Rebekah Wing
Anna Le
Olivia P
Samantha Mariko
Weronika Kumanek
"It's mysterious stuff from outer space," said curator and Playboy's director of special projects, Neville Wakefield, at David Yurman's Vestry street studio last night. He was referring to a piece of Gibeon meteorite, which, named for Gibeon, Namibia, where it struck a billion years prior, was on display.
The occasion was the unveiling of Yurman's new menswear collection, aptly dubbed Meteorite. To fete the launch, Evan Yurman—the jewelry brand's heir apparent—asked Wakefield to create a presentation that highlighted the lineup's overarching intergalactic feel.
"I wanted to narrate the story of [transforming] the raw material from space into product," Wakefield told Cbamd.com. The room was staged with a projection of the moon on one end and the meteor on the other, with the label's pieces raised on pedestals in between. The electronic sounds of French band Air played ever so softly in the background.
Pucker up, kiddos. Smooches abounded on the Spring '14 runways, making their mark everywhere from Peter Jensen, where frocks and tops were covered with photo-realistic lips, to Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, who crafted a pair of sunglasses with gilded gobs for lenses. The gap-toothed pink and purple pouts that appeared on a series of looks at Giles Deacon were rumored to be an ode to stylist Katie Grand's grin. Meanwhile, Saint Laurent's Hedi Slimane doused an 80s-tinged ruffle top and short black wrap dress with an allover rouge lip print. Inspired by Yves Saint Laurent's 1971 Vichy Chic collection, the smackers were a somewhat surprising embrace of the house's history. Tucker's Gaby Basora employed the motif, too. The New York-based designer collaborated with Solange Azagury-Partridge—best known for her "Hot Lips" baubles—on rosebud blouses and dresses strewn with fuchsia kissers.
If mouthy accessories are more your taste, look no further than Yaz Bukey's Spring '14 range. The designer served up a patent cherry bouche bag—as well as a pair of lipstick-shaped earrings for touch-ups. And even on the street, showgoers were donning mouth-embellished duds. Tommy Ton snapped one femme in Paris wearing surreal black driving gloves fit for Dali—the wrists sealed with two bright red kisses.
Yesterday evening, Saks Fifth Avenue threw a party celebrating the third season of the hit show Scandal and also unveiled window displays modeled after Kerry Washington's character, Olivia Pope. Apparently the actress and Scandal's costume designer, Lyn Paolo, were up late Tuesday night adding some finishing touches to the windows. "My flight landed in New York at 1 a.m., and I hopped in the car and told my driver, 'Take me to Saks!'" Washington told Style.com. "It's closed,' he told me, and I said, 'I know, but we need to go there right now!' We were running all over Fifth Avenue comparing our window to other windows." Although they admitted the Saks visuals team was phenomenal, both Washington and Paolo said they just had a much more particular vision of how Pope dresses, hence the middle-of-the-night switcheroo.
It was an anecdote that the show's creator, Shonda Rhimes, found particularly humorous, although she confessed that she's not quite as type A as Washington and Paolo when it comes to fashion sense. "I'm a person who would be wearing pajamas every day if you let me. I knew when we were doing Washington, D.C., that I wanted to make [the city] a bit more fashionable than it actually is. That's why I hired Lyn—she is just so good at what she does."
Pleating, in various iterations, unfurled as a keynote trend this season. Alexander Wang, for example, offered boxy swatches on miniskirts in New York. Also crimped in Manhattan: Victoria Beckham's peekaboo accordion creases. And, in Paris, Phoebe Philo caused a stir with loads of narrow corrugations at Céline. Yet where these designers skewed toward traditional folding, a trio of labels proposed a fancier twist on the technique for Spring '14 via intricate pleats that mimicked ruffles.
At Delpozo, creative director Josep Font's barley-yellow trousers, which boasted an arc of frilled pin-tucks, were a standout in his soft, painterly collection. In Paris, Dries Van Noten opened his show with a quiet white frock, the seams of which were embellished with whorls of gilded fabric. Bottega Veneta's Tomas Maier, too, employed creased ruffles in his Spring '14 lineup. One dress in particular—a gray-green number vertically veined in bow-like folds—was particularly striking. "I wanted to add texture and dimension in an unusual way," Maier told Style.com. "The monochrome color, combined with the movement of the pleats, creates this effect." To construct the garment, Maier and his team blended cotton with a vegetable fiber called ramie, which possesses malleable characteristics akin to copper. The result was a tactile sartorial sculpture.
Coco Chanel once said, "Fashion should be discussed enthusiastically, and sanely, and, above all, without poetry, without literature."
With his latest creative effort, Karl Lagerfeld sets out to do just that. The Kaiser has extended his artistic talents to a special illustrated edition of Paul Morand's The Allure of Chanel, a book that examines the philosophy of the French house by recounting conversations with Mademoiselle Coco herself. The updated version of Morand's tome, which was originally published in 1976, includes Karl's sketches of Coco in all her iconic glory—dripping in pearls and impeccably dressed.
The good thing is: Unlike Lagerfeld's Spring'14 artistic endeavors, this one will fit on our coffee table.
