FASHION Magazine

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From digitized foliage to hand beaded blooms, this spring offers a garden of earthly delights. In this vibrant photo shoot from our May 2014 issue, florals take a spin for yet another season and proof less ordinary than ever.

No 16-year-old on earth can compete with Elle Fanning’s Hollywood cachet. She’s been on set with Cate Blanchett, shopped Rodeo Drive with Sofia Coppola and partied with Miuccia Prada in Milan (being the current spokesperson for Miu Miu and all). If that doesn’t signal a gal who is going places, her latest role in this summer’s Maleficent—which has her sharing the silver screen with Angelina Jolie—will. (P.S. she already shared screen time with Brad Pitt in 2006’s Babel and 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

On the cusp of Fanning’s next phase of fame, FASHION magazine photographed the young starlet for our Summer 2014 Issue in the apropos confines of an estate home in the Hollywood Hills. After she was snapped in outfits by a mix of labels ranging from Blumarine, Delpozo and Paule Ka, Fanning sat down with features editor Elio Iannacci to talk about fashion, film and family time with the Jolie-Pitt clan. Here is a sneak peak of Fanning’s cover story, due to hit newsstand shelves on May 19, 2014.

Yves Saint Laurent found beauty and inspiration in Morocco, and now its natural bounty has yielded a precious skin-preserving ingredient known as red gold: saffron.

A young Yves Saint Laurent, looking relaxed and casual in a white open-necked shirt and white flares, strolls through Marrakech’s Djemaa El Fna square, chatting to a Marrakchi woman with a basket atop her head. It’s one of many personal snapshots from the book Yves Saint Laurent: Une Passion Marocaine, handwritten in French by his partner in business and life, Pierre Bergé. Saint Laurent was fascinated by the goings on in the square, often walking there to watch the acrobats, snake charmers and gnawa dancers who still bring life, music and art to the city today.

“The moment I saw Veronika, it immediately clicked in my head: ‘this is the outfit of the season.’ From what I’ve been seeing across the board, comfort has really been on people’s minds, and this for me was the perfect balance of comfort and fashion. It captures the mood of how women in fashion are […]

The post Snapped by Tommy Ton: “This is the outfit of the season” appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

In the days before the Academy Awards, actress Lupita Nyong’o could have stuck to primping for her big night, but instead she chose to speak about “dark beauty” at the annual Essence Black Women in Hollywood luncheon. She read aloud a letter from a fan who, after seeing her success, had decided not to buy a skin-lightening cream. Nyong’o explained that she too once hated her skin tone, that she was teased and taunted, and that her “one prayer to God was that I would wake up lighter-skinned.” That fan wasn’t the only one paying attention: When Vanity Fair was accused of lightening the 12 Years a Slave star’s deep brown skin for her portrait in its February 2014 Oscar issue, armchair comments ranged from “Black people like to be adequately lit too” to “It’s so nice to finally see a black celebrity with really dark skin.”

It’s easy to think of Beyoncé, Rihanna and Freida Pinto as symbols of inclusivity; they are, but with their light skin and/or light eyes, they represent a beauty ideal that many women of colour can never hope to achieve. Colourism (or shadeism) is a type of discrimination that occurs within ethnic groups, creating a quiet divide between light- and dark-skinned people of colour. It drives women to choose too light a foundation; use lightening creams with dubious ingredients and results; or opt for surgical treatments. If you’re any type of brown, hearing an auntie say, “Stay out of the sun or you’ll get too dark!” is about as common as being told to eat your vegetables.

How to wear jeans at any age »

Maintaining their place at top of modern day wardrobe food chain, jeans reign supreme as the modern day must-have. Here, we prove they’re just as versatile, whether you’re in your twenties, thirties, forties and beyond. Taking runway inspiration from 4 of this season’s hottest looks, we present: how to wear jeans at any age.

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The classic men’s shirt is this season’s inspiration for dresses, skirts and more. Who better to model spring’s take on a classic than Linda Rodin, the 65-year old beauty whose modelling career, like its popularity, is booming more than ever.

View some of Charles James’s most famous pieces »

Most people know their Chanel from their Givenchy, but bring up Charles James and you’ll likely hear crickets. Lauded as “the world’s best and only dressmaker who has raised haute couture…to a pure art form” by Cristóbal Balenciaga, he might just be the greatest couturier you never knew existed.

Born in 1906 to a British military officer and an American socialite, James got his start as a milliner in Chicago before finding his calling in couture. After moving to New York in 1939, he became the most exclusive dressmaker for America’s high-society swans, including Austine Hearst, Millicent Rogers and Babe Paley—a clientele he personally vetted, even giving them direction on how to move, sit and dance in his designs.

And with creations as sensational as his, James could afford to be choosy. His sweeping gowns and signature silhouette—strapless bodice, tiny waist, voluminous skirt—conveyed a sense of grandeur and majesty that ensured the wearer would be the star of any room. Even Christian Dior attributed the inspiration for his career-defining New Look to a James idea.

