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Wake up and smell the concrete: the rise of alt perfumes
Floral meadows, orange trees, sex … the familiar smells of the perfume counter, right? How about concrete? That’s the inspiration behind Comme des Garçons’ latest perfume, released this week. With a flat bottle that looks like an off-cut of the Southbank Centre, it’s the kind of dressing-table addition that will appeal to design geeks fond of brutalism, who likely have a Marie Kondo approach to interior decor. On the Selfridges website, it’s described as “an exploration of destruction, construction and creation”.Along with continuing the tradition of hyperbole in the fragrance world, Concrete is part of a trend for scents that ostensibly ditch the usual palate and go for something, frankly, weirder. There’s Russian designer Gosha Rubskinskiy’s signature scent, designed to have the smell of skateboarding on a summer day, with “the smells of rubber and tar colliding”. Or Christopher Shannon’s, which he says is inspired by his “upbringing in working-class Liverpool; sulphur and copper scents mixed with the smell of food from the bustling streets and fresh citrus notes from a newly cleaned house.” Serge Lutens, the cult perfumer and makeup artist, might win the prize for most esoteric: Dent de Lait is designed to smell like the feeling of losing your first tooth. It even comes with a film with images of gap-toothed children, and artfully employed dental floss.
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Cheat sheet: seven things to know about the Burberry show
The supers were out in force
Kate Moss arrived and ascended the stairs with fellow super Naomi Campbell before joining Jourdan Dunn in their seats. Moss was wearing a trademark black leather jacket and sunglasses while Campbell donned a tartan shirt and electric pink skirt.
The now- and next-gen represented
Kaia and Presley Gerber both walked the show, as did Adwoa Aboah alongside Jean and Olympia Campbell. Cara Delevingne sat front row live streaming on Instagram in tartan pants with platinum pixie crop and leather jacket, dancing in her seat to some of the show and cheering on Aboah before standing to applaud Christopher Bailey’s bow.
The Burberry check is about to have a moment
Once a pattern Burberry used with a light hand, Bailey went all out covering entire raincoats, trenches, bags and one mini dress that made us rethink the check as a cool weather fabric.
Famous progeny also showed up
The genetically smiled-upon Iris Law (daughter of Jude) joined Lennon Gallagher (son of Liam) and Levi Dylan (grandson of Bob) in attendance, all strong echoes of their parents, and grandfather, in Dylan’s case.
Cult pieces abounded
The classic house, not normally known for chasing cult-appeal, produced piece after piece destined for summer wish lists. We’re calling the all-over Burberry check baseball cap, chandelier earrings and oversize tartan tote as wait-list pieces.
Photographers are the new front row A-list
The collection was presented in conjunction with an exhibition co-curated by Burberry president and chief creative officer Christopher Bailey and photographer Alasdair McLellan. McLellan sat front row as did Juergen Teller. All of this underscored with works on display by photographers like Shirley Bakey and Dafydd Jones that sat alongside those by Gosha Rubchinskiy and McLellan, capturing different aspects of British life through the ages - from subculture dens, rainy days and the English garden.
You can get in on it now
As with previous seasons, this collection is see-now-buy-now so you can buy it globally immediately. If you happen to be in London the exhibition will be on show at Old Sessions House until 1st October.
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Marc Jacobs heads off rumours of decline by revisiting former glories
That rumours of the artistic demise of the New York fashion week legend Marc Jacobs had been vastly exaggerated was evident when Anna Wintour broke into a run on Park Avenue to make sure she arrived on time for the start of Jacobs’ show. Even the US Vogue editor-in-chief, peerless in her power over the city’s fashion scene, could not afford to miss this.
Last month, Jacobs addressed persistent rumours that his label was in financial difficulties, telling Women’s Wear Daily there was no truth in gossip that he was set to hand over creative control, and adding that the talk was “upsetting and stressful” to his staff.
His show on Wednesday – rumoured to be in danger of being cancelled – went ahead, and to a full house which included Nicki Minaj and Raf Simons, designer at that other Manhattan fashion institution, Calvin Klein.
