Beautiful and strange

In his blue gardens, [they] came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars...
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It's hard to believe that Alexander McQueen died over a year ago. His label continues without him, and Sarah Burton, who has taken over from him having worked closely with him for years, seems to have been able to capture exactly what it is that made his designs so unusual: this dress, for example, is beautifully cut and deceptively simple, but as always there's a sting in the tail. At the back, there's a graceful dip of cowl neck:

 Look at it again. There's something unsettling, almost disturbing about the pattern, which seems to contain elements of delicate pale clamshell, but there's also a Rorschach quality to the print, and something insectile, and mothlike, about the pattern.

Alexander McQueen dress, from Net-a-porter. Undeniably expensive, but it's a work of art.

Kind of blue

Dresses by London-based designer Osman Yousefzada for his Osman line, also worn here by Anna Friel (it's a beautiful dress, and she looks great in it, though I'm not entirely sure about the legs akimbo look). Victoria Beckham was so impressed with Osman's column dress that she borrowed the dress and then, ahem, paid homage to it with a dress in her own collection. Dresses from Matches (and they are reassuringly expensive too).

Go with the flow

Beautiful, and possibly unwearable, unless you happen to be entirely lacking the key characteristics of the female form (curves, dimples, cellulite). Roksanda Ilincic, from Net-a-Porter.

Saying stop your sericulture

Male silkworm moth, picture by Kevin Wanner, an entomologist at the University of Illinois.

China accounts for 70% of global silk production, but according to the Financial Times the price of silk has doubled since the start of 2009 and now stands at its highest level in more than 15 years. The China Cocoon and Silk Exchange said that the price of silk cocoons reached RMB92,700(US$13,570) per tonne in mid-April. Those poor little silkworms only eat mulberry leaves, and the breakneck urbanisation of the key silk-producing region around Shanghai has reduced available land for mulberry trees.

Output has declined 15% to 84,000 tonnes last year, and the drought that began in late 2009 has exacerbated a slide in production. Prices are forecast to rise further, but it's also suspected that Chinese investors are squeezing the market by hoarding silk in the hope of increasing demand and therefore price.

Lanvin green silk draped dress. What an amazing creature is the silkworm!

Jolie laide

You can't tell me he wasn't a genius. This isn't beautiful, by any means - hence the title of this post - in fact it's quite disturbing; the pattern is hypnotic, you're looking into the belly of a beast; it draws you in, it rustles in the grass, it follows you stealthily... To be worn once, and then kept in a glass box.

Alexander McQueen, from Net-a-Porter. GBP3,300, and already sold out.

Burn baby burn

Every year for the last 6 years I've raced at Deep Water Bay dragonboat races. Every year, my team's kit has had tops with thin straps; and every year, the sun beats down and despite the apparently perspicacious, not to mention frequent, application of sunscreen of factor 30 and above, I get weird burn-then-tan marks around my shoulders in the shape of little straps. How old am I?

I'm ruined, then, for dresses like this one. But this year I decided enough was enough and though it didn't arrive in time for today's race, our kit has cap-sleeved t-shirts instead.



Dress, Alexander McQueen. Espadrilles, Chloé. Both from Matches.

Those are pearls

Shoes, Chie Mihara, from Plümo.

This is the second pair of Chie Mihara shoes I've stumbled upon (weirdly, on her website - watch out for the noodling Spanish guitar, running water and birdsong - I couldn't find a single pair I liked). These are a little bit chunky, but have such a lovely mother of pearl detail that I can forgive them anything. They have a 1940s feel so at first I thought that a teadress might be a perfect match, but I think they are perhaps too complicated to compete with a pattern, so red it is, and what's more no jewellery is to be worn, or else.
Dress, Giambattista Valli, from Browns.

October revolution

Brilliant pictures from Tim Burton's fashion shoot for the October issue of Harper's Bazaar: above, Nina Ricci; below, Alexander McQueen. I love the way that although the clothes look absolutely weird, impossible, and unwearable, as high fashion often is, for once this is echoed by the scenario in which they are displayed and it makes them beautiful.

This rough magic

A clutch made from Japanese kimono material by Hong Kong based designer Mischa. And an even more beautiful dress by William Tempest. His name sounds like a nom de plume; Shakespeare's first name and his best play.


ARIEL: All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.
The Tempest, Act I, Scene I

Working wardrobe

Promenade in green: RM by Roland Mouret


Fade to grey: the deceitfully named Cheap'N' Chic by Moschino


Drapes of wrath: Diane von Furstenburg

Three very different dresses (all from Net-a-Porter) which could conceivably be worn to work. And all you need now is a great pair of shoes.
Come to heel: Rupert Sanderson from Browns Fashion

And finally a dress that could never be worn to work (but which would go nicely with the shoes; for people who like everything to match, of whom I'm not sure I'm one, that's the kind of match they like):


Hips, lips, power: William Tempest from Browns Fashion

Back to basics

A bride-to-be was having her pre-wedding wedding shots done at the end of Stanley Main Street. With the groom nowhere to be seen, she twitched uncomfortably as a busybody attendant slicked extra make-up (wholly unhelpfully) onto her face. She looked altogether rather uncomfortable with the whole thing. I stood on a wall behind her to get the shot of her back.

Showstoppers

Joanna Vanderpuije, a Central St Martin's graduate, has just produced her first collection and it's beautiful.


Perhaps it's the spare, elegant aesthetic of the photographs that contributes to the impact: these are clothes you'd be proud and excited to wear.


As Alber Elbaz says in a recent interview (and it's worth reading: he's such a likeable character, with his insecurity about his weight and his preference for sandwiches over avant garde cuisine): "A good shoe or a good dress does something to you. It's not just about fashion victims. It really does do something for all women".

