FASHION Magazine

After a long and exhausting month of shows (it’s a hard life… we know), we’ve finally had a few minutes to digest the thrills and frills that we saw on the runways in New York, London, Milan and Paris. So, here they are. Our top ten hits, in no particular order. (Ordering them would be like choosing favourite children, and we simply CANNOT go that far… )

Check out our London fall 2011 fashion week photo gallery »

“Why do you come to London? Is it the best for finding new designers?” I forget who asked me this the other eve⎯by now the whole week’s a blur of long skirts and spikes and unnaturally bright hair⎯but the answer is yes. It’s not the weather.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and golden fish and pretty maids all in a row. Oh, and lotus flowers and Ming vases and tea-room wallpaper and… all this print which is more than I have words for. It left me faint.

Fall ’11 is only Mary Katrantzou’s sixth show, and I remember her first, when she was back-to-back with Mark Fast and nobody knew either of them. She’d just began doing perfume-bottle prints and their hyperrealness startled me. Then she picked up whole rooms and swirled them into wearable objet d’arts. Now she’s in the garden: more specifically, she says, Diana Vreeland‘s apartment, or “garden of hell.” If this is hell, I’m quite happy to be headed there.

I knew the David Koma show would be black and white and dotty all over when Daphne Guinness ⎯beer heiress, patron saint of designers and stranger to colour ⎯arrived. Sure enough, the first look was a super-minimal cream sheath with black leather dots, in rows of varying size, appliqued on sleeves and skirt. Then came a black wool capelet and a swingy leather midi-skirt, both perforated with great big polka dots. The circle motif spiralled into delightful madness: swirling patterns; leather and wool mashups; screenprinted, polka-dotted faces. I hated only the blog-rave soundtrack and, in that spirit, the balls of fun fur Koma tacked onto otherwise great pieces. He’d have been better off leaving black and white alone. Would Daphne wear a kool-aid blue fur peplum or a sun-yellow stole? I don’t think so.

Fashion week hazard: Getting caught up in the moment, suddenly realizing you have no idea what’s going on with Libya. Insiders say fashion week looks glamorous but the reality is: there is no reality here.

So it was strange, in a good way, to read Peter Pilotto‘s show notes on revolts past (the Russian Revolution, the Paris Riots of ’68) and present (Egypt). Pilotto and partner Christopher De Vos promised to translate these into “seditious shirting details.” Forgive my skepticism.

1. There are some serious fashion peeps finding themselves in the second row: Lynn Yaeger, Julia Restoin-Roitfeld, Kate Lanphear, Derek Blasberg. Okay, maybe they’re not all that serious, but they’re all used to A1 treatment. Wonder how they feel about their industry fame being subjugated to Hollywood fame at a fashion show?

Imran Amed, expat dynamo behind the Business of Fashion blog, has created a bag and named it after his hometown. The “Calgary” is a collaboration with Bill Amberg, whose little shop of leathers is around the corner from Amed’s Notting Hill flat, and comes in six limited-edition styles (black pony, orange patent…) for £950 (about $1,500 CAD). There’s also a “crowdsourced” version: you can go to the BoF site to vote for black cowhide, grey patent or brown cowhide. The winning style will sell for £495 (about $785 CAD). It might not be quite “the Carine,” as seen in yesterday’s Tom Ford show, but the “Calgary” certainly has an it-ness all its own.

I ran into Amed toting his brand-new bag after the Topshop show, and he kindly shared a cab with me as well as answering a few of my questions.

I’d be dead certain the Topshop Unique show was inspired by my Halloween costume, Cruella de Vil, had it not also been… Lady Gaga‘s Halloween costume. In any case, it was a Cruella, Cruella world at Old Billingsgate Market, this year’s expansive Topshop venue.

It was a six-minute ride from the Mayfair Hotel to the Mulberry show this morning, and yet when I arrived, I found myself in some enchanted woods. Flowering vines caught in my hair, which perhaps I should’ve brushed. The red and white speckled mushrooms indigenous to all Disney movies—you know the ones—popped up under my feet. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed waiters offered cupcakes decorated to match.

Day two is over and I’ve got that Blur song in my head. No, the other Blur song. You know: “girls who like boys who like boys who like girls…”

That’s because London boyswear darling J.W. Anderson is doing girlswear now, and London girlswear darling Jonathan Saunders just debuted boyswear. It’s all very confusing and probably illegal in Arizona.

If last night was about the British sort of celebrity, today was about my sort: true fashion characters. Front row at Charles Anastase this morning (a properly wet one, I might add) was Charlotte Dellal, exquisite shoe designer and Titian titan of society, her waves unruffled by the rain. Scott “The Sartorialist” Schuman appeared to be sans Garance for the first five minutes of their entire romantic history (she must have been in the bathroom). And I walked smack into Alexa Chung, but it’s not my fault… she was standing sideways!