The one constant of Jacobs’ New York fashion week shows is that whichever way the prevailing winds of commercial fashion are blowing, he will send his models striding in the opposite direction, and most likely in really strange shoes.
And so it was that at a time when most designers are reframing their shows as immersive, multi-sensory brand experiences – a street party with burgers in greaseproof paper at Alexander Wang; a black-tie dinner amid a collection of James Bond level cars at Ralph Lauren – Jacobs did the exact opposite, stripping the catwalk show to its bare bones.
A long, single row of folding chairs were lined up around the Park Avenue Armory. Two minutes after the stated 6pm start time, the show began in silence. And so it continued, the solemnity of the parade a foil to the eccentricity of the clothes, the only sound that of the caller whose job it is to instruct each model to “go”, until an opera-flooded finale.
The collection was a journey – provocatively, in the context of rumour about the label’s future – through the Marc Jacobs archives. The muse was Kate Moss at the Met Gala in 2009, when the model was dressed by Jacobs in a draped chainmail silver mini-gown with matching turban. (The longtime Jacobs muse Sofia Coppola, recently photographed in a turban by Steven Meisel, was also namechecked by the designer.)
The satin headwraps, created by the British milliner Stephen Jones, a longstanding Jacobs collaborator, were a constant throughout the collection. Depending on the model, the outfit, the light or the addition of jewelled brooches, they seemed at various points to conjure Nefertiti, Greta Garbo, north African headwraps, and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Jacobs recently softened his initially punchy response to last year’s accusations of cultural appropriation, acknowledging that he may have been insensitive. This collection showed that his enthusiasm for cross-cultural referencing was unbowed: prints roamed from Indonesian batik to Pucci swirls, from Savile Row pinstripe to Japanese florals.
The outlandishness of the silhouettes – harem-pant sportswear, giant-sized cardigans – was offset by shrewdly commercial bags. Flight bags, bumbags and duffels blended utilitarian shapes with retro attitude. And in one aspect – perhaps more by accident than design – the show was bang on trend. From Haribo orange to Kermit green, the “super-bold glowing-sunshine palette” was in step with the trend for primary colours which has swept New York.
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How fashion's new obsession with office dressing made me feel like an 80s throwback
It’s a normal Tuesday morning in the office and people are staring at me. They look me up and down as I fill my water bottle. They give me side eye in the lift. This is not an anxiety dream. This is real life. My appearance is inspiring unspoken questions in my colleagues. Namely: what on earth is she wearing? And why?
What I am wearing is an Isabel Marant suit. It is woollen, grey and double breasted, with burgundy stripes and softly padded shoulders. In the Guardian’s proudly dressed-down environment, where jeans and T-shirts are practically compulsory, I am an aberration.
It’s not just scruffy journalists who don’t wear suits in 2017. The world of work is in flux, and the world of workwear with it. In an age of telecommuting and the gig economy, the old rules are eroding. Formal attire is not extinct, quite yet, but it is endangered. MPs are no longer required to wear ties in the House of Commons; titans of industry wear hoodies as often as pinstriped suits.
As we face these anxieties, trust the fashion industry, in all of its contrariness, to back the corporate look in a big way, with designers from Céline to Calvin Kleinsending suits down the catwalk. Meanwhile, a wonkier take on office wear – shirts spliced with blazers, herringbone jackets fashioned into strapless dresses – has become the calling card of brands including Palmer//Harding and Monse. Menswear has gone managerial, too. At Balenciaga the concept has spread from the clothes to the entire brand aesthetic, with business cards used as show invitations and boardroom carpet providing the backdrop for ad campaigns.
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Fashion’s corporate fascination has piqued my own interest in trouser suits for the first time since graduation. My usual work clothes are – and I deliberately employ a fancy word here to make this seem more aspirational – deshabille. The hard-cornered boardroom aesthetic isn’t part of my fashion vocabulary for the same reason that I don’t have a LinkedIn profile. Working in the dressed-down media is a big part of my identity, as is the lack of delineation between office and weekend clothes. On the moodboard in my mind’s eye is Kate Moss’s bedhead hair and the tousled insouciance of Carine Roitfeld’s casually misbuttoned silk blouse. Sadly, crumpled chic is rather less iconic the way I wear it – not least because I’m 5ft tall – but I’d rather be a bit of a mess than look as though I’m trying too hard.