Photography by Cecil Beaton/Condé Nast archive

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Charles James Clover Leaf Austine Hearst

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Charles James

Charles James evening gown

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Charles James

Charles James with model

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Charles James

Charles James butterfly ballgown

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Charles James

Designer Charles James

A spate of strong leading ladies has been holding court on television lately, women like Scandal’s Olivia Pope and The Mindy Project’s Mindy Lahiri, who refuse to cheer from the sidelines. While USA Network’s hit legal drama Suits—onto its fourth season—might seem like a boys’ club in comparison, it does its best to reject stereotypical power dynamics, thanks to female characters whose strength often rivals that of their male counterparts.

In fact, many of the women on the show play powerful dealmakers, stealth lawmakers and unapologetic ball breakers. “Beyond the fact that they’re strong women who aren’t just playing a wife, a girlfriend or this pretty little thing, these are all flawed and interesting women who are relatable as much as they are aspirational,” says 32-year-old actress Meghan Markle, who plays one of Suits’ most ambitious characters, a by-the-book paralegal by the name of Rachel Zane.

Unlike in many shows that typecast non-white characters, Markle—who is African-American, English and Irish—is not the token ethnic girl. “In the past, the dream girl would be blonde-haired and blue-eyed. It wouldn’t be me, who’s biracial and freckled,” she says.

Somewhere between doing what I could and doing what I wanted, the last line of Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections became one of my favourite mantras: “She was seventy-five,” it goes, “and she was going to make some changes in her life.” The “she” here is Enid, a wife, mother and grandmother whose husband has just passed away, and who steps out of the hospital into a green spring night. It’s a sweet ending. It is also a real thesis, and few embody it better than public editrix number one, the Parisian expat and pushing-60 sex symbol Carine Roitfeld.

In February 2001, Roitfeld took the reins at Vogue Paris. After 10 years, a hundred wickedly “erotic-chic” issues and many, many angry calls to Condé Nast from duly offended citizens, she left—abruptly, amid a thicket of rumours. “I don’t want to get old in this golden cage,” she told The New York Times’ Cathy Horyn. Because her tenure at Vogue had shot her to the kind of icon status it takes most icons a lifetime to achieve, and because the attendant pressures had somehow left her forehead as cleanly unlined as her pencil skirts, it was easy to forget that Roitfeld was then 56 (she’s just five years younger than Anna Wintour). Post-Vogue, she promptly collaborated with M.A.C and posed with her family and friends in a Barneys campaign called “Carine’s World.” Then, moving to New York, she started her own ultra-culty magazine, CR Fashion Book, with offices in the Standard Hotel East Village. In other words, she did everything a thoroughly millennial It girl would do, except she was—is—a mid-career mother of two.

See the 1990s trend on the runways »

For most of my 20s, I’ve been your archetypal hypochondriac (let’s just say a good old MRI really calms my nerves), but lately, my Woody Allen-like fear of the end has morphed into something even more frightful: the end of my youth. I’ll be 30 next April—a milestone I’ve been dreading since I turned 27 (which, let’s be honest, was traumatic enough). Most say the best is yet to come, but from where I’m sitting, my impending existential grapple with miniskirts has pushed me down a road of teenage wardrobe nostalgia where crushed velvet, neon and over-the-top everything reign supreme.

Fashion’s ’90s streak couldn’t have come at a better time. For me, the ’90s represent a period in my life when my biggest priorities were decorating my room with posters of Leonardo DiCaprio, sneaking into 14A movies like Cruel Intentions and The Craft and lining up outside MuchMusic to see The Backstreet Boys. Fast-forward to today and the ’90s couldn’t be more pervasive. Crop tops and Birkenstocks are street-style staples, witches are the new vampires and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is, well, fresh again. And while for many it may feel early for a ’90s redux, the evidence says otherwise: Cher Horowitz’s, like, totally important Alaïa moment happened 19 years ago. Aaliyah has been dead for 13 years. And Marc Jacobs’s infamous grunge collection for Perry Ellis? That was 21 years ago.

See the Ostwald Helgason Aldo Rise collection »

Susanne Ostwald and Ingvar Helgason are staring intently at a swatch of woven raffia. Ostwald thumbs its subtle texture and pauses. “It’s missing emotion,” she says. Helgason nods. “It’s missing that fuzzy, fun, happiness…,” he trails off. “We need something warm, something unexpected.” Aldo women’s footwear designer Jackie Yermus produces a rougher weave of white with natural-toned raffia. Ostwald’s eyes widen. “This one is very emotional,” she says, laying it beside a pebbled orange, a grainy sky-blue and a shiny nude, also under consideration. “Yes,” she says, “they are very happy together!” She and Helgason exchange high-fives.

It’s hard not to fall in love with Ostwald and Helgason—the charming duo behind breakout fashion label Ostwald Helgason. For one thing, high-fives and happy talk are de rigueur when they’re around, as are discussions about balloon animals (the inspiration behind their spring collection) and Little Shop of Horrors (a previous jumping-off point). If there were such a thing as a fashion prom, they’d be a shoe-in for Cutest Couple (sorry, Kimye).

Photography by Carlo Mendoza

Photography by Greg Kesser

Photography by Carlo Mendoza

Photography by Richard Lam

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Ostwald Helgason Aldo

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Ostwald Helgason Aldo

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Ostwald Helgason Aldo

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Ostwald Helgason Aldo

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Ostwald Helgason Aldo