To say that Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon’s new book, In My Shoes, is dishy would be an understatement. Friends and colleagues such as Ann Dexter-Jones, Alina Cho, and Wendi Murdoch gathered at the Four Seasons Grill Room last night to toast the tome, and Mellon’s candid remarks about her new memoir definitely made everyone eager to pick up a copy. In a way, In My Shoes represents her closure on what was not the most amicable of departures from the company she had built. Mellon told cbamd.com, “I was surprised at how cathartic writing this book was. It was about closing one chapter and starting a new one.”
Catharsis aside, Mellon confided that the most exciting part about last evening’s fete was getting introduced to the crowd by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. While the mayor spoke about Mellon’s business acumen, he couldn’t personally attest to the quality of her shoes: “I’ve never worn her shoes, and I’m very unlikely to. And if I do, I’m certainly not going to tell anybody. But they are wonderful. How do I know? I asked [my partner] Diana.” Later in the evening, Mellon offered, “That was such an honor. I really feel welcome to New York now!” However, considering how quickly guests snatched up copies of her book, and how many women were wearing Jimmy Choo shoes, it seems like the Big Apple would have welcomed her with or without the mayor’s approval.
It's no secret that Phaidon's epic The Fashion Book, first released in 1998, is an authoritative resource for industry insiders and fans alike. Now the coffee-table tome has been given new life with a definitive updated addition. Among the seventy-two new entries are Style.com and sartorial luminaries like Bill Cunningham, Nicolas Ghesquière, and Tilda Swinton. To fete the book's release, Phaidon will be hosting a panel discussion at Topshop's Soho outpost on Thursday, October 10, at 6 p.m. Iris Apfel, Vera Wang, and Style.com's own Dirk Standen will be on hand to talk fashion history and the new guard of style alongside moderator Simon Collins, dean of fashion at Parsons the New School for Design. Need another reason to turn out? You'll have a chance to pick up the new book (as well as a limited edition tote bag and a signed print by cover illustrator Mats Gustafson) four days in advance of its official release.
Anyone who's been watching the ready-to-wear shows knows that athleticism is the thing for Spring (gym gear at Gucci, soccer socks at Prada, mesh galore at Pucci, et alia). But in an interview with Reuters this weekend, Diesel founder (and ruler of the OTB empire) Renzo Rosso made a more conceptual connection between the worlds of fashion and sport.
"Fashion is like soccer. Only champions make a difference," he said when asked about LVMH's recent investment in J.W. Anderson and Nicholas Kirkwood—two brands he had reportedly been following for the past couple of years. "We also considered investing in them, but we never expected LVMH to move so quickly," he added.
With big companies once again championing up-and-comers (Kering just invested in Altuzarra and, of course, bought a 51 percent stake in Christopher Kane in January), the game is definitely on. Here's to the next generation of winning talents.
Crusader is as much of a job descriptor for Vivienne Westwood as fashion designer. And among her agendas, no cause resonates more acutely than her crusade to fight climate change. For Spring '14, the designer sent out models in plastered-and-fractured makeup at Vivienne Westwood Red Label, the effect of which she likened to animals being "trapped" in the headlights. One look, a strapless brocade dress in pale gold and lavender, topped a ratty T-shirt that read "Climate." Here, the message rang loud and clear. Moreover, Westwood gave out pre-addressed postcards to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, instructing editors to write down their own ecological apprehensions.
But Westwood wasn't the only designer who expressed her environmental concerns this season. Christopher Kane showed metallic teardrop cutouts on dresses—"Sterilized petals," he called them. He also offered diagrammatic outlines of botanicals, paired with blocky letters spelling "Petal" and "Flower." His wares appeared to place a conscious emphasis on the synthetic over the natural. At Dior, Raf Simons printed slogans such as "Alice Garden" and "Primrose Path" along brightly colored numbers that seemed to suggest a kind of nuclear summer, mutated wisteria included.
Shifting from terra firma to the big blue sea, Kenzo's Carol Lim and Humberto Leon addressed the problem of overfishing: In addition to a few fun aquatic prints, there was a T-shirt that read "No Fish, No Nothing." "The challenges facing our oceans are a global concern," Leon told Style.com. "The shirt is an effort to help raise awareness through fashion's strong voice." A portion of the garment's proceeds will go to the Blue Marine Foundation, which battles fish-stock depletion worldwide.
Nicholas Kirkwood has never been to Morocco, but for Spring'14, he's in a Marrakech state of mind. High-perched styles include lacy, laser-cut leathers and raffia heels in bright orange with fuchsia details that play with a cool seventies sports feel, while a new line of super-soft moccasins in hot colors seems to point to bright horizons.
But the designer's not headed for sunny climes anytime soon: "The industry doesn't really let you do that anymore—as soon as I'm done with this collection, I'm already late for pre-collection!" That and Kirkwood's newly signed partnership with LVMH ("They're the best partner you could dream of," he said) will keep him plenty busy.
On the agenda: more staff, more shops, and more smart day options, like his first thong sandal and a cork-sole moccasin that picks up on elements of the men's collection. He's also gearing up to "capture fashion in midheight"—to that end, he has just secured the patent to his signature triangular heel. The blowout vacation will just have to wait.