Wearing a suit feels physically weird. It’s a lot more fabric than I would usually put on my body. I’m hot. So hot that I tug at my collar like a dodgy banker in a movie about insider trading. Meanwhile, my colleagues appraise me, coolly. “It’s a conspicuous look,” one says. Another adds that I look “intimidating” and “a bit like a carpet”. “You look fucking powerful,” another says. He is smiling, but I sense a chasm between us. The stiff wool boxes me in, surrounds me completely. I feel weirdly isolated, as though I have set myself up in opposition to the tribe.
The next day I trot into the office in high heels and a Stella McCartney checked coat-dress and one co-worker trills: “Oh, here she is, executive realness has arrived.” This phrase, well-known to viewers of Paris Is Burning and RuPaul’s Drag Race, is pertinent. Wearing double-breasted power tailoring does feel like a form of drag; a fantasy and a performance. It’s also screamingly 80s – other colleagues compare me to David Byrne and Working Girl – harking back to an era when power dressing manuals such as John T Molloy’s The Woman’s Dress For Success Book advised females to smash the glass ceiling with their shoulder pads. Molloy’s manifesto makes exhausting reading. Blouses should not be too high-necked or too revealing. Haircuts should not be too long or too short. Suits should ape men’s tailoring but femininity should be subtly preserved. Women should avoid sweaters and floral patterns “which say ‘lower class’ and loser,” he writes, charmingly. The history of women getting dressed for the office is so fraught that it almost feels as though somebody didn’t want us there.
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Still, power dressing has its benefits. I don’t feel small any more. The finer details of my body shape feel irrelevant, which brings with it a sort of confidence. Occasionally, I interpret my own behaviour differently. After work, during my customary sprint from the tube station to my son’s childminder, I feel less like an utter failure for resorting to running and more like a high-flying, productive individual for whom walking is not sufficiently quick.
I like this feeling of pulled-together efficiency. But the exaggerated lines of this outfit – the shoulder pads – are making me self-conscious. I feel like a throwback to an era when a different battle was being fought. Power dressing is still fraught with difficulty for women, of course, as the furore caused by Hillary Clinton’s scrunchies and Theresa May’s leather trousers proves. But the suit is not the neat solution that it pretended to be in the 80s. Author and editor Tina Brown, a keen suit wearer until recently, says: “When I look back I see how very overdressed we were with bigger shoulders. There was a sense that we had to be almost aggressively put together to make a statement, which is not where we are now or where we want to be.”
The next outfit on my agenda is very different: a wilfully anti-fashion fitted shirt, tie and tie clip, inspired by the menswear catwalks of Balenciaga, Martine Roseand Gosha Rubchinskiy. This looked achingly cool on the catwalks. Recreated via an M&S shirt and Acne Studios trousers because my body is not long enough to do menswear, it does not look cool on me. Alistair O’Neill, professor of fashion history and theory at Central Saint Martins, reminds me that this trend is all about context. Fashion designers have long been fascinated by workwear – think of the lumberjack shirts worn in city centres, not forests. This time it’s white-collar work being mined for inspiration. True Gosha disciples, he points out, would wear this “to a club, or to go shopping, or when off to the skate park. The dissociation from office culture is what will make the clothes so enjoyable to wear by those who will consume them as fashion.” Sadly, I am not hip enough to make this look work. I feel a bit like Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids, with a touch of Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer, brisk and no-nonsense, as though I am holding an invisible clipboard. Or, as a co-worker says: “I’m scared that you’re about to make us do a team-building exercise.”
The fourth and final look is a breeze, literally and figuratively. It’s a billowing take on a striped shirt from Palmer//Harding. For the first time in days, I am not overheating. When I walk into the office my colleagues seem relieved. “I’m into it,” our stylist says – the ultimate compliment. Then she strokes the fabric of the cuff, appreciatively. I am approachable, again.
