THE WEEK IN FASHION: DECEMBER 10th to 14th

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

Just 11 days until Christmas and the fashion world is beginning to descend into festive silliness. However, there are several stories of note for us to catch up but before that we turn to in-depth analysis of Victoria Beckham shunning the Spices and the shocking new "megging" phenomenon...


It was supposed to be a mere premiere, the opening night of the latest instalment in the oeuvre of Judy Craymer. Yet it turned into a culturally significant moment as four members of the band formerly known as Spice Girls rocked up attempting to emulate the Girl Power they'd ignited nearly 15 years ago with glitter, botox, flesh on show and girly showing off. What was once so right (well, it was in my mind as a 9 year old) just became so wrong. That wrongness was only magnified when the fifth Spice, Posh a.k.a Victoria Beckham rocked up terribly late looking super chic in her white shirt and shrugged-on coat with her Burberry bedecked boys as companions. She eschewed the post-pop tragedy of joining in with the group posing and pouting of her fellow Spices and instead showed just how much she'd moved on and had created her own new brand of lady power. Lisa Armstong's take on the evening's significance is really spot on.

The latest big, searching debate in fashion is.... The Megging. Indeed, that is the Man Legging. It may seem an absurd notion to entertain right now, but stranger things have happened on Planet Fashion.  They could become the ultimate lazy boy move on from the tracksuit bottoms, much in the same way that leggings were for girls several years back. For further insight, read The Guardian's in-depth investigation. 

Working the Megging (image via telegraph.co.uk)

The AW13 NEWGEN recipients were announced this week. J.W Anderson and Simone Rocha get catwalk sponsorship while newcomers include a man whose does very classy footwear, Liam Fahy, and Paula Gerbase, whose androgynous tailored designs you can find out more about here.

Paula Gerbase designs

Lovely, luxurious Liam Fahy slippers

It's been yet another big week for Stella McCartney. Her brand was the most searched for on the internet this year, no wonder really considering every A-lister worth their salt has had a Stella turn on the red carpet not to mention the fact that every Team BG athlete was kitted out in McCartney kit for the games. To round off her phenomenal year, Stella held her traditional Christmas light switch-on at her Bruton Street store on Monday evening. The honour of switching on the festive display went to Vic Reeves and Paul Whitehouse who also sang to the assembled guests about being vegetarian.

Paul, Stella and Vic sport matching tweeds  (image via http://entertainment.topnewstoday.org)

Ok, so it's not strictly fashion- specific news but the ongoing difficulty of merging our Instagram and Twitter feeds is really to getting to those of us who want to show off lovely pictures of shoes/ handbags/ jewels etc. etc. The two social networking sites are having a number of disagreements which means that they have reduced their compatibility with one another. Find out the details here. And here's to a 2013 when we don't have to keep opening new tabs to see the latest pictures of people's latest fashion finds. Talk about #firstworldproblems.

We're missing out on gems like this thanks to the Instagram/ Twitter feud. Image via Tommy Ton 

Congratulations to Sarah Burton who picked up her OBE at Buckingham Palace yesterday. Burton is due to give birth to twins in February so obviously this makes a lovely story about her being a prine candidate to outfit Duchess Kate for her own pregnancy. Sarah did a lovely job on herself yesterday, going for a gold embroidered coat and simple black dress. Also at the palace was April Ashley who I have coincidentally been learning about in the book I'm reading, The Last Curtsey. Ashley was one of the first transexuals and has had a quite incredible life. She's now been awarded the MBE for her services to transgender relations.

April Ashley and Sarah Burton collect their honours at the palace (images via daily mail and style.com)

Spring/ Summer '13 is really feeling like it's getting underway, especially as the Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs campaigns have now been released. Of course, Ruby Jean Wilson stars in all the optical illusion imagery.

Images via WWD.com and Fashionologie.com

i-D's interview with Sarah Mower is inspiring; if you've ever had so much as a passing thought about a career in fashion then you will find a wealth of advice and very refreshing reality check right here. This one of the best wise quotes-

"You only get anywhere if you have to write – if you actually have to put something down on paper. If you’re driven. You have to be self-critical and write things over and over again, and redo it and redo it. It can take me three hours to write the first sentence."

Sarah Mower with her assistant Hannah Lambert (image via i-donline.com)

If you can't possibly stand another gallery of trinkety fashion gift ideas, then may I refer you to Colin McDowell's edit of the best fashion books to put on your Christmas list this year.

W: The First 40 Years is one of Mr McDowell's recommendations (image via highsnobette.com)

To round off our pre-Christmas Week in Fashion, we bring you two of our favourite celeb outifts of the week.

My long term girl crush on Kirsten Dunst has been renewed after she wore one of Dior's SS13 fabulously simple and chic navy jackets with the metallic, space heels. Meanwhile, Kanye West went for a leather Givenchy kilt when he performed at a Hurricane Sandy fundraiser on Wednesday. The high fashion piece has divided opinion and now has its very own Twitter account, we like it. Happy Weekends everyone!

