#SuzyPFW: Alexander McQueen — The Line of Beauty - Vogue

The maidens in their chalky dresses, alabaster leather crinkled across their bodies, looked magical as they walked the wooden planks of an old Paris schoolhouse.

Whether floor-sweeping gowns or short skirts or even jeans, there was the same effect of intense decoration at the Alexander McQueen show.

"It's an ode to craftsmanship, to the Huguenots who came to Spitalfields with flower seeds in their pockets," said designer Sarah Burton of the French religious migrants who crossed the English Chanel in the seventeenth century and settled in the East End of London, the late Alexander McQueen's stomping grounds.

Burton has a knack for each season finding a new crevice in the world of McQueen. She is able to shred organza and suggest that the wrecked beauty has a story behind it; to embroider a giant bird on the body of a chiffon dress as though it were a vicious vulture; or to wrap heavy chains round black tailoring to hint at a chain gang.

Yet there is a parallel feeling of sweetness and light: flower patterns on the finest leather gowns, floral paintings on shoes and a soundtrack that included "Willow's Song" from 1973 film The Wicker Man and "I am Daylights" by British singer-songwriter Songs of Green Pheasant.

Burton received an ovation for her imagination and for the intense beauty of the show — and the success bodes well for the McQueen store that opened in Paris's Rue Saint-Honoré this week.

Yet only backstage did I grasp fully the extraordinary craftsmanship the McQueen ateliers had achieved — and this for a ready-to-wear, not a couture collection.

The papery whiteness turned out to be leather, washed and treated. French lace was handmade with doves and flower trellises. Jewels were thin chains with a Huguenot cross attached.

The show embraced a general trend of innocent, pastoral dressing for the summer 2016 season. But this lyrical version, with hints of darkness as well as light, was a triumph for Burton and the house of McQueen.

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Noir Kei Ninomiya весна-лето 2016 - Vogue

Бывший сотрудник дизайн-студии Comme Des Garçons создает оригинальные, но вполне реальные вещи в четко прослеживаемой японской эстетике

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#SuzyPFW: Céline — Phoebe Philo Unpacks Her Feelings - Vogue

Overhead was a tent in bold primary colours and at our feet drifts of sand as the setting for the Céline show. The bright background suggested vacation and escape. Yet not the clothes: soft satin and black lace dresses like glamorous nightwear; coats with an easy hand-in-pockets stance, a rib-knit waist inserted and an overall city feeling.

None of the fine clothes explained the deep feeling that Céline incites, where designer Phoebe Philo seems to be stretching her skills to the limit in the service of women. She knows we pine for simple linen dresses, shadowing a female body shape, and, this season, with those fashionably full sleeves.

Once backstage, Philo's long, discursive explanation made sense of the show and its setting.

First she said that she had worked with the artist Fos, who had also directed the live music. The idea was to create a space that corresponded to how women behave in different areas.

"I'm very interested in understanding how different clothes make us feel, and I started to think about a slightly strange wardrobe," Philo said. "Those clothes for me are as if you were to go on a year-long voyage, you could just pack it all and use it in all the different places you might visit. The collection is a bit like the tent, which can be folded and packed up."

Phoebe then added another emotional element.

"The context is taking her out of urban life and literally putting her feet in the sand," she said about the Céline woman. "I found it so charming and touching to remove her from that environment. I long more and more to be in nature — I get a lot of satisfaction imagining those clothes there."

The long explanation helped to define the visceral reaction to what Céline offers: clothes that do not have an external Wow! factor, although Phoebe has done that in the past with an African-inspired collection. Or when she created furry sandals that became objects of desire and were copied across continents. At this show the fur was white, teddy-bear cuddly and offered as a coat.

Although there were red ballerina flats to accompany the lingerie looks, gold jewellery in earring hoops or wrist squares and — of course — Céline's famous bags, the power was in the choice, especially the outerwear. Spring is often forgotten in summer collections, but here were smart coats decorated with wavy lines or curvy pantsuits with gilded trimmings. Navy jackets or a checked coat with plaid pants: these clothes were indeed for all seasons and reasons.

How and why has fashion today moved so far from most women and their crazy-busy lives? Céline offers a convincing — and appealing, answer.

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#SuzyPFW: Kenzo — Forever on the Move - Vogue

When I go to Tokyo Fashion Week in ten days' time, will I see anything so intrinsically Asian as the Kenzo show here? I felt this even though the original Kenzo Takada lived in Paris, and built his label on wanderlust, and current designers Humberto Leon and Carol Kim are Asian-American, rather than Japanese.

It is hard to define the mix of the cute, the streamlined and the sporty that makes up the current, global look of Kenzo. But the duo has grasped how to move the brand forward — literally in the case of remote-controlled platforms that progressed into the vast room, displaying the colourful clothes.

"We always want the shows to feel spectacular, and for people to walk away with an impression," said Humberto backstage. "We feel the spirit of Kenzo; we channel our inner Japanese with this brand. We want the heritage to be apparent and for Kenzo Takada to sit in the audience and feel: 'they are thinking of me.'"

It is rare for designers revitalising a brand to be quite so willing to please the founder, rather than taking a more pugnacious stance, as when Alexander McQueen took over Givenchy. This Kenzo collection was nothing like the label's original 1970s style, yet it expressed a similar sense of freedom.

The basic looks included macramé-type knit with a portrait neckline. The bottom half was a short A-line skirt worn with lattice thigh-high boots or flat sandals, which seemed powerful rather than seductive.