The shirt is the perfect soft power garment. I also love the bag I carry with it: a huge Balenciaga tote with corporate-style logos running across it diagonally. The logos bring to mind the branding of desk phones and photocopiers; the unglamorous insignia that permeated our lives before the sleek black and grey lines of iPhones and iMacs took over. It is these details – the little logos, the business cards and tie clips – that are so evocative. They remind me of how much has changed in office lives, in the 15 years since I started working, and how much will continue to change. You know, when the robots take over. Against this context, the mundanity of an office – its paperclips, staplers and tea runs – has become a source of nostalgia, something to be cherished.
Meanwhile, I’m glad that, for the most part, shoulder pads have gone the way of fax machines and Filofaxes. But I would wear a suit again.
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Five trends from London Fashion Week you may (or may not) care to adopt
London Fashion Week continues to do what it does best: trail-blaze new trends and raise eyebrows.
Here are five trends and styles you may or may not want to take up:
Headgear
Hussein Chalayan went bold, using headwear as an extension of his outfits’ embroidery. The models, now stylish columns, looked even more severe than they tend to do on catwalks.
Although this sort of face-in-the-hole chic was oddly elegant, seasides are unlikely to be so avant garde any time soon.
British designer Hussein Chalayan’s catwalk show for the Spring/Summer 2018 collection on the third day of LFW (AFP/Getty)
Fashion brand A.W.A.K.E. also went big by re-envisioning the sombrero, making them more minimal in design, if a little phallic.
One of the hats at A.W.A.K.E. (Ian Clark)
Fancy footwear
Given the renaissance of Stan Smith shoes and Gucci’s super popular range of white sneakers, trainers were scattered across the catwalks.
Never one to follow the pack, Christopher Kane took a different approach to his trainers: it felt like a pair of Crocs had been catapulted through a billionaire’s vault.
They’re utterly fabulous in the way only high fashion can be, of course. But you’re still not allowed to wear Crocs. Ever.
British designer Christopher Kane’s Spring/Summer 2018 collection on the fourth day of LFW (AFP/Getty)
Tartan
“Has tartan ever been out?” kilt-owners and punk throwbacks ask.
Perhaps not: it’s a classic print. But it’s always nice to know your grandmother’s tartan throw or your flannel shirt still has some life left in it.
Model of the moment Gigi Hadid donned a woolly tartan-print coat at the Tommy Hilfiger TOMMYNOW show – a collection of clothes that can all be bought now – while other models wore the print on puffa jackets, shirts and blouses.
Meanwhile Burberry reinvented its iconic beige check pattern in red.
Supermarket chic
Richard Malone’s debut collection at LFW took colour inspiration from the everyday: supermarkets. His collection used a palette blue, green and yellow as the basis for his softly tailored jackets and dresses – and there was nothing everyday about it.
Worth whacking out one of those 10p Tesco bags to up your style game, eh?
Models present creations by Irish fashion designer Richard Malone for his Spring/Summer 2018 collection on the first day of LFW (AFP/Getty)
Statement fashion
Fashion has always be used to make a statement and London Fashion Week was no different.
Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi at Preen sought to empower women with their clothes. Even without the flimsy bonnets, the collection no doubt took a little inspiration from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Victorian styles were given modern updates in bright white, accents of red and glimmers of loose tailoring.
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Donatella Versace: "My brother was the king,
Donatella Versace: "My brother was the king, and my whole world had crashed around me”
and my whole world had crashed around me”
Men – particularly wealthy, powerful ones – are often described as becoming more attractive as they get older. You rarely hear it said of a woman, but it is true of Donatella Versace. I am watching her sit for her portrait and marvelling at a face that has the bones of a Roman emperor and the lashes of a Fellini leading lady. Her three-quarter profile could – should – grace a stamp, or a gold coin, or a slope of Mount Rushmore. Her skin, the colour of the terracotta rooftops of Milan, spread out outside the window, is luminous. Vanilla-blond hair falls in a soft wave, lopped off at shoulder blade height. The high slit in her floor-length black dress reveals legs toned so taut that they ripple as she moves. I am watching from the back of the room and when she breaks from posing to greet me, she moves with a lissom grace that belies the seven-inch platforms on which her tiny frame is jacked up.
