Category Archives: Fashion weeks

Nicolas Ghesquière marks Louis Vuitton with powerhouse show in Paris

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In a vast futuristic greenhouse at the Louvre, 4,000 guests were shown why the brand is the biggest of them all

Ten years to the day after his first show for Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghesquière celebrated a remarkable anniversary in the same Paris landmark where he made his debut. In the ruthless spit-em-out churn of fashion, and in the eye of that storm as the designer of the biggest brand of all, Ghesquière’s is quite the run.

A vast futuristic greenhouse lit from within with 13 vast globe-shaped chandeliers – Louis Vuitton, travel, get it? – filled an entire quadrangle of the Louvre, rising almost to the mansard roof of the museum.

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Chanel brings Hollywood and seaside chic to Paris fashion week

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Penélope Cruz and Brad Pitt star in a remake of a French classic as designer Virginie Viard turns the catwalk into a coastal boardwalk

The lights dimmed, and the Chanel show opened with Penélope Cruz and Brad Pitt on the catwalk. Cruz smouldered in a chic black polo neck and discreet diamonds, Pitt twinkly eyed in an open-necked white shirt. They gazed into each other’s eyes, flirted a little, and then – how could either of them resist? – embarked on a clandestine affair.

Well, almost. Cruz was, in fact, sitting demurely in the front row in a leather skirt suit, and Pitt was not in attendance. The rendezvous was on a short film, made for the show and screened above the catwalk, a remake of a seminal scene in Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et Une Femme, a classic Gallic romance about a widow and widower falling in love that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival in 1966. Lelouch, now 86, was also a guest of honour at Chanel’s show.

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‘Dressing up is back’: Tommy Hilfiger lauds luxury at New York fashion week

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Designer returns for first show after two-year absence with new take on preppy and move away from streetwear

“Luxury is the word on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Everyone knows what luxury looks like now, and everyone wants it. But luxury is unreachable for most people. If I can sell an affordable version of luxury, that’s a great position for our business.”

Tommy Hilfiger has returned to New York fashion week after a two-year absence, riding a wave of “quiet luxury” fashion and on a hunch that “dressing up is back. We are moving away from streetwear into a more polished look. It’s in the air – I can feel it,” he says.

Billed as “a New York moment”, the show was a coming of age for a brand that has long aligned itself with popular culture and youth, through close ties with hip-hop and sport. Invitations borrowing the typeface and layout of a New Yorker magazine cover summoned guests to a Friday night at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station, a Manhattan institution hosting the first catwalk show of its 110-year history.

Trays of martinis and old fashioneds made for a cocktail party atmosphere. At his office the morning after the show, Hilfiger recalled his pre-show jitters. “I was thinking, are they ever going to sit down? How are we going to start this show?”

Ralph Lauren is sitting out the season, Calvin Klein went dark as a catwalk name five years ago, and Marc Jacobs has taken to staging shows outside the fashion week timetable. This presents an opportunity for Hilfiger to claim a headlining spot in American fashion, in the city where he started his brand in 1985. He seized it with pedal-to-the-metal exuberance, ending the show with a beaming victory lap dressed in a varsity jacket and gleaming white trainers.

Hilfiger knows how to distill the American dream into a memorable image. Plenty of New York designers make nice clothes, but only Tommy Hilfiger throws the kind of party where the first sight on entry is guest Sylvester Stallone, being served french fries (in a canapé-sized silver cone) and ketchup.

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‘Hallelujah!’: enigmatic Phoebe Philo announces fashionably late return

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Despite being nowhere to be seen over a month of fashion shows, designer was name on everyone’s lips

The most talked about designer of this season did not have a fashion show at all. She was nowhere to be seen over a month of shows in New York, London, Paris or Milan. Yet despite not having made a single coat, dress or shirt for six years, and never once posting on Instagram, Phoebe Philo was the name on everyone’s lips on every front row.

Finally, on the last weekend of Paris fashion week, Philo made a fashionably late entrance, announcing that she would make her long-awaited return on 30 October.