All photos ©2009 Jaime de Almeida.

A distorted reality

Sometimes I find that I like the idea of fashion so much more than the reality. Lanvin is a good example of this: the clothes are so touchable, the colours beautiful, satin and grosgrain in jewel colours and my favourite shade of slate grey. But they are particularly expensive and extravagant; dreams, destined to remain unworn, no doubt, and as these pictures from Paris Fashion Week show, wholly unsuited to anyone fatter than a stick (so many folds of material would look ridiculous covering curves; and satin is a very unforgiving fabric).

Looking through photos of the Autumn/Winter 2009-2010 season from the Paris shows on French Vogue (where these photos came from), there are definitely some regrettable things going on: dresses with only one sleeve, for no discernible reason; fur adorning everything, despoiling some otherwise perfect 1940s silhouettes; the aforementioned wayward folds of fabric (beautifully seamed and sewn, often, but peculiar nonetheless); and Alber Elbaz will make his models wear rats' nests in their hair. Once again, what silly Karl Lagerfeld termed "the new modesty" is nowhere in evidence.

Consider the lilies

I am going to a beach wedding in Phuket this weekend, which poses the challenge of what to wear - not too dressy, clearly, but judging by the extremely glamorous women who attended the hen party, I have to make an effort (and I don't look good in crumpled linen anyway). I've just moved to a new flat and so I am suffering from my periodical loathing of the idea of possessions (so many of them! and to what end?); however, unbidden, this Rick Owens Lilies dress appeared to me as if in a dream. The idea of wearing this to the wedding, teamed with what is now tiresomely dubbed "statement" jewellery (I'm making a statement. This is jewellery), is a vision entirely unrelated to reality. First, I'm not buying it. Second, even if I did, and it fitted me, and more importantly suited me, I couldn't get it to Hong Kong, nor to Phuket, on time.

From Net-a-porter.

Crouching tiger, hidden salmon

Roksanda Ilincic's clothes are always beautiful and simple with something nicely modern about them. This dress wouldn't suit me at all (the colour, described as rose, washes out anyone with pale colouring; a more accurate description would be salmon pink, which inexplicably is not favoured by designers) and what's more it's unjustifiably expensive and dry clean only, words to strike fear into any lazy/thrifty woman's heart; but the simplicity of this dress, and the way it's put together, and the precise way the fabric falls, and the addition of the baroque belt, are an admirable combination.

A love of nature keeps no factories busy

I went shopping in Edinburgh today amidst huge discount signs; everything is on sale already. Something about the abundance of clothes on the racks gives the shops an almost jumble sale feel, which I must admit fills me with torpor. I particularly resent the implication that consumers are somehow expected to spend our way out of the recession. Why is no one suggesting that it might be no bad thing for us to stop consuming? Before the crisis started to become inexorable Ben Bernanke said that "the main source of imbalance in the global economy was not excess spending at home but, rather, excess saving in China and other developing countries, where consumption was artificially low". This sort of self-deluding myopia is what caused all the trouble; and I am definitely liking neither the idea nor the reality of consumption at the moment. But nonetheless, in the kind of contradictory gesture I'm often guilty of, here are some more ideas for my trenchant critics to get their teeth into:


Alexander McQueen, from Net-a-Porter: sky high heels to make anyone feel good;


Issa, from Matches (something about the casual way they display the clothes is accessible and at the same time a bit downbeat); and


Vivienne Westwood from Net-a-Porter.

In pastures green he leadeth me

A welcome (for me) relapse into the trivial: I love Alexander McQueen shoes (as much as I currently like green, green anything), though I don't own any (I balk at paying US$1,000 for a pair of shoes I'll wreck in days on Hong Kong pavements, which are peppered with holes and have soft crevices between the cracks just made for heels to sink into). I do, on the other hand, own a pair of Marni shoes; but surely these are just wellies with heels?

Both from Browns, as is this: Roland Mouret dress with a detail far more slyly appealing than any number of cliched red-soled Louboutins (although Browns' model is wearing a pair: they went for the obvious match there).

Silhouettes and alcohol

I had a red-hot chilli martini with some friends in the bar at the top of the Mandarin Oriental and then with my head spinning and throat burning, came home and watched the video of Alexander McQueen's A/W collection on net-a-porter. Clean lines, perfect silhouettes and simple but elegant tailoring. It might be the vodka talking but these seem to me to be things of beauty, with no hint of gimmicks (though I could have sworn the model wearing Look 5 has knock knees; you'll have to watch the video to spot it).

Back to black

It's been somewhat po-faced round here of late. Definitely time for some frivolity: Roland Mouret Pigalle dress, from Net-A-Porter. Part, apparently, of the new minimalism.

The soft bed of luxury

One of the above dresses costs US$2400. The other, a third of that. Can you guess which? And then the real challenge: can you guess why?

A clue: one of them is by Bottega Veneta which seem to have successfully established itself as a premium luxury brand (it was rated the world's top luxury brand in the 2008 Luxury Brand Status Index (LBSI) survey from the ludicrously named New York City-based Luxury Institute, which canvassed the idle rich to find out their opinions; apparently "wealthy women are highly discerning, almost to a fault"); partly by virtue, apparently, of superior craftsmanship, and partly, it seems to me, and this is one of the tricks of the luxury trade, by charging shedloads of money for their product. It works in Hong Kong - and if you look at their site, the roll-call of locations is quite illuminating.

Dresses by Bottega Veneta and Lanvin; shoes by Azzedine Alaia and Balenciaga, all from Browns.