At 62, Donatella Versace is artistic director and vice-president of a company with an annual revenue of £592m. Perhaps, then, it is sexist to focus on how she looks. But she brings it up herself, when the photographs have been shot and she and I are sitting on plump sofas in her elegant all-white office. I ask her where her aesthetic came from and she says, “I was not born fantastically beautiful, but I always wanted to be impressive. So I bleach my hair blond, I wear high heels. I am 5ft 2in – me and Bruno Mars, the same – so I wear high heels all the time, to be tall.” Donatella knows it is not trends that drive the fashion industry, but the eternal obsessions of women as they look in the mirror: looking better, getting noticed, feeling good. The visceral, primal stuff. This is why the Versace brand still has potency, 40 years after Gianni Versace opened a first boutique on Via della Spiga, a half mile from where his sister and I are sitting now.
The Donatella who sits opposite me today in her light-filled office is a very different looking woman from the Donatella I first interviewed a decade ago. Her hair then was twice as long and twice as thick, with a heavy fringe that obscured half her face. Her skin had reached that point of mahogany where the glow seems to dim. She was still smoking then, lighting successive Marlboro Reds with hands that trembled a little, so that there was a soft clatter every time she replaced her espresso cup in its lacquered saucer. She was already in her 50s, but I remember thinking that she seemed like a little dauphin prince, dwarfed by the gilt grandeur of her private apartment.A decade later, she seems so much younger than she did then. The Versaceopulence is as deep-pile as ever, with armfuls of peonies and high-end scented candles flickering on every side table. Donatella’s handbag sprawls its contents across a large desk behind her, and the energy around those who work with Donatella is infinitely more relaxed. Sipping water through a straw from a glass etched with a Medusa head, she seems a sunnier person. Only the distinctive rasp of a voice is the same, despite almost a decade as a non-smoker.
Donatella Versace has proved a lot of people wrong and not least, one suspects, herself. “When my brother was murdered, I had the eyes of the whole world on me and 99% of them thought I wasn’t going to make it. And maybe I thought the same, at first. My brother was the king, and my whole world had crashed around me.” But two decades after the murder of her brother placed Gianni’s sister and muse unexpectedly at the head of the Versace table, she helms a business that, since creaking close to bankruptcy in 2004, has been nursed back to health. A British CEO, Jonathan Akeroyd, was hired from Alexander McQueen last year. The Versace family still owns 80% of the business, with most shares in the name of Donatella’s daughter Allegra, who is now 31. (Allegra’s brother Daniel inherited Gianni’s art collection, which is now worth a good deal more than the £37m it was valued at then.)
The Donatella Versace story began on 2 May 1955, when she was born in Reggio Calabria. Her mother, a dressmaker, would let her baby daughter play in the basket of fabric in the middle of the room as she worked. Her brothers, Santo and Gianni, were 10 and eight when she was born, but her bond with Gianni defied the age difference. “I was his doll and his best friend. He dressed me up in cool clothes, took me out to discos and clubs from when I was 11. I loved it. It was the best time of my life,” she says. Donatella left home for university in Florence, but was soon back by Gianni’s side, and remained there throughout his 90s glory days – supermodels singing George Michael’s Freedom on the catwalk in 1991, Liz Hurley in that safety pin dress in 1994, Madonna shot by Steven Meisel and Mario Testino in 1995 – while Santo ran the business. “There was Santo, the calm one; Gianni, the enfant terrible, and me – Gianni’s accomplice” was how Donatella described the dynamic at the time. She had sole creative responsibility for Versus, the diffusion line launched in 1989
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I&E CERTIFICATE STUDENT, DUKE WOMEN’S BASKETBALL PLAYER TO DEBUT FASHION COLLECTION
Erin Mathias spent a lot of time this past summer bent over her sewing machine, watching as the sketches above her desk were transformed into sweaters, jackets and slacks.
The visual and media studies major and I&E certificate student worked on her own fashion collection this summer, which she plans to debut at a fashion show on campus Thursday, Sept. 29.
