Trends ss2010: take a bow

Bows seemed to be the finishing touch on many spring/summer outfits. They came in both extra small and very large variations.

The bows were often placed around the neck,  the waist or at the shoulders of an outfit. Blugirl, Luella Barteley and Moschino had many bows in their collections. The bows on Valentino’s dresses were perfection.

To complete a certain look designers often put some extra bows in the models’ hair (Erin Featherson, Luella Bartley) and even on their shoes (Kinder Aguggini). At the Louis Vuitton show small bows were placed on top of the big afros the models wore.
Marc Jacobs used colorful headbands with bows that vaguely resembled the bunny ears he designed for Louis Vuitton last year.

Bows came in silk, cotton, lace and disco-shiny material. There were well-formed stiffed bows and ribbons tied like a bow. Some of the bows looked as if they had just been torn off a birthday present.

Bows formed the perfect detail on many outfits. They gave it just a little bit extra and made several looks more elegant and feminine.

Tess van Daelen

Au revoir Christian !

This week, a French court approved a restructuring plan for bankrupt label Christian Lacroix that will reduce the house to a licensing operation. Only about a dozen of the roughly 100 employees will keep their jobs. The label’s problems culminated with the parties that expressed interest in buying the label but failed to produce financial guarantees in time to rescue it.

Experts say Lacroix focused too much on haute couture collections. Successful labels use couture nowadays as marketing efforts. No label sells enough couture clothes to justify it. Lacroix was notoriously insistent on maintaining its high-end approach to clothing. Under LVMH’s ownership, Lacroix made lower-priced Canal and Jeans lines. When the Falic group bought the label in 2005, they were quick to do away with those. Lacroix was happy because he didn’t want to be bothered with the more affordable things. But still, where were the Lacroix sunglasses? Perfumes? “It” bags? Sales of items like those account for the bulk of profits for luxury labels. Lacroix’s C’est La Vie fragrance never even took off. Fragrances are powerful profit drivers, but we shouldn’t forget fashion’s other highly potent force: divas. Look at Lady Gaga. She’s in Vogue, she was the first non-model to wear Alexander McQueen’s spring 2010 Alien shoes, and she was the highlight of New York Fashion Week and plenty of other things.
There should have been a diva out there for Lacroix to dress.

For me Lacroix was the beginning of my career as a journalist in fashion. I still remember my first fashionshow ever, Christian Haute Couture spring 1989 in hotel Intercontinental in Paris. It was breathtaking. Powerful, colorful, and very French joie de vivre. But times changed, as did women, fashion and the business.

So for old times sake: some highlights of past collections.

Jetty Ferwerda

Groupielove #1

Balmain is the hottest label in town. For spring  Christophe Decarnin brought out another whammy of a no-brainer blockbuster: disco cavewoman goes to the front. His army of sizzling, sleek-limbed supergirls strode out with huge-shouldered, metal-epauletted military tailcoats. Their T-shirts were tattered; bullet belts were slung around artfully “destroyed,” stained, and holed jeans or, yet more sensationally, minute, hypersexed, raggedy suede and leather loincloths (the term “skirt” hardly covers it). No wonder the models had fun, these clothes were made to suit their bodies. Daria Werbowy was exclusively booked to do the show.

Trends ss2010: endless variations

Since a white blouse is one of the most popular basic items, we spotted a lot of these in almost each summer collection. They appeared in three main versions: blouses that looked like jackets, tight waisted blouses and loose-fitting men’s shirts.

New details that were added to these blouses were rolled up sleeves, puff sleeves and collars decorated with ruffles and extra layers. Although designer Gianfranco Ferré has always been honoured for his multiple variations of the white blouse, I’ll bet he couldn’t come up with all the versions we saw for summer 2010.

The models wore their feminine blouses with ruffles and puff sleeves mostly in their pants or skirts (Moschino, Sophia Kokosalaki, Derek Lam, Max Mara), so the waist was accentuated. On the other hand, there were blouses that showed no bodyshape at all at the Junya Watanabe, Cacharel and Chloé fashion show.

There were a few outstanding white blouses. Stella McCartney designed an ultra-long, loose version. At the LoveSexMoney show there was a white blouse with an extremely big collar made of several layers of airy fabric. The white blouses at Girbaud looked like straightjackets. The best white blouse was shown by Aquilano & Rimondi. They made a super feminine white blouse with puff sleeves, large ruffles and ribbons… so classy.

Tess van Daelen

Trends ss2010: into the wild

We’ve seen the animal prints  for quite some time in fashion. Especially the leopard print was a major success in the past. This season we still saw some leopards at Giambattista Valli, Blugirl, Dolce & Gabbana and Paul Smith. Yet if you take a good look, you can see that the leopard print is diminishing and the reptiles are taking over.

Alexander McQueen’s collection was all about reptiles. Models dressed in colorful snake and python prints strutted down the runway. This had everything to do with the story behind this show, which was about the future ecological meltdown of the world and reptile-like creatures replacing mankind.

We also spotted light snake prints in the Pucci fashion show as well. They appeared at some short jackets. Kinder Aggugini used the snake prints in unrealistic light blue and pink. At the Iceberg fashion show the snakes were deep blue.

Other animals were spotted at Julian MacDonald, who designed a few fish dresses full of silver scales. Vivienne Tam showed a collection full of fantastic dresses that all had the print of a large butterfly on them. The colors of those butterflies worked beautifully.

Hopefully designers will continue getting their inspiration from nature. Nature has some extra reserves of great colors and patterns to create beautiful clothes with.

Tess van Daelen

Trends ss2010: strange cutouts

Were they short on fabric? Or did they think it would be nice to ventilate some dresses? What reason lays behind the strange cutouts in some designers’ dresses we don’t know. But it’s definitely a new trend.

We saw the strangest cutouts in diverse places. Above the armpit (Gucci, Kane), diagonally over the breast (Emporio Armani), around the stomach (Gaultier, Armani), above the breasts (Balmain, Gaultier, Elie Saab), under the breasts (Ungaro), between the breasts (Gucci), around the navel (Girbaud, Pucci, Alexander Wang), on the upperarms (Gucci), on the upper legs (Michael Kors, Viktor & Rolf) and around the waist (Erin Wasson, Laroche, McCartney).

At the Gucci show almost every dress had some small cuttings. Michael Kors’s dresses had cutouts that went around the model’s body, the fabric was held together by transparent plastic. Jean Paul Gaultier cut so much out of his t-shirts that they only existed of shreds of fabric. The bathing suits that we saw at the Pucci fashion show had splendid cutouts that gave them that little bit of extra sexyness.

Viktor & Rolf cut their hundreds of layers of tulle in a way the lower part of their dress looked like a piece of cheese. Unlike for the other dresses it didn’t add any sexyness, but it certainly made the dress stand out.

Tess van Daelen

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