy Park Hotel martinis, squished up on the bleachers in the half-dark for another hour before the show actually began. All kinds of shenanigans. In the last few years, it has gone the other way: annoyed with people sniping about his tardiness, Jacobs has taken to starting his shows on the dot. Which creates another kind of blink-and-you'll-miss-it energy that is, in its own way, just as Manhattanesque as the louche scenes of old.
Edie Sedgwick and Warhol's factory were the key references of Jacobs's collection this week. Along with Studio 54, another oft-mined fashion reference, the Factory era is shorthand for New York being the centre of the (cool) world. Skirt suits were made sassy by an almost Britneyesque gap between top and bottom half, uniting elements from the 1960s and now. Thick stripes of black and white sequins thundered down the catwalk at such a rate as to turn themselves into Bridget Riley op-art before one's eyes.
Until a few years ago, New York was the last of the four fashion weeks. Fed up with being accused of plagiarism, and of buyers who had blown their budgets in London, Milan and Paris, the city's designers jumped to the head of the queue. Since then, the commercial schedule has hastened so that most buying is done before the catwalk shows: the budget issue is for the most part no longer relevant, the plagiarism issue ditto. For an editor, the order poses a problem, because New York is seldom at the forefront of trends. So trying to predict them at this point is like watching the first quarter of the film Memento, and then trying to figure out the plot. There are shards of information that are clearly important, but we don't yet have the context for them.
That's my excuse, anyway. If I was to stick my neck out at this point and predict a trend, I might go for T-shirt dresses and graphic panelling. In recent seasons, US and European designers have been running along parallel paths: New York obsessed with sportswear (those omnipresent posh jogging bottoms) and Europe mining the potential of racing-stripe edges and blocks of colour on more tailored clothing. This week, the two seemed to come together: not just at Marc Jacobs, but at 3.1 Philip Lim, at Tommy Hilfiger and Karen Walker. (Dungarees, also. Mark my words.)
Graphic panels and go-faster stripes, put on the fashion map by Phoebe Philo in Paris several seasons ago, were embraced by many New York designers this time. I don't mean by this to suggest laziness, or copying – no one has intellectual property of the stripe, and Phoebe's Celine aesthetic references classic American sportswear. What goes around comes around. At Alexander Wang the stripe was more of a slash. At Victoria Beckham it gave a crisp edge to collars and to trouser seams for daytime, and a more risque, lingerie touch to sheer-panelled evening dresses. DKNY showed a strong collection that drew inspiration from its namesake city, with a colour palette that stretched to "black, white, neutrals and flashes of taxi". Diane von Furstenberg indulged a dreamy, Marrakech-to-Jaipur colour scheme but kept the look bang up to date with crisp ribbons of black edging.
The fashion season is only now hitting its stride – as I write, we haven't even seen many of the major New York shows. But the early signs seem to be that the gloomy, dark mood that pervaded the previous season has lifted. At Rodarte, dresses constructed around a central breastplate panel reminded me of the gothic mood and obsession with armour that shaped February's shows – but this time, the breastplates were in mint, or apricot. More like the jolly plumage of a robin, than any kind of defensive statement. That, I think, is cheering news. And you know what's even better? London fashion week starts tomorrow.
Source
Which brings us to New York fashion week, where anyone who's anyone in the industry – that's me, Suri Cruise, Ricky Martin – has spent the past few days. Now, there is plenty to gripe about in the fashion-week system. All this environmentally unsound galumphing around the globe is arguably unnecessary in the age of live streaming. The New York-London-Milan-Paris axis of power is surely ludicrously outdated now, when Beijing has three times as many Gucci stores as New York. Not to mention the worst part, which is of course that the packing is an absolute nightmare.
 |
| Stripes have been ubiquitous in New York. Photograph: Getty Images |
But there is still something very positive to be got out of the fashion circus, because it forces us to see the world through a different lens. Fashion is always about how we feel about ourselves and our lives. The point of wearing actual clothes, rather than swathing yourself in an animal skin, or whatever, is that clothes transform you from your naked, private self to a functioning member of society. So when you are at another city's fashion week – not just clicking through the photos on style.com but actually there, with their weather and their food and their smells and their news on the radio – it gives you a little peek inside the head of that place. (I think it might be called perspective, except run up in modish chiffon/neoprene blend and with a hefty pricetag.) When you put that together with being able to have bacon and maple syrup for breakfast, you've got a pretty compelling argument for New York fashion week, in my book.
