Start doing your sit-ups now because the crop top is having its resurgence moment for spring 2012. Everyone from Acne to D&G to Prada showed crop tops on the runway, in all shapes and sizes. (Well, from small to teensy that is.) Which tiny style is your favorite?
Q. What eminent designer puts what seems like 150 looks on the runway — bottom-grabbing pencil skirts; tiny purple Floradora dresses — and forbids photography (apparently to lend an air of exclusivity, but in this case, maybe to protect his reputation) and emerges on the runway at the end of the show, then stands around Read more →
London fashion week is over, seemingly in the blink of an eye. But before Milan swoops in and steals all the glory, we wanted to give a shout out to the 10 collections we loved most in London. Brit designers gave us a lot of pastel and florals, a lot of color, and a lot of cheekiness.
Click through to see the ten best spring 2012 collections from across the pond.
London fashion week was a whirlwind of shows, and we had a great time covering them. Besides being an incubator for original fashion, London designers are also not afraid to work a LOOK on their models, making for the best beauty-ogling of all the fashion weeks. From Vivienne Westwood (at left), who is not afraid of, well, anything, to more subtle yet never boring looks, we loved the beauty in London.
This is all about the drama. You need a certain amount of self-confidence to pull many of these off, but we encourage you to try!
Click through for our 10 favorite looks from London.
Fashionista contributor Long Nguyen is the co-founder/style director of Flaunt.
LONDON–What’s a London experience without a little rain? And so it was that around 6pm last Sunday, a sunny afternoon surrendered to light drizzle as several black cars queued to drop just 55 guests off at Tom Ford’s showroom on a side street near Victoria Station for his intimate spring 2012 fashion show. Several male models clad in black three piece suits ushered them inside under enormous umbrellas, a scene more suitable for an embassy dinner than a runway show.
Inside on the second floor showroom, the reception desk was temporarily converted into a bar where waiters served vodka tonic, champagne and still waters. “It has an air of the old Gucci shows with Domenico Desole greetings guests and waiters serving Vodka,” Hillary Alexander told me as we sipped on drinks and waited to enter the main room.
In the late 90’s, in addition to a large bouquet of white flowers and a handwritten note to welcome us to Milano, some of us would get a bottle of vodka, or, on occasion, a 25 year-old bottle of whiskey from Mr. Ford at our hotel room. Then, the designer’s debauched sexy and slinky styles ushered a revolution in fashion. Now, we are in a different moment in time. In this digital age where images from fashion shows hold the attention span of a click to the next page, there is a need for designers to apply a different approach to how fashion can be seen and evaluated.
But back to the show.
Check out Giles Deacon’s gorgeous collection of metallics, swan prints and insane headpieces. He does conservative and over-the-top with equal precision. Can you believe those gowns at the end?
We’ll be talking about prints–especially floral ones–for a while after this fashion month. And after Mary Katrantzou’s amazing spring 2012 collection, she might be the most important name in that conversation. The colors! The florals! There were actual flowers on the runway! So awesome.
This very promising up-and-comer showed a solid collection of expertly mixed fabrics in well-tailored silhouettes. We like.
The whirlwind of fashion week continues; this show included a scenic dash past the London Eye, over London Bridge and up to the Tate Modern, the artistic home for the modern the new, and, now, Matthew Williamson’s spring show.
Outside, an ice cream van and tourists jostled with the fleet of black cars (and women in black) that had descended for Sunday’s show, as inside the iconic turbine gallery lit up with purple hues of light. Racing down the sloped hallway (killer for heels) and up to the gallery, I saw some of fashion’s greatest–Anna Wintour, Anna Dello Russo, Hamish Bowles–sitting front row with Matthew’s “beautiful friends”–Jacquetta Wheeler, Tallulah Harlech, Poppy Delevingne, herself a recently appointed Ambassador for the British Fashion Council, and her ‘bestie’ Sienna Miller, who needs no title to be one of Matthew’s great muses.
The collection was a joyful mix of oranges and yellows, silk prints and sophisticated soft draped silhouettes.
Erdem Moralioglu showed his spring collection at the Savoy Hotel, in a ballroom that was painted a soft, barely-there baby blue–a color motif that seemed to inspire a huge portion of the show.
The clothes were covered in muted floral wallpaper prints–a far cry from the bold blooms we saw during NYFW–or bathed in solid pastel shades. It was a far quieter print than we’ve seen from the designer (who has been deemed “The Master of Floral“) in past collections. But don’t let the sedated color palette fool you: This was not a collection for wallflowers.
The backstage world before a fashion show can be a weird and wonderful place. My experience at Topshop Unique was especially so on Saturday, not for any specific lightning bolt reason, but more because of a culmination of many small experiences.
I gathered a lot of information that afternoon (and a lot of poor quality pictures) and decided it was worth a re-telling. So, put on your special all-access wristband and follow me:
1:30: Arrive at train station, to creepy unused old Eurostar section. Get wristband and head up a long ramp and non-functioning escalator. Oh! There’s a glass ceiling and tons of light. No longer creepy.
1:35: I notice that the models all have gold paint in their hair. And I also say hi to Charlotte Free, the pink-haired model who was a fixture for a season or two on the runways. She still has pink hair.
Monday was a good day for both clothes and celeb spotting at the London shows. While London front row faves Irina Lazareanu and Harley Viera-Newton chatted at Pringle of Scotland, Tilda Swinton quietly and gracefully swanned in and took her seat. She’s completely stunning, and rather unassuming in real life, posing for pictures then quietly sitting down. And tall! Pringle should have begged her to take to the runway for them.
Speaking of the runway, you’ll recall that Pringle has had some creative director upheaval. Clare Waight Keller went to Chloé early in the summer; this is Alistair Carr’s first collection for the label. For his first outing, he mined the 1960s and the Pringle archive, specifically riffing on the twinset.