Kirsten Dunst in Dior (image via stylite.com)

Kanye's Givenchy kilt

PORT ELIOT: A FASHION DOLL'S TEA PARTY HOSTED BY SARAH MOWER

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

Rare is the festival where there is a corner so civilised that it is worthy to play host to the treasured childhood dolls of fashion's great and good. Port Eliot house is nestled at the bottom of the valley where the festival takes place and is open throughout to offer festival goers an antedote to tent and field based activities.  Thus, its Dining Room was the ideal setting for an auspicious gathering of Barbies, Sindys, Kens and traditional dolls owned and much loved by the likes of Viktor&Rolf, Simone Rocha and Lady Amanda Harlech. There are few with the cachet to persuade designers and fashion luminaries to allow their treasured possessions to go on a little trip to the country but luckily Sarah Mower, who came up with the whole idea and is the festival's fashion curator, and LOVE magazine editor Alex Fury were on hand to prise the dolls from their owners' hands for a few days of tea partying. 

It seems almost obvious that a fashion designer might begin their career making clothes for dolls. After all, our childhood toys are what we use to act out our fantasies of adulthood, giving them the lives and looks which we on some level aspire to- I remember that I would ensure all my dolls had nicely plaited hair and pretty party dresses before lining them up in neat rows in my bed to be taught by me in the role of teacher or to go on imaginary trips to the zoo (my brother's farmyard animal collection) and model in fashion shows. For an aspiring designer, the doll is an ideal canvas to begin on- take Erdem Moralioglu who was "violently jealous" of his twin Sara's Skipper Barbie, which had "a flatter chest and bigger shoulders" than the Barbie Bride Sara previously had. Erdem kidnapped Skipper Barbie whilst his sister was at Brownies and "got hold of this cheap-y blue polyester , and fashioned a circle skirt from it and put it over her head", he then got his Mum to help him make a strapless bustier- "very Spring/Summer". Whether that has anything to do with the fact that he's now a very successful fashion designer is anyone's guess.

The" cheap polyester" dress which Erdem made when he was five, and a dress
 from his AW12 collection in Barbie size.  

Many of the stories which Sarah, Alex and their team of curators (Jess Dubeck and Ben Evans) unearthed as they collected designers' dolls were far more extraordinary than them simply being childhood toys. In fact, this tea party was such an insight that I reckon the V&A would be mad not to hound Sarah and Alex until they agreed to host the same tea party, or even an expanded version, as an exhibition in the capital so that even more people could realise that the power of the doll is far more than a mere plaything. These are some of my favourite stories....

CHRISTOPHER KANE

The line-up of Chris Kane Barbies is a mini retrospective of his work to date. That's because a member of Chris's team recreates a look from each season in Barbie form as a record of the collection. They do it rather speedily too because Resort '13 already has its own outfit (far left). 

ALBER ELBAZ

It was Alber Elbaz's story which sparked Sarah's idea to host a Fashion Doll's Tea party. And it doesn't even involve dolls but a distinct lack thereof. Elbaz's family were too poor to afford toys for him and so he took the ingenious approach of dressing the figures on the family's chess board. Elbaz describes how he would "use my Father's silver cigarette paper, and use flowers and sequins, and stick hair on their heads with a piece of chewing gum". Decades later, Elbaz has an endless supply of real-life dolls in the form of Lanvin customers and models but has also created the Miss Lanvin dolls which perhaps go some way to making up for his doll-free childhood. The chess set which appeared at the tea party is one he recreated especially for Port Eliot. The process made Elbaz reflect on his chess piece dressing and he remarks in the tea party notes "It made me think: maybe the best creativity comes out of lacking resources". I think it also shows that when something is innate- like his desire to dress and design- there will always be a way around it.

JASON WU

Jason Wu's doll connection is probably the strongest of them all and he probably wouldn't be where he is today if it weren't for his love of doll dressing. He describes how "at the age of sixteen, while at boarding school in Connecticut, I decided to call the president of Integrity toys offering them my sketches, astonishingly they offered me a job designing for their fashion dolls. A year later, I was named Creative Director, then partner. Both positions I still hold today and am extremely proud of". In fact, Wu has financed his label through the money he makes designing for Integrity, meaning that without dolly fashion, he may not be doing real lady fashion now. 

SARAH BURTON AT ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

A doll version of a piece from Lee McQueen's final, posthumous collection

The dolls sent by McQueen's Sarah Burton do not have so much of a childhood resonance but represent a key stage in house's design process which began with the Plato's Atlantis collection of SS10. Each season, McQueen's famously tailored and complex shapes are engineered in doll form before being scaled up when perfect to human size. This reminded of the way that Vionnet would do all her groundwork on mini mannequins. It's not a practise unique to Burton and her team, but the dolls looked like works of art in their own right, especially as the paper dresses they have were printed with the patterns which would eventually make up the final dress. 

Lulu Kennedy's rabbits, Paul and Amanda, would be entertained by Lulu and her little brother dressed as pirates or gypsies for hours on end.

Giles Deacon sent dolls he made, dressed in miniature versions of dresses from his AW12 collection...