Marc Jacobs's New York catwalk shows are peerless in capturing the spirit of the city. The energy in the audience, and backstage, has to be experienced to be believed: the most talented artists, the most outrageous drag queens, the most beautiful girls. Imagine the Chelsea Hotel lobby in its heyday, updated and live-streamed. If you could bottle the atmosphere in that show, you could sell it, to be dabbed on the wrist like a New York version of Chanel No 5. In the old days, you used to turn up at Jacobs's shows at the time on the invite, only to be told casually that the shoes hadn't turned up yet (I always assumed "shoes" was code for "coke", but let the record state there was absolutely no evidence for this) and that we should go and have a drink and come back in an hour. So an hour later, you'd have an audience pumped on lethal Gramercy Park Hotel martinis, squished up on the bleachers in the half-dark for another hour before the show actually began. All kinds of shenanigans. In the last few years, it has gone the other way: annoyed with people sniping about his tardiness, Jacobs has taken to starting his shows on the dot. Which creates another kind of blink-and-you'll-miss-it energy that is, in its own way, just as Manhattanesque as the louche scenes of old.
Edie Sedgwick and Warhol's factory were the key references of Jacobs's collection this week. Along with Studio 54, another oft-mined fashion reference, the Factory era is shorthand for New York being the centre of the (cool) world. Skirt suits were made sassy by an almost Britneyesque gap between top and bottom half, uniting elements from the 1960s and now. Thick stripes of black and white sequins thundered down the catwalk at such a rate as to turn themselves into Bridget Riley op-art before one's eyes.
Until a few years ago, New York was the last of the four fashion weeks. Fed up with being accused of plagiarism, and of buyers who had blown their budgets in London, Milan and Paris, the city's designers jumped to the head of the queue. Since then, the commercial schedule has hastened so that most buying is done before the catwalk shows: the budget issue is for the most part no longer relevant, the plagiarism issue ditto. For an editor, the order poses a problem, because New York is seldom at the forefront of trends. So trying to predict them at this point is like watching the first quarter of the film Memento, and then trying to figure out the plot. There are shards of information that are clearly important, but we don't yet have the context for them.
That's my excuse, anyway. If I was to stick my neck out at this point and predict a trend, I might go for T-shirt dresses and graphic panelling. In recent seasons, US and European designers have been running along parallel paths: New York obsessed with sportswear (those omnipresent posh jogging bottoms) and Europe mining the potential of racing-stripe edges and blocks of colour on more tailored clothing. This week, the two seemed to come together: not just at Marc Jacobs, but at 3.1 Philip Lim, at Tommy Hilfiger and Karen Walker. (Dungarees, also. Mark my words.)
Graphic panels and go-faster stripes, put on the fashion map by Phoebe Philo in Paris several seasons ago, were embraced by many New York designers this time. I don't mean by this to suggest laziness, or copying – no one has intellectual property of the stripe, and Phoebe's Celine aesthetic references classic American sportswear. What goes around comes around. At Alexander Wang the stripe was more of a slash. At Victoria Beckham it gave a crisp edge to collars and to trouser seams for daytime, and a more risque, lingerie touch to sheer-panelled evening dresses. DKNY showed a strong collection that drew inspiration from its namesake city, with a colour palette that stretched to "black, white, neutrals and flashes of taxi". Diane von Furstenberg indulged a dreamy, Marrakech-to-Jaipur colour scheme but kept the look bang up to date with crisp ribbons of black edging.
The fashion season is only now hitting its stride – as I write, we haven't even seen many of the major New York shows. But the early signs seem to be that the gloomy, dark mood that pervaded the previous season has lifted. At Rodarte, dresses constructed around a central breastplate panel reminded me of the gothic mood and obsession with armour that shaped February's shows – but this time, the breastplates were in mint, or apricot. More like the jolly plumage of a robin, than any kind of defensive statement. That, I think, is cheering news. And you know what's even better? London fashion week starts tomorrow.
Source
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