London Fashion Week round-up (Days 1 and 2)

So fashion week kicked off on Friday and if you follow me on Twitter, you'll have noticed that I've been out and about going fashion crazy. Apologies to Twitter friends (and real life friends) who have no interest in fashion. I promise it will be all over soon.

Good start to Friday with Paul Costelloe - which I didn't like much at the time [you can watch it here if you like]. I didn't take any pictures at the show] and thought it was a bit 80s glamazon meets Little House on the Prairie with some Victoriana thrown in for good measure. But I loved the latex legwarmers and the bouffant hair and after watching the Caroline Charles show later that morning, reassessed my opinion of Costelloe in hindsight.

The best shows I saw on Friday were the David Koma off-schedule show for Vauxhall Fashion Scout and the BodyAMR presentation both in the magnificent Freemason's Hall on Great Queen Street. The BFC tent is great, but it's really interesting to see shows in random locations. It's also good to see off-schedule shows get spoiled a bit with spectacular venues. A few year's ago London used to be pretty scruffy: showing in car parks and what not - nowhere near the glamour of couture shows in the Grand Palais of Paris - but with On�Off and VFS showing in Freemason's, Julien MacDonald showing in Whitehall and Vivienne Westwood showing in the Royal Courts of Justice, seems like LFW is finally waking up to the possibilities of London's built environment.

Much hyped David Koma came out with a beautiful show. All super body con and very geometric, with cut out leather and wool in zig-zag patterns stretching across the body. He wasn't as hyper-futuristic as his earlier collection, which was nice as it's always good to see dresses you'd actually *wear* at fashion week. I loved the bizarre silver and gold zip fasteners (I think that's what they were) used to create a more three dimensional feel to some of the dresses - exaggerating the silhouette without going crazy.

After Koma, I went upstairs to the BodyAMR presentation. I've been a fan of this label since I picked up one of his dresses last year - a gorgeous, hooded, black chiffon dream. I'm not crazy about everything produced under the BodyAMR label, but there are some absolute knockouts. This collection was all desert-dwelling space-age princess clothes and the venue was awesome - upstairs in the Freemason's Hall - the models going through these stunningly intricate carved gates to get to the press pack at the end of the runway. The models all looked incredible - in fact most of the models I've seen this year have looked great - really healthy and glowing. A nice change from some years...










The funniest thing was that I was sitting behind this girl with a really cute hat on. I snapped a cheeky pic and two seconds later the papps went haywire. Turned out she was Olivia Inge - mega famous model. She seemed pretty good-humoured when we admitted we had no idea who she was. Nice girl.


Olivia Inge at BodyAMR

Saturday


tribute wall to McQueen inside the main BFC tent


so much queuing!

Saturday morning I was supposed to be at the Charles Anastase show, but my ticket didn't arrive and I couldn't get in touch with the PR people so I had no idea where the show was and missed it. Whoops. Twitter people surprisingly unhelpful. Alas, Kinder Agguginig and Emilio de la Morena shows were brilliant and the eggs florentine and coffee at the rather wonderful Fleet River Bakery more than made up for missing Anastase.

Thought the Kinder collection was beautiful - check out the full collection here, but was quite amused when reading the press blurb before the show which indicated this season's inspiration was provided by Juliette Recamier - a darling of neoclassical France who was even painted by David. Impressive, thought I, though Kinder's collection turned out to be Napoleonic costume a la Sophia Coppola - half new romantic, half rock and roll.

The Emilio show was absolutely gorgeous - I 've been saying that about most of the shows - but it's true. Didn't take many pics either as the lighting in the BFC tent is really crap for point and shoot cameras, but here's a snap of the final walk. The show blurb said that the collection was inspired by planetary landscapes, but I thought that the McQueen-inspired techno prints in various shades of aqua/blue/teal/silver looked more like something a forward-thinking princess of Atlantis might wear on a Friday night out.

photo from Dazed Digital


final walk at Emilio


bloggers area in the main tent

I rocked up to the PPQ show at 7.30 only to wait outside for almost AN HOUR trying to get in to the tent. It was a total scrap heap of chaos and lots of angry well-dressed people. By the time I finally got into the tent, the music was just going on and they refused to let anyone else in...so I didn't get to see the show. Bad, bad PR people. Over allocating tickets and mis-managing admission is really unprofessional.