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Giorgio Armani channels ‘countless light vibrations’ for Milan show

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Designer revisits his lifelong interest in science, with iridescent silks and undulating 3D layers

Giorgio Armani may be the world’s most recognisable designer, but as the 89-year-old wrote in his autobiography, his childhood ambition was to be a physician.

While that particular goal eluded him, at his fashion show in Milan on Sunday afternoon he revisited his lifelong interest in science, citing his inspiration for his new collection as “vibrations”.

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Burberry shows off killer trenchcoat and blue strawberries at London show

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Prints symbolising British summertime appear on fashion week catwalk alongside modernised version of brand’s staple product

The scene before the biggest show of London fashion week was quintessentially British: an orderly queue for tea, coffee and eccles cake. Britishness, along with trenchcoats and checked scarves, is what Burberry stands for. This is surely the only catwalk show where Hollywood action hero Jason Statham, acclaimed choreographer Wayne MacGregor and Arsenal striker Bukayo Saka can be found rubbing shoulders in the front row.

The first look on to the catwalk was a trenchcoat. The trench is a Burberry staple – but this had a notably slimmer cut, an elegant dropped-waist silhouette, and was black rather than beige. There were more trenchcoats to follow: some sleeveless, some leather, all of them sleek and minimal.

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Succession drives ‘quiet luxury’ look at Milan fashion week

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Menswear has moved away from logos to more refined silhouettes, with collections from Prada to Raf Simons ditching streetwear

Such is the piercing influence of Succession on the wardrobes of the rich and famous that its stars didn’t even need to make a front-row appearance at Milan fashion week to make their presence felt. Excess is out and elegance is in as designers pursue the “quiet luxury” look that owes much of its recent popularity to the Roy family stone.

At Prada, the bellwether of where the fashion mood heads next, the co-designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons used the humble white shirt as a springboard for “a reconsideration of simple things”, said Prada after the show on Sunday.

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Models and robots share the runway at Coperni fashion show

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Boston Dynamics’ canine automatons steal show in Paris as maison stages modern fable, designers say

Welcome to the age of the super-robot.

With their impossible proportions, thousand-yard stares and supernatural ability to walk in 5in heels, catwalk models often appear a different species to regular humans.

But it was the models, including Kate Moss’s daughter Lila, who played the role of vulnerable, flesh and blood creatures at the Coperni fashion show in Paris, where they shared the stage with five robots.

Coperni partnered with Boston Dynamics for the first fashion show in which robots, rather than models, were the star turn.

As the lights went down, four pairs of green eyes began to flash in the darkness. When the “Spots” – Boston Dynamic’s robot canines, in tarantula stripes of yellow and black – stalked into the room, there was an audible collective intake of breath as each creature seemed to lock eyes with, and approach, an audience member.

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Paris pays tribute to futuristic fashion of late Paco Rabanne

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Designer Julien Dossena thanks maison’s founder, who died last month, for his ‘radical expression’

In silver chainmail hoods and Perspex dresses, aluminium-foil suiting and gleaming white space boots, the faithful came to pay their respects. At the first Paco Rabanne catwalk show since the founder’s death last month at the age of 88, the loyal clients and fans who packed the front row alongside the eminent designers Jean Paul Gaultier and Nicolas Ghesquière mirrored a newly minted catwalk collection which was packed with dazzling silver and rustling tinsel in tribute to the futuristic fashion that made Rabanne famous.

Fake fur skirts and trousers made from shards of crystal rustled and shimmied in homage to Rabanne’s delight in fashioning clothes from unlikely materials. The delicate chainmail evening bags which have been a signature and house bestseller for decades made several appearances.

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Kyiv-made: Litkovska brings chic clothes and Ukraine strength to Paris

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Camel, toffee and charcoal feature in Ukrainian collection created under Russian bombs

You would never guess from the immaculate tailoring and finely turned silhouettes of the Litkovska collection shown at Paris fashion week that its production was frequently interrupted by air-raid warnings, which forced the 23-strong team of tailors and stylists to flee the design studio for a bomb shelter. It remains the only Ukrainian brand on the Paris catwalks and is still designed and produced in Kyiv by Lilia Litkovska and her team.

