Milan Fashion Week: Roberto Cavalli autumn/winter 2012 -...
Milan Fashion Week: Roberto Cavalli autumn/winter 2012 - 1
Roberto Cavalli autumn/winter 2012.
Catch up with all the news from Milan Fashion Week
Milan Fashion Week: Roberto Cavalli autumn/winter 2012 -...
Milan Fashion Week: Emporio Armani autumn/winter 2012
Horsey touches and a nod to Little Lord Fauntleroy at Emporio Armani
Shorts for winter? That was the calf-flashingly (albeit under tights) counter-intuitive suggestion at Emporio Armani this morning. And these weren't just any shorts: a few printed Bermudas apart, all of the looks were built around a Lord Fauntleroy-ready knickerbocker undone at its around-the-knee cuff. Worn with every variety of thin-soled flat you can image - patent, crystal-studded velvet slipper, printed patent slipper, two-tone, three-tone, four... - it was a combo that gave the model cross-dressed Gwyneth in Shakespeare In Love jauntiness.
That...
Milan Fashion Week: Raoul autumn/winter 2012
The montage of classic Sixties films that had been spliced together for the Raoul presentation in its elegant new showroom was enough to keep fashion editors entertained for hours. Belle de Jour , Darling , Two for the Road , Goldfinger , The Party ...spotting and naming the mini segments could become a new form of ultra-chic pub quiz. This is a label that knows and reveres its Sixties iconography.The spring collection paid early homage to the glory years of air hostesses, and there's...
Milan Fashion Week: Marni autumn/winter 2012
Marni forgoes its signature prints for high-impact block colour and lean, clean lines.
When Phoebe Philo and Raf Simons fever took hold of the cognoscenti, it seemed that Marni would have to step out of the spotlight for a while. It's true that the label no longer commands the fanatical cult following among the front-rowers that it used to - although what's the betting the fash-ed count will be sky-high when the Marni collection launches in H&M in a couple of weeks? How did she bring it in on budget? Or will it be the loss-leader bargain of the century? Consuelo Castiglioni laughed when I asked her backstage. "I can only say H&M...
Milan Fashion Week: Dolce & Gabbana autumn/winter 2012
Dame Helen Mirren generally seems the most serenely imperturbable of women, and most certainly not the sort to let her handbag plummet to the floor.
Yet this was the fate that befell the snakeskin leopard-print tote that had passingly rested in the crook of Dame Helen's elbow as she reeled backstage immediately after a stunning Dolce & Gabbana show in Milan.
Handbag rapidly restored to elbow - the accident occurred as the actress applauded the designers' seething sea of staff - she told The Daily Telegraph : "I have to say that I'm blown away. I loved it. It was immodest...
Milan fashion week: Alberta Ferretti autumn/winter 2012
No sooner does national treasure Adele reveal that she prefers dressing demurely to putting it all out there, adding that "expoiting your own sexuality isn't very clever", than Milan steps into line.
Alberta Ferretti took a buttoned up approach to seduction in her show, with high necklines, below the knee hems - and a self-assured, hard-boiled swagger that brought to mind Joan Crawford and Bette Davies in their glory years.
Jackets were belted and collars turned up, trousers were crisp, skirts were of the pencil variety, glamorous white croc clutches with silver straps were clasped like shields. Coats were glossy black leather, purple...
Milan Fashion Week: Gucci autumn/winter 2012
With specialists predicting Milan's sales are to nosedive this year, Frida Giannini delivers a dark but still glamorous collection for Gucci.
This is set to be a gloomy year for Italian fashion - analysts suggest sales will decline by 5.2 per cent in 2012 - and Gucci's opening show today captured that mood perfect...
Milan Fashion Week: MaxMara autumn/winter 2012
Warm military-style coats top slim-line tweed shorts and light-weight sweaters at MaxMara autumn/winter 2012.
There was a time - quaint to imagine now - when putting military-inspired clothes on a catwalk might have been viewed as an act of slightly questionable taste, given all the real military uniforms being worn out there. But fashion can't wait for ever, and since there's no sign of our politicians growing tired of staging wars all over the place, what can a trend-lover do but simply get on with accessorising her very own khaki felted wool coat with a peaked cap and leather trimmed gaiters?
nd these coats were great, both in the...
Milan Fashion Week: Fendi autumn/winter 2012
It's business as usual in Milan as Karl Lagerfeld produced a collection of fur, fur and more fur at Fendi.
There are three things that mystify most Italians; taxes, feminism, and those who dislike fur.
Fendi is Milan's ultimate animal house, as resolutely skin-hungry as a blunderbuss-happy big game hunter, and this winter collection was no excepti...
