The agony and the ecstasy of seductive shoes   Oh, the ignominy and the embarrassment of it all: swaying on one leg like a drunken duck, hiding round the corner of the red-carpet entrance, pulling off the flats, stuffing them in a handbag and putting on those vertiginous heels. You see the shoe-changers lurking outside […]

Stern and Diane Kruger give butterflies an edge. For jewellery, I like the idea of nature hot and strong – especially during the burning summer months. Brazil is always hot – in colour and in spirit. So H Stern, the international jewellery house with roots in Rio, has made its new collection glow. Butterflies and […]

 From the haughty to the naughty. Bouncy skirts, tiny waists, floral prints, ballerina slippers – the city streets this summer have such a New Look. That was the famous phrase used when fashion bounced back with Christian Dior’s designs after the war years. Oh those fabulous Fifties! I don’t really want to re-live them because […]

Angular Sixties model Penelope Tree relates her life story, from David Bailey to Cambodian children. I like the idea of a game-changing outfit – something as essentially trivial as fashion altering the flow of an entire life. Penelope Tree, the angular image-maker of the Sixties – still with her sculpted cheeks and beanpole figure – sat […]

Port Eliot: a compelling festival of culture, fashion and families.  “I want to leave a memory like a wonderful stain in your head – something happens when you are on a festival site, you lose your inhibitions and there is a sense of community,” said Catherine St Germans as poets declared their words under woodland […]

A Roman artisan’s thoroughly modern Sixties experiments. How can a court shoe balance on a metal ring, instead of a heel? Or rest its height and strength on a glass bauble, sliced in half with an upturned triangle completing the balancing act? Just when you thought that nothing new could be done with a shoe, […]

Designers in Italy make decency the key It is almost a year since Silvio Berlusconi, who had been Italy’s long-serving prime minister, was sentenced for tax fraud and banned from public office. Since his attitude to women and his role as a television mogul had given Italian female presenters a hyped-up, over-sexed glamour, it is […]

I liked the hats – platforms of black veils, set off with a feather; tiny, cut-out flowers sprouting from an upturned cup shape; a garden of three-dimensional florals; or a puddle of mesh pinned with a single jewel. Most of all I loved the idea that each student at Rome’s Accademia di Costume e di Moda had […]

A piano, a double bass and a drummer – and what an audience for this musical trio led by Ukrainian Dimitri Naiditch. Firstly, there were the marble heads with noble faces, placed like sentinels in alcoves in the old stone walls. Then there were the artworks in the Palazzo Farnese – Rome’s greatest monument to […]

Jeremy Scott is doing Franco proud. I take it all back! When Jeremy Scott showed his first collection for Moschino, I was sniffy about his McDonald’s-meets-Sponge Bob collection. But after seeing the new Moschino store on Rome ‘s Via del Babuino, I am a convert. I smiled at the puns: Master Peace on a bag […]