Mathias, a senior class member of the Duke women’s basketball team, says she’s always been interested in fashion, but after her freshman year at Duke she began sewing and sketching more. The summer after her sophomore year, she interned in New York City under designer Charles Harbison.
“I got an inside look at the industry, and that definitely made me realize that I wanted to be a fashion designer,” Mathias said.
Mathias’ I&E Certificate requires that she complete two summer experiences. For her second summer experience, she branched out on her own, hopeful that having her own collection and show would give her the most robust portfolio possible.
“This summer I wanted to use a personal experience to gain knowledge about entrepreneurship and innovation,” she said. “With this collection, I’ve seen how innovative I have to be, especially in the fashion industry where things are constantly changing.”
Mathias said what she’s already learned through her I&E Certificate courses has helped shape how she thinks about the fashion industry.
“Entrepreneurs are creative, and they’re setting out to also be innovative and do something different,” she said. “Similarly, as a designer, you can’t be the same as someone else who’s already in the industry. You have to be different. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m making some looks that are already out there, but I’m adding different aspects and making them my own.”
She’s worked on the sketches for her collection for about a year, she said. Mathias estimates she created more than 40 sketches, but many were thrown into the trash pile. Now, she’s narrowed it down to nine total looks – six for women and three for men, although she said that some of the looks can be worn by either gender.
“I just start sketching random things that pop into my mind, whether I gain inspiration from seeing other designers’ collections or from walking around campus,” she said. “They might change around as I really get into the design process and begin making the garment.”
She points to a dress she designed for her basketball banquet as an example. Originally, she sketched the dress with bottle caps running up the sides, but along the way, she decided to place the caps around the neckline and chest.
“As I’m putting things together, my eye just sees something different than what I sketched,” she said. “And the dress turned out completely different than how I originally imagined it, but I love how it turned out. It’s all about the process.”
Why bottle caps? Mathias is using a lot of them on her pieces and attributes them to a sense of place.
“I’ve definitely gained inspiration from living in Durham and in Pittsburgh, where I’m from,” she said. “I’ve got this industrial-type feel to all my looks, so I’m using a lot of chains and bottle caps.”
Mathias often sources reusable materials from The Scrap Exchange. She then spray paints and hand paints bottle caps for inclusion in the collection.
Helping to pay for these materials, as well as fabrics and a fashion show venue, is a Benenson Award for the Arts, which Mathias applied for and received from Duke Arts.
A typical day for Mathias includes basketball workouts and practices in the morning, followed by sewing in the afternoon and evening, while her Great Dane Zara keeps a close watch by her side.
One of the most challenging things has been the actual execution of pieces. Sometimes she can envision a piece of clothing, but as a self-taught sewer, it takes time to get the garment to look right.
But Mathias is committed to focusing on the details of each piece, perfecting each look before it hits the runway in next week. Thursday’s show will begin at 6:30 p.m. in front of Duke Chapel.
“I think that’s important as an entrepreneur,” she said, “to not rush into things and to take time to develop your idea before putting it out there.”
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It's Dior darling! Rising Australian model Fernanda Ly hits the runway for famous French fashion house during Paris Fashion Week
She's the 20-year-old Australian model whose star continues to rise in the global fashion world.
And Fernanda Ly has added another string to her career bow, strutting her stuff on the catwalk for Christian Dior for Paris Fashion Week.
The pink-haired stunner was a vision in black for her Dior turn, wearing a playful sheer polka dot dress underneath a long leather jacket.
After being discovered by agency Priscilla's while she was shopping, Fernanda has since worked with the likes of Louis Vuitton, Kenzo and Moschino.
Last season she was also the face of Christian Dior's Autumn/Winter 2017 campaign
It appears that Paris has been inundated with genetically blessed Australians this season with Fernanda joining the likes of Jordan Barrett, Catherine McNeil and Aleyna Fitzgerald on the Parisian catwalks.
It was a similar situation at the recent New York Fashion Week, with Jordan, Aleyna, expat Andreja Pejic, Shanina Shaik and Madeline Stuart all taking a fashionable bite out of the Big Apple.