Simone Rocha's doll attends the tea party, complete with scars from being thrown down banisters by her loving owner.

Tallulah Harlech's Barbie with her Mother Lady Amanda's dolls

Sarah Mower at one of the first doll's parties she curated 

With such a prestigious group of dollies in attendance, this had to be a truly spectacular party. So set designer Michael Howells, who also curated the flower show at the festival and has decorated the house's chandeliers with feathers and dried flowers, scattered sweeties amid sets of doll's china to create the perfect backdrop for proceedings. The pièce de résistance was the doll's house which Sarah Mower spotted in the window of the Trinity Hospice charity shop in Kensington.

Sarah sent us this photo of (left to right) Hannah Lambert (her assistant),
Jingle-Jangle James, Meggie and designer Louise Gray beside the main table at the tea party

And Sarah couldn't get away with not inviting her very own doll. She sits, dressed in a paisley dress and knitted knickers made by Sarah's fashion loving grandmother, Maisie- the doll is named after her.  Maisie sits centre stage with Tammy Kane's (sister and business partner of Christopher) doll who is called Toni Bonnie Bella- Tammy has recently had a baby called Bonnie, perhaps named after the doll?

PORT ELIOT: A FESTIVAL LIKE NO OTHER

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

You might have heard about Port Eliot, the festival which takes place in a nook of Cornwall valley round the grounds of Port Eliot house, just beside the village of St Germans. The one which creates an exodus of London's creative and media community. The one which is really inspiring and beautiful. But until you've actually experienced Port Eliot- like I did this weekend- it's hard to understand exactly what is so special about it. It is a festival like no other but definitely the absolute definition of festival. Not only are there familiar faces around every corner, from Christopher Biggins riding about on a flower bedecked golf buggy to Dominic West chilling by the river but there is also something going on at almost every moment of the day from the early morning wild swimming and yoga sessions to 3am guilty pleasures DJ sets. The frustrating thing is, you can't do it all. 

My weekend included, but was not limited to,  dancing to a ceilidh band, a trip to the circus, cabaret Britney Spears, bhangra, gypsy jazz performers dressed as Elvis, dresses inspired by interiors, flower arranging, a folk band who gave their audience pop corn and crisps and encouraged us to make paper planes, history lessons and existential thinking thanks to a 20s jazz, Gypsy brass, English Folk and Trinidadian Calypso inspired fivesome. There was so much more it COULD have included had we got up earlier and been in more of a military mindset. There were so many workshops going on which I'd have loved to have done, such as Anthropologie's silk printing and ceramics, but most of them involved arriving at 9am to register which is a difficult feat to accomplish after a night of gin drinking and dancing.

It's not just the schedule which makes Port Eliot. The house- a proper example of decaying but beautiful aristocratic living- was open to view for parts of the day during the festival. Little touches like the Macbook left open atop an antique desk and pictures of the St Germans' much loved whippet Roo made it a million times more real than your usual stately home visit. If you needed a quieter moment, or a nice spot to sit with a drink then there were the vast and oh-so English river banks and rolling fields. A final West Country tip, we popped into the Thermae Bath Spa en route to Port Eliot for some pre-festival pampering and it was brilliant- a great way to get a spa experience at a rather reasonable £25 for two hours of steaming in variously aroma-ed rooms and bathing in the thermal rooftop pool. Bliss. Sadly, the festival is taking a break next year but ink it into your 2013 diary right now. 

Here's a tumble of my Port Eliot scrapbook....

The view from our tent- no luxury yurts or winnebagos for this Fash Junior

A grandly dressed tent

Murals inside Port Eliot house

 In the Wardrobe Department where the likes of Louise Gray, Fred Butler and Piers Atkinson were on hand all weekend to provide dressing up inspiration.

Milliner Stephen Jones sketches hair designs...

And Bumble and Bumble bring them to life.

Mary Katrantzou was there to speak with Love magazine's Alex Fury about her career to date, her unique aesthetic and the triptych of dresses which she created after a visit to Port Eliot house with Sarah Mower.

Sarah Mower (in Katrantzou jacket), Alex Fury (in Katrantzou trousers), Mary Katrantzou and Port Eliot's organiser, Cathy St Germans. They are posing with three of the four Warren sisters (Octavia, Aggy, Imogen and Bea) who modelled some of Mary's dresses during the talk.

Mary's triptych of dresses hanging inside Port Eliot house

The estate has a beautiful orangery which ousted the festival's Michael Howells curated flower show. Entrants were asked to celebrate the Jubilee and/or the Olympics...

 The main Park Stage where plenty of evening action took place...

Mobile tea dancing- a man with a car and a boom box travelling around the site hosting mini tea dances. The One Minute Disco was also hugely popular and by Sunday people were running towards it as they saw the van coming to blast out a tune for 60 seconds at a time all around the festival site.

 

 Silk printing and plate decorating in the Anthropolgie tent...

A word of warning, there are children everywhere at Port Eliot. If you're adverse to their presence at festivals, this one's not for you. Many of them were to be found rolling in the mud baths which appeared at low tide...