IT WAS LEFT TO Founder, Chairperson and Chief Visionary Officer of the Sungjoo Group and Chairperson of MCM, Sung-Joo Kim – affectionately known as Mrs Kim – to remind us of the relevance of this year’s Condé Nast International Luxury Conference being based in Seoul. A stalwart of the luxury community here, and throughout […]

  Zaha Hadid, sitting in Issey Miyake pleats that followed the flow of her ample figure, always had a twist of her fleshy lips – her signature smile – when I saw her in fashion’s front rows. Her death at age 65 seems an unfathomable loss for someone who was so far ahead of the […]

In stately St James’s, south of London’s Piccadilly, you can find indulgent arrays of bespoke suits, silk ties and elegant men’s socks laid out on polished wooden tables. But not, until now, has there been gender-uncertain menswear in wooden booths, or nestling in a barely lit basement area of a building originally created in 1911 for […]

  I HAVE WRITTEN not one word about the results of the enquiry by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) into the future of fashion shows. And I have not yet reviewed the Hermès show, which took place on Tuesday, 8th  March. There is a reason why I feel that these two stories […]

Kenzo: Colourful, Kinetic Clothes A Paris theatre was laid out with chairs in twists and turns, its vast walls decorated with digital projections of piano keys in a rainbow of colours. What was the meaning and the message at Kenzo, especially as the first sound of the show was the American National Anthem? Humberto Leon and his design […]

  Vivienne Westwood: (Partly) Passing The Torch   Andreas Kronthaler, the long-term husband of Vivienne Westwood, stood backstage working on the models’ outfits. Nothing novel about that. Except for the first time, Vivienne, forever famous for her “Punk goes Pop” creations, is passing the torch to Andreas. Well, part of it. Although Vivienne, 75 this year, was at […]

THE RICH, SWOONING voice of Elvis, the sweeping music of Rachmaninoff, and a womanly calm closed the international season in Paris. The collection of shapely clothes, rounded at the bosom and with ankle-deep hemlines, came from the most unlikely source: Miuccia Prada in her Miu Miu collection.     “Beauty in different ways – just […]

Does Louis Vuitton really have so much power that its designer thinks of the drowned city of Atlantis – and then, on show day, rain of Biblical proportions falls on Paris? Saving us from the downpour, the show space was made up of tent-like sculpted pods at the back of the LV art foundation in […]

WAS IT THE tinkling notes of Philip Glass played live on a grand piano that made Valentino’s dance of delicacy seem so exceptional?     As each model moved gracefully forward, back straight, body held in a dancer’s position wearing a simple, neutral-coloured dress, it seemed like the start of a story. These were surely […]

In  your fashion dreams… everybody is sitting front row on little gilded chairs; all the models’ feet in their hybrid lace-up boots are visible; the fabric of each outfit from pink tweed to blue denim is only an arm’s length away; and you can count the big, glossy pearls looped across the breasts.     […]