Speaking to Grazia recently, Fernanda revealed that she revelled in being busy, admitting she gets nervous when she has free time.
'I like working, she said. 'I'm a workaholic - sometimes I feel like I'm never working enough.
She added: 'Sometimes I could be working every day of the week, the sometimes you don;t work for like two or three weeks and you think to yourself...you get really scared.'
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Hervé Léger obituary
Hervé Léger never intended a life in fashion. He wanted to be a sculptor, and endured a year studying at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris before he fled education to get his hands directly on materials. His curiosity about the properties of fibres, from human hair to silk jersey, was the base of his greatest success, the bandage dresses that were the most sympathetic approach to the body-conscious fashion of the 1990s.
Léger, who has died aged 60 of a ruptured aneurysm, instinctively moulded cloth to display and flatter the body beneath. Fabrics incorporating elastane (aka Lycra or Spandex) fibres for stretch were extensively used in underwear, and exercise and dance kit in the 80s, but less so in fashion; too vulgar. Léger found his first stretch-assisted knitted jersey as a discarded experiment at a textile factory. Because he had experience of shaping hats from fabric strips, he realised he could make the weird stuff into a dress that would follow female curves by assembling strips, panels and tubes to run round or diagonally across the body (most dresses are cut vertically, falling from shoulders or waist). His first full collection in this style was shown in 1991, when supermodels such as Cindy Crawford, plus actresses on the new red carpets, still had considerable curves, and a professional wish to show them off.
His was not an overnight success. His real name was Hervé Peugnet, and he was born in Bapaume, northern France, which he left at 18 for art school; after he dropped out, he took a hairdressing apprenticeship to support himself. This was excellent training (hair is a difficult fibre, yet susceptible to moulding), and gave him access to couture, working on models at the collections, including at Chloé, where Karl Lagerfeld was chief designer. Young Peugnet taught himself fashion design and cut, making accessories and hats, doing contract jobs at the house of Lanvin and for the costume designer Tan Giudicelli.
He met Lagerfeld at a Chloé party in 1980. Lagerfeld thought little of the young man’s sketches (his ideas did not translate well to drawings) but, because of his practicality, hired him as a personal assistant at both Fendi and Chanel. In 1984, Lagerfeld encouraged him to start his own Parisian boutique and to change his name from unmemorable Peugnet to Léger, to suggest lightness.
Léger was ceaselessly inventive and his clothes mobile; part of the appeal of the bandage dresses which he slowly began to introduce in the late 80s was that, for all their tightness, which positively held the figure in and up, they allowed unrestricted poses for the cameras. He designed active swimwear and tights, too, and ballet costumes for Roland Petit’s company at the Paris Opéra.
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In fashion news today: Coach reveals name change; Taylor Swift to release app
Coach has announced a drastic name change, revealing their parent company will now go by the name Tapestry. The move comes following news of the brand’s acquisition of Kate Spadeand Stuart Weitzman, and reflects the expansion into a multi-brand firm. The Coach brand name will remain unchangedand the new move reflects only the newly formed parent business. [Vogue inbox]
Taylor Swift has announced she is releasing an app strictly for Swift fans. Named ‘The Swift Life’, the app has been dubbed “like Facebook” but for Swifties. Allowing fans to connect with each other and also with her, plus collecting ‘Taymojis’, stickers and pictures, the app will certainly be a mecca for all things Taylor. Set to be released in late 2017, we’re sure to hear more about it closer to the singer’s album launch in November. [Billboard]
To celebrate World Sight Day, Oscar Wylee are donating 100% of all gross profits today, October 12, to Sight For All — a charity helping combat preventable eye diseases in Australia and abroad. Aiming to raise $20,000, today might be the day you invest in those Oscar Wylee sunglasses for summer. Get shopping. [Vogue inbox]
The 2017 Aria Award nominations have been released, with Australian band Gang of Youths pulling a total of eight nominations. Paul Kelly follows with seven, and Jessica Mauboy, Amy Shark, Illy and A.B Original all received six. The Award ceremony will be announced on November 28 at The Star in Sydney.
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