Where Humberto and Carol excel is in their modern attitude to prints, which are digital and graphic; to colours, which were mostly primary — red blue and yellow; and in the understanding that there is not one style today, but many. A floor-sweeping dress in a red-and-blue pattern looked just as relevant as the short skirts.

The design duo said that they had thought of a young woman dressing with a nonchalant mix of things from her global travels. Hence bits of hardware as if from a traveller's backpack, and bits of swimwear worn as underwear. Let's just call it twenty-first century wanderlust.

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Фантастические часовые новинки Piaget - Vogue

Золотой песок, звезды и караван — это полупрозрачная крышка секрета

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Comme Des Garçons Comme Des Garçons весна-лето 2016 - Vogue

Новая коллекция практичной линейки японской марки

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#SuzyPFW: Vetements — A New, Romantic Normcore - Vogue

The idea of melding a grunge attitude from the early 1990s with the bold shoulders and look-at-me colours of the 1980s is refreshing. So much has been done to bring the 1970s back into fashion — yet the spirit of the moment seems bolder than Woodstock whimsy can contain.



There was nothing to suggest that endless hippie trail at 
Vetements. Rather, the show was propelled by the idea of grunge on speed: big shapes, bold colours and those square shoulders.



Of course it also seemed a bit Margiela — since brothers Demna and Guram Gvasalia, the Vetements team leaders, worked with Martin Margiela before the brand's current era with John Galliano at the helm.



The show, held in a kitsch Chinese restaurant in the hinterlands of Paris, opened with a man — deliberately not a model — wearing a yellow T-shirt with the DHL delivery company logo. What Vetements itself then delivered was a grass-green suit with skirt as tiny as jacket shoulders were huge, and other tailoring with diamond-patterned knits that was off-kilter and striking.



I was expecting something more underground, perhaps expressing the festering rage across Europe about the haves and have-nots. Greece and Spain have moved politically to the left and in the UK a veteran socialist has emerged as a political leader. Yet I saw optimism rather than anger in a bold orange nylon jacket or a men's striped shirt elongated to a dress.

 

Floral patterns, as if made from aprons found in great-grandma's kitchen, were charming. So were off-kilter acid shades coming out among a belted leather coat over jeans, and other conventional sportswear with a change to size or proportion.



The internet propels designers — even supposedly underground ones — into the public arena. I couldn't help thinking back to Martin Margiela's earlier shows, held in barren places also on the outskirts of Paris with an audience of immigrant kids, unemployed people and a sprinkling of journalists. Now every show is catapulted immediately onto Instagram (not least by myself). And Vetements was picked up by LVMH as a finalist for their designer prize.




I hope that this label has time to develop their fashion look — a bold, crazy, romantic version of normcore — without falling too soon into the hard, sharp embrace of the fashion establishment

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#SuzyPFW: Junya Watanabe — Out of Africa - Vogue

Why Africa? Why huge headdresses, a scarification illusion on faces, oversized neckbands and wild animal prints on dresses and shoes?

From Junya Watanabe there was no reply and no response backstage ­— other than pleasure expressed that his collection, showed at the Paris museum of the history of immigration, had been so well received.

The Japanese designer had achieved what he does best: taking a theme but not losing with it the easy freshness of his style. This collection was based on a shirtdress, simple, roomy and with full sleeves, a fashion story of the moment.

But with this basic pattern Junya achieved many different effects, from textured surfaces to the fiery orange-and-brown printed pattern of a tiger skin as a cape.

The vivid colours were out of Africa: yellow, royal blue, orange, white. Occasionally all those vibrant shades appeared as curving stripes on a single dress. Other, more explicit jungle motifs were a zebra print dress with matching shoes.

I am always wary of fashion designers taking patterns and markings or traditional head and neck pieces and using them as eye candy with no reference to the deeper cultural meaning. But this Junya Watanabe show did not seem in any way crude or disrespectful. Rather, it flagged up the beauty of simplicity and then added an African dimension.

It would have been helpful to have an explanation for the inspiration: a recent visit to the continent? A book? Tribal art? But Junya prefers to let his clothes do the talking. And this collection spoke for him in a bold and viable way.

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#SuzyPFW: Manish Arora — Romany Rave - Vogue

It was half Indian, half gypsy — and totally Manish Arora in the complexity of pattern, decoration and vibrant colour. But was this costume party, flashed with gilding and stuffed bunnies (ears up like stiff soldiers), really a fashion show as the Paris scene understands it?

I have always championed Manish as not only the major Indian designer in the global arena, but also striding ahead with colourful, artistic Adidas sneakers and sportswear. But the sporty, international side had melted away in this summer 2016 collection.

Gypsies are believed to have started their pilgrimage across the world in India, the designer's home territory. But in this collection Romany culture was made to look like a kitschy theme, with hippie-de-luxe gilded chiffon dresses sweeping the floor of an underground dive by the river Seine. Scarlet and gold were the dominant colours, and even when there were shorter, knee-length dresses, the show lived up to the British phrase  'fancy dress'.

I tried to understand the point of Bunnyla, the decorative bunny. I supposed it was an invention in the spirit of Fendi's Karlito, a furry accessory. But I did finally grasp that Manish was involved in a project about air pollution, turning masks into attractive objects. That seemed more worthwhile than a multitude of embroidery, floral and butterfly decoration.

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Louis Vuitton едет в Рио - Vogue

Николя Жескьер покажет свою следующую круизную коллекцию в Бразилии

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