Features
Choosing colours...the blueprint for beauty
If you want to embrace this season's bold rainbow trends, it's best to choose your colours with care. Carola Long gets some guidance from the experts
Inside Features
The 5-minute Interview: Wayne Hemingway, fashion designer
Thursday, 3 April 2008
Fashion designer turned urban planner, Wayne Hemingway, 47, founded the Red or Dead clothing label. From 4 April he will be participating in B&Q's "Body Warming not Global Warming" initiative to create sustainable housing in the UK.
Susannah Frankel: Ready To Wear
Monday, 31 March 2008
The allure of the strappy, high-heeled sandal – or, in fact, any high heel, the more extreme the better – is well charted. Less often recognised, however, is the nowhere near so obvious appeal of the paper-flat shoe. This was, of course, the subject of a bewildering amount of attention last week when, in an uncharacteristically modest moment, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy resisted towering over her husband in high heels, opting for flat Dior pumps instead.
Publish and be glammed: When did in-house fashion titles get so glamorous?
Sunday, 30 March 2008
Next month, a year after opening its first UK store, the American clothing company Abercrombie and Fitch will relaunch its controversial magazine A & F Quarterly, discontinued in 2002 after four US states threatened legal action against its racy sexual content. At the time, Abercrombie's chief executive Mike Jeffries declared that he was simply "bored" of the project.
Fashion: Meet the modern fashion tribes
Saturday, 29 March 2008
D'you know about bear culture? It's wild. There are bear clubs and bear cubs and bear websites now. It's a big thing in a small way if you know where to look. Bears are chubby, hairy, gay men who like similar and get together on a regular basis. They're chubby chubby-chasers. If you're looking at a set of bear portraits, posed and shot in white-out studios as coolly as 19th-century African anthropology photographs, it's absolutely obvious. This is a precise type, a body type, a sartorial type and an attitude. If you re-rendered the pictures as silhouettes, they'd still be identifiable, the bear-shaped chest and stomach meaning the arms hang differently, the quietly defiant "I know what I like" attitude.
Fashion: Return of the flapper
Saturday, 29 March 2008
The effervescent spirit of the Jazz Age informs many of the looks for the spring/summer collections. From dropped waists to tiered tassels, there is no doubt that the styles of the Twenties – and Thirties – are again in vogue.
Wrap superstar: Designer Diane von Furstenberg tells her story
Thursday, 27 March 2008
Diane von Furstenberg's brand logo is a pair of lips. But when we meet, I am struck by a sartorial touch that could stand for the woman herself. The tortoiseshell reading glasses tucked neatly into her cleavage seem to symbolise the way she has fused intelligence and sex appeal, business sense and glamour to create a fashion business whose wholesale sales will near $200m this year alone.
The 5-minute Interview: Jacques Azagury, Fashion designer
Wednesday, 26 March 2008
Azagury is a British fashion designer, born in Morocco, whose clients have included Princess Diana, Helen Mirren and Davina McCall. He trained at the London College of Fashion and St Martin’s School of Art and opened his flagship store in Knightsbridge in 1987. His first signature scent, Azagury, is being launched by Selfridges in April.
Susannah Frankel: Ready To Wear
Monday, 24 March 2008
The fashion industry is all too rarely surprising. We all know, for example, that Dolce & Gabbana is more likely to make the cover of any glossy monthly worth mentioning than Comme des Garçons. This is because the Italian label is designed to ensure that stick-thin Hollywood cover stars look, well, stick-thin, and overtly glamorous to boot.
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