Early Halloween

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh she's back from the dead! Mada Primavesi was spotted lurching from her grave and stumbling down the Miu Miu runway.
P.S. I promise I will stop doing tumblr sized posts soon.

Runway to Page

The looks in this editorial are way better here than they even were on the runway. This editorial should be unremarkable but man I love it. What is it about it? Maybe it's the stylist. I looked up the lady responsible, Catherine Newell-Hanson and boy does she kill it on the regular. She does do that annoying thing of reproducing entire looks from a show, but there is magic in the air here so I don't mind. 

images from Fashion Gone Rogue and vogue.com

Ads, Beautiful Ads

Since it's well and truly the Christmas season now, I thought it would be topical to do a post on advertising and consumption (haha). But actually, advertising in fashion magazines is an interesting and contentious subject. We've all been there haven't we? Someone has picked up one of our magazines and scoffed, scorned us at the amount of advertising in its pages, something along the lines of "I've counted, and it's 167 pages before the masthead!". Now I ain't gonna defend that! It's true! There are a lot of ads in fashion magazines. But what these people (these people) don't understand is that unlike, say, an ad for Neutrogena, the ads that labels put in fashion magazines are much, much more than just ads. To put it simply, they are campaigns. 
There. In that one word they are declared as different. Because while these images from the new Heidi Slimane helmed Saint Laurent Paris are of course trying to sell us something, they are also a creative outlet for a fashion house to further express exactly what they are all about.

In these images, creatives have even more control over their image, or aesthetic ("aesthetic" sounds far more creatively driven than the commercial "image" doesn't it?) than they do at shows. They help show what the collection is all about, what the designer was thinking, what his influences were. This Saint Laurent campaign in particular is an excellent example of the power of fashion's campaign image. Sent down the runway, the clothes looked like above average examples of a stylish LA lady. To be honest I was a bit embarrased for Slimane. But here, here I get it. It's about being androngynous and slinky, and pared back but not minimal as we know the term, and about clean lines and black and white. The images also convey, very succinctly, that Slimane is making huge changes at this house, that he is placing Saint Laurent at the front of the new change towards the new-minimalism, simplified-but-not-simple luxury aesthetic. Just compare this latest campaign to Winter 2012, when Stefano Pilati was head designer - anyone could tell that with Slimane, something's afoot.

And it is absolutely no mistake that he released campaign images before he even showed his first full collection. Art and design isn't just about objects guys, it's also about feeling. 

Miu Miu have also just released their Spring Summer 2013 campaign, and as with Saint Laurent, they have made everything make so much sense. Crinkly denim pencil skirts look so much more appealing now.

Still lifes! Or accessories advertising. Whatever.

Saint Laurent images from The Cut

Miu Miu images from Fashion Gone Rogue

Miu Miu S/S'12 (Hate to Love #3)

I must admit I was a bit grumpy at Miuccia Prada when she proudly announced that the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2012 collection was designed and created in only 15 days. She said it like it was some great thing, however I wanted to yell (did yell, at my computer) "this isn't Project Runway people!". The statement bothered me because I felt like it cheapened the whole process of designing - it's not a race after all. There are already too many collections in a year and there is enough of a rush, enough of a focus on the 'new', without Prada stepping it up a notch.
Because of this I couldn't look at the collection without thinking about its rapid creation, and in a misinformed act of protest I just dismissed it. Only now, five months after the show was presented, has my head cleared and I can assess it without an angry bias. And with this distance, I have realised it is TOTALLY AWESOME.

I've cropped the images in this way deliberately because the hair, make-up and accessories, while maybe not being objectively ugly, certainly distract a huge amount from the clothes (please notice the diplomacy in my wording, it takes a lot of self-control).

I can pin the excellence of this collection down to a few distinct elements. The first is the upper body wrapping that featured throughout. They've been generally described as stoles, but they depart quite a bit from the traditional night-at-the-opera staple. Nevertheless, for whatever reason having your chest constricted is very elegant, as Ashley Olsen seems to have already figured out.

Another great element of the collection was the off-the-shoulder looks. To be honest they don't seem very practical, but they were what helped push this collection off-kilter for me, and that is always a good thing.

The a-line shape has been a bit of a trend for a while now, but Prada, in the way that only Prada can, completely transformed the silhouette by its own exaggeration, via not just skirts but cape-like coats too. And I have no idea how Prada chooses her colour palette for a collection, but I'd love to be a fly-on-the-wall for that process because none of the colours for this show made much sense, yet they all worked amazingly together. I can't help stealing the description of colours from Nicole Phelps: "oxblood, cherry red, cerulean blue".

The patchwork assembly of graphic textiles was also a stroke of inspiration paired against unlikely colours such as metallic lilac (look up). The women of the show were likened to "snarky" (thanks Cathy Horyn) Hitchcock-esque anti-heroines, but I think those interpretations were due solely to the twisted hair, makeup and shoes. When left alone the vaguely folk-ish collection of prints, along with the metallics and crazy shapes and details, speak more for themselves than for some hypothetical character.

Original images from vogue.com