The bombardments are just one of the logistical challenges faced by the designer and her team in Kyiv. “There are problems every day, but we find solutions every day,” said Litkovska backstage before her show.

“We are very lucky because our studio is close to a good bomb shelter,” added Olena Iakovenko, one of four team members who travelled to France with Litkovska to stage the event.

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Giorgio Armani’s AW23 menswear proves chasing gen Z is not necessary

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Despite not doing shock tactics and trends, the designer’s signature is something of a ‘mood’ this season

If the fashion industry sometimes seems obsessed with creating the next sell-out trend, then the men’s autumn collection by Giorgio Armani served a poignant reminder this season that you do not always need to chase the purse strings of generation Z.

Armani, the world’s most successful fashion designer and proprietor of one of its few independent fashion brands, does not do shock tactics and trends. While his contemporaries roll out logo-heavy bags and zeitgeisty moments, the 88-year-old has always been consistent in his polished offering of 1% chic for the best part of five decades. Ironic, then, that it is this very signature that makes him something of “a mood” this season.

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Prada charts course between useful and zany at Milan fashion week

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Fashion label has taken items you might already own – a white vest, a backpack – to its menswear show

No one comes to Milan fashion week for its “useful clothes”. Yet this was the verdict of the director Luca Guadagnino, who sat in the front row on Sunday’s menswear show: “Useful, yes, wearable, yes, all those things. Everyone can wear this.”

Price tags aside, his point was this: just as in previous collections, Prada took things you might already own – a ribbed white vest, a backpack – and turned them into must-have pieces. They did the same with duffle coats, donkey jackets, black office brogues and navy parkas. Sometimes fashion holds up a mirror to what’s happening in the world, but sometimes it reminds us of what we already own.

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Issey Miyake and Off White celebrate late founders at Paris fashion week

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Parentless labels reveal collections, with Miyake’s fluid inventions repurposed for 2023

What happens to a fashion house after its founder dies? If you’re Issey Miyake and Off White, two labels made parentless in the past 12 months, you carry on making collections in their name while peering through the sartorial looking-glass as you figure out what to do next.

Closing was never an option for Issey Miyake. The first Japanese designer to crack Paris fashion week, Miyake’s name was already a byword for cutting-edge style and Steve Jobs polo necks when he died in August aged 84. Miyake had not designed at his label since 2020 (Satoshi Kondo is the current creative director) but his fingerprints have always been all over the label’s collections.

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‘It felt important to keep going’: grief hands London fashion week a dilemma

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Whether to pay homage to the Queen amid the party dresses has divided participants

There was only one show in town in London this weekend, and that was the Queue. But the catwalks of London fashion week soldiered on.

“It felt important to keep going, because this is a time when London needs to stick together, and right now some of this city’s young designers are at risk of losing their businesses,” said the designer Jonathan Anderson after his JW Anderson show.

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‘A radiant expectant mother’: Rihanna and the rise of the power bump

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Pop star challenges perceptions of pregnancy by wearing black negligee to Dior show at Paris fashion week

It was a moment of pure joy at a Paris fashion week sobered by the shadow of war. Rihanna sailed into the Dior show like a galleon in full sail, pregnancy bump lightly veiled in a sheer black negligee of lace-trimmed dotted Swiss tulle. The veteran fashion critic Tim Blanks, who quizzed the pop star backstage as to whether she was expecting a boy or a girl – she wasn’t telling – described her as “the most radiant expectant mother … a real ray of light on a dark day.”

In the month since the unofficial new “Queen of Barbados” announced her pregnancy by posing for the paparazzi photographer Miles Diggs on a snowy New York street with a vintage Chanel pink coat unbuttoned to reveal a naked bump crowned with a cascade of gold and gemstone jewellery, Rihanna has done more than push the boundaries of maternity wear. In characteristic form, she is challenging expectations of how women in the public eye should look and behave.

Rihanna, who wore a fluffy lavender coat over a black latex crop top at Gucci and a peach leather mini dress for the Off-White show, has not been the only expectant mother in the spotlight at this month of fashion shows. At the young designer Nensi Dojaka’s London fashion week show, the tissue-thin sequined slip worn by the model Maggie Maurer celebrated her four-month pregnant shape. “I think it’s quite shocking – in a good way,” Maurer told Vogue. “Women’s bodies are like superpowers.”