During the day I also managed to get a good look round the exhibition in Somerset House and saw some really great stuff. I especially loved Holly Fulton's inspired by an imaginary trip to NYC collection - which was all art deco prints and amazing accessories. This punched leather mini dress with perspex cut outs was really quite something.

photo from HollyFulton.com

I also really loved the outerwear by Christopher Raeburn, a British designer who makes beautiful coats and bomber jackets out of recycled military uniforms and parachutes. Such an imaginative and inventive way to reuse military surplus and as a big plus, the lady watching over the stand was super nice.


menswear jackets at Christopher Raeburn


above and below photos from Christopher Raeburn blog

Sunday
 

Mostly I lay on the couch at my friend's nursing the hangover from hell after an all-nighter on Saturday, even though I had tickets to quite a few shows. Whoops. I did get up to watch the CMS show on the live stream - which is an amazing development in the fashion world - way to innovate, London!

The CSM show is a LFW institution as many a now well-known designer (e.g. John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, and Giles Deacon) took their first steps toward fashion stardom in those grimy halls. There was an awful lot of architectural minimalism and not a lot of colour. Some good stuff, but the only thing that really rocked my world were these dresses by knitwear designer Shao-yen Chen. Marie Antoinette mini-dresses that look like they've been attacked by poodles and they're just awesome. No idea where I'd wear them, but I so would.

photos by Marcio Madeira/FirstView.com at Style.com




messing about being 'fashion-y'


waiting inside the tent

Note: all photos are my own unless otherwise noted.

but Larkin will never go out of fashion...

Nicole Farhi A/W '09 at the Royal Opera House

Even though London Fashion Week isn't technically over, my involvement in it is as the copy for my piece on LFW is just about finished (not half as crap as I thought it would be). I wouldn't say I enjoyed the shows, but it was interesting to see how they operated. It's funny because I think I'd enjoy them a lot more were they less laden with all the weird fashionista self-righteousness: I want to scream at these people 'you work for fashion magazines! you don't even make clothes, you sell them by wearing them! why so smug?' Via the forces of PR, the fashion world has created an aura of 'exclusivity' and I'll tell you why that aura is so essential for the success of the industry. If you knew just how shallow the people were, how uneventful the shows are, how scary the models look in real life, but especially how crap the parties are, you'd never ever shell out the big bucks for a pair of Prada shoes. Sure, you might still admire the man-hours involved in making an avant-garde McQueen dress, but it wouldn't be surrounded in a halo of celebrity-coveting desire if the 'fashion world' lost its lustrous lustre (tautology, I know).

If nothing else, I'm glad I went if only to strengthen existing beliefs. Yeah - cool, well-constructed clothes are fun, but when people start using designer labels (and all that they imply) to prop up an ailing sense of self, then the fashion, advertising, and PR people are doing their jobs too well.

On to more interesting things... Far more desirable, and strangely enough almost more difficult to obtain, were tickets to the great Josephine Hart's poetry evening at the British Library. A few of these evenings have been broadcast on Radio 4 and I heard a repeat broadcast one sunny afternoon last May (of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning) and have been trying to get tickets ever since. Hart is an Irish novelist, married to the other Saatchi (Maurice), and has brilliant connections in the acting world. The premise of her evenings is based on a simple idea: poetry is meant to be heard with the ear, not seen with the eye. She picks a different poet for each monthly reading and then selects a number of actors for their affinity to the selected poet's work. This month's poet was Philip Larkin and the readers were Charles Dance (best know as Mr Tulkinghorn in Bleak House) and Dominic West (apparently plays Jimmy McNulty in some show called the Wire). Hart is absolutely right about the necessity of hearing poetry and not reading it, and it is so much better to have actors performing the poems rather than the author's stilting and self-conscious reading. I've never been a huge Larkin fan and before the readings began I was secretly disappointed to have missed other, favoured poets, but the actors made the poems come alive in such an inspiring way, that you can't help but make immediate connections. I absolutely loved it and when I got home later that night I tried to book for March's reading (Wilde!!), but it was already sold out...

A little Larkin to leave you. I really liked this poem, read last night, called 'Dockery and Son':

'Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here now.'
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. 'And do
You keep in touch with-' Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
'Our version' of 'these incidents last night'?
I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In '43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much . . . How little . . . Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of . . . No, that's not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They're more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we've got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.