Milan Fashion Week: Ermanno Scervino autumn/winter 2012
According to his notes, "the worlds of Hampshire, England, and Eighteenth Century Venice" inspired Ermanno Scervino's collection today.
So, entirely ignoring Venice (such a well-used muse after all), working out just which parts of this show were Hampshire-based made for a fascinating fashion exercise.
The pealing bells (Winchester Cathedral) and delicate birdsong (Farnham Birdworld) that announced Scervino's show was starting seemed authentic enough. Also molto Hants were the horse-riding pants, lots of them in leather, that cantered down the catwalk in a series of equestrian-inspired outfits, complete with riding helmets.
However...
Milan Fashion Week: Jil Sander and Muccia Prada
As Raf Simons announces he is leaving Jil Sander, speculation is rife around Sander returning to the label she founded - and all this whilst Milan's most influential female designer Muccia Prada shows her latest offering.
Could Dior finally be about to announce a replacement for John Galliano? It's a year since the British designer was fired - a long time for such a prominent brand to remain faceless. Then yesterday, suddenly a suprise statement said that Raf Simons was leaving Jil Sander, the label where he has worked for the past seven year...
Milan Fashion Week: Moschino autumn/winter 2012
While Milan continues to speculate about the (increasingly likely) return of Jil Sander to the eponymous label she founded in 1968, another famous brand got on with doing business its own way. Rossella Jardini, creative director of Moschino, has maintained a deliberately low profile since taking over from the extrovert Franco Moschino after his death in 1994, without any apparent harm to the bottom line.
This is an unusual house in many ways. If you asked fashion savvy consumers to sum up the Sander aesthetic, they might offer up neon colour, voluminous shapes, understated tailoring, flawless shift dresses. Ask them to define Marc Jacobs...
Milan Fashion Week: Etro autumn/winter 2012
Paisley you expect from Etro: after all, this Milan-based print house has been specialising in the kaleidoscopic Central Asian pattern since the 1080's.
What its womenswear designer Veronica did this morning was to artfully fuse her family's signature swirls with many of this season's emerging trends.
So there were hints of military in the drab khaki jackets with tight brown belts, an (unwitting) echo of Prada's bound-to-be influential matchy-matchy iridescently gridded trousersuits (Etro's trousers were narrower on the leg, slightly longer, and with more of a kick than Prada's), a Proenza Schouler-esque threesome of super-wide, triple-pleat...
Milan Fashion Week: Just Cavalli autumn/winter 2012
Hot-to-trot raver supervixens - proceed directly to Just Cavalli.
Roberto Cavalli says it would take an "indecent proposal" - something in the region of a billion euros - to make him even contemplate selling his company.
This is fitting enough, because gleeful, borderline indecency is Cavalli's stock-in-trade. Sometimes it segues perfectly with the mood of fashion, and sometimes it doesn't. Right now, perhaps, it doesn't: but Cavalli stuck to his guns in this new collection for his recently-reclaimed-from-licencees Just Cavalli diffusion range.
The backing set was very warehouse rave: a grimy, graffiti splattered, paint-curled stairwell....
Milan Fashion Week: Versace autumn/winter 2012
Femme-bot velvet and leather bustier dresses covered in jewelled crucifixes - Donatella Versace revisits Gianni's final couture collection 15 years on.
While 68-year-old Jil Sander has put artistic differences behind her and returned to her eponymous company in a surprise move, announced yesterday in Milan, Donatella Versace says she too has finally put her demons behind her.That collection, shown in Paris, in the Ritz, managed to combine religion, sexual and cutting-edge techniques - three of his abiding interests. Chaste it wasn't.
"It's taken 15 years for me to feel I could revisit that collection," she explained. "I always...
Milan Fashion Week: Bottega Veneta autumn/winter 2012
Covered-up control at Tomas Maier's Bottega Veneta autumn/winter 2012 collection
Tomas Maier's Bottega Veneta is the most fastidious of Milan fashion houses, rigorous in everything from the perfect symmetry of its trademark thick-knit Intrecciato leather bags, to the edict that its assistants prepare the catwalk wearing socks so as not to sully its perfect whiteness.
Next winter's collection maintained that rigour in the utterly precise tailoring of its dark, masculine wool jackets with matte horizontal swooshes on the hip. An often black or drably-dark collection of dresses with only subtle decorative detailing - a restrained ruffle...
Milan Fashion Week: Giorgio Armani autumn/winter 2012 - 2
Giorgio Armani autumn/winter 2012.
Milan Fashion Week: Giorgio Armani autumn/winter 2012...