In the age of optics, announcing a pregnancy via the medium of fashion has established itself as a power move. A timeline shift toward ever more daring takes on bump-dressing can be tracked via the maternity fashion of a thought leader in this field, Beyoncé. When Beyoncé revealed her first pregnancy in 2011 at the MTV Video Music Awards during her performance of Love on Top – by unbuttoning her sequined blazer and turning to give the audience a profile view – the bump was demurely covered-up in a white shirt and high-waisted trousers.

By the time Beyoncé was pregnant with twins in 2017, the rules of engagement had altered. This time around, Beyoncé made the reveal wearing only a bra and satin knickers, cradling her bump in front of a flower arbour with a veil falling over her shoulders as softly as the hair of Botticelli’s Venus, in an image that set a new record for Instagram likes.

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Prada flexes its muscle with mashup of lo-fi and ultra-glamorous

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With its collection of cotton vests and showstopper coats, label brings to Milan catwalk what it does best

With Kim Kardashian in the front row and her half sister Kendall Jenner on the catwalk – a resurgent Prada is flexing its muscles, as the big hitters of Italian fashion jostle for position in the post-pandemic era.

With Gucci returning to the city’s fashion week for the first time since February 2020 and Giorgio Armani, who cancelled two January events during the Omicron surge, throwing his hat back into the ring with two shows, the competitive edge has returned to Milan’s catwalks.

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New York Fashion Week: inclusivity centre stage at raw and diverse Telfar Clemens show

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Brand delivers an assault on the senses with Telfar TV interspersed with live experimental jazz and sportswear-influenced clothes

The motto of Black-owned New York fashion brand Telfar is “It’s not for you – it’s for everybody”. If this has been hailed as a win for inclusivity, the epic show at New York fashion week was about defining what that meant for designer Telfar Clemens and his collaborators. A press release, handed out to guests, asked “how can a Black business with almost entirely Black customers - be the result of someone else’s inclusivity?”

The exploration of what inclusivity means to Clemens and collaborators was an assault on the senses.

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Wear a suit to the office. It’s a special occasion…

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Savile Row designer Ozwald Boateng says it’s time for a smarter look, tailored to a new era of hybrid working

He’s the designer famed for reviving Savile Row tailoring in the Cool Britannia era of the 90s with his sleek, jewel-coloured suits. Since then, office attire has become less formal and working from home has taken off, yet Ozwald Boateng believes rumours of the death of the suit are greatly exaggerated.

As he prepared to show at London fashion week on Monday after a 12-year absence, he told the Observer that he believes the suit will be seen as less an everyday work uniform and more as special occasion wear – but with many of those going into an office just two or three days a week making more of an effort and opting to dress more formally.

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Julia Fox steals the show as LaQuan Smith sticks to glamour at New York Fashion Week

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Red sequins, faux fur corsets and sky high heels from the celebrity favourite in a tribute to his late mentor, Andre Leon Talley

LaQuan Smith’s autumn/winter 2022 show at New York fashion week on Monday evening started over an hour late.

It soon became clear why – a celebrity was involved. Julia Fox, the model and actor who has had the lens of the paparazzi trained on her for months thanks to her recent relationship with Kanye West, opened the show and caused a hush across the audience.

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Prada’s Milan fashion week show ends with Jeff Goldblum on the catwalk

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Hollywood heavyweights including Kyle MacLachlan bring coronavirus-hit week to a close

Prada called on Hollywood heavyweights Jeff Goldblum and Kyle MacLachlan to bookend its catwalk on Sunday afternoon, bringing a close to a quiet menswear fashion week that saw multiple brands cancel their shows in light of increasing Covid cases across Europe.

The appearance of the actors at the Fondazione Prada punctuated the second physical catwalk show from founder Miuccia Prada and her co-creative director Raf Simons since the latter came onboard in early 2020, marking an unprecedented union of two of the fashion industry’s most influential and famed designers.

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