Clare Vivier and Heather Taylor have perfected the art of hosting by dividing responsibilities, with Vivier focusing on wine and Taylor on flowers and dessert. Their friendship of 20 years has led to a seamless collaboration that enhances the dinner party experience.
Participating in London Fashion Week is not a luxury but a necessity for any emerging brand aiming to go global. It's your ticket to the world of international fashion. - Katie England, Creative Director of Topshop and curator of the New Generation program
The question of how fashion is archived - what enters the museum; what is deemed worthy of preservation; whose clothes are considered culturally significant enough to outlast the bodies that wore them - has long sat uneasily at the centre of fashion history itself. Institutions have tended to answer it, or ignore it, in much the same way: couture gowns under glass, luxury garments mounted on conservation-grade mannequins in blockbuster exhibitions - an implicit hierarchy of the designed over the worn, the authored over the anonymous.
Fifteen years after the death of Lee McQueen, the brand is struggling to maintain momentum. The founder is a hallowed name in the fashion industry, and one of the few modern designers to whose character and story the wider public feel a connection. But the generation who wore McQueen's original bumsters have aged out of shock-value fashion, and the name has less power over younger consumers.
That space wasn't some lavish backdrop to Saint Laurent's entertaining but, rather, a living, breathing collaborator in his creative enterprises. Yves Saint Laurent gets a Matisse, then makes a Matisse dress; Bergé buys Goya's 1791 Portrait de Luis María de Cistué y Martínez, and Saint Laurent translates that baby Spanish aristocrat's pink sash to a bowed 1983 evening gown.
The dress, conversely, is 80 years old, and it isn't his. It's by Pierre Balmain - Tron shows me a René Gruau illustration of the look where, with a platter hat, white fox stole and opera-length gloves, the look is borne back ceaselessly into the past. It's an illustration in a book titled The New French Style, of Balmain outfits with an essay by Alice B Toklas, the partner of Gertrude Stein.
When Regalia, 52, pushes the Ferrari out of a storage facility into the Monterey sunlight, the metallic paint ignites with a pale opalescent fire, shimmering in shades of honey and oxblood. Imagine a Ferrari-shaped pool filled with ancient brandy. The Lusso, designed by the famed Italian coachworks Pininfarina, is regarded as one of the loveliest of Ferrari's touring cars, but no Lusso ever left the factory with half the hand-rubbed luster this car has.
People have a lot of ideas of what Chanel is, or rather what it should be. One word that doesn't come up much, though, is rebellious - yet that's exactly what Chanel the woman was and what Chanel the house remains. Rather than rebellion, 'paradox' was the word used by Matthieu Blazy, Chanel's artistic director of fashion collections, backstage after his debut show for the maison in October.
Travelling for art can be incredibly virtuous and culturally rewarding, like collecting souvenirs for your eyes (and from the post card rail in the gift shop). Remembering to research what is on before I book flights is a lesson I learnt all too well after I missed the Metropolitan Museum's fashion exhibition in 2016 by one day. As a fashion obsessed 20 something, I did not take this well and have since improved my itinerary planning and exhibition calendar checking.
The end of the show did not mark the end of the trip. Back at the Le Grand Bellevue the group divided between fireside hot chocolates and the hotel's spa. The hotel's Le Grand Spa is over 3,000 square metres and has eight different types of saunas, several ice showers, foot baths and an outdoor bubble pool (named thus as it's bigger than your standard jacuzzi).
Speaking backstage before the show, Anderson, dressed in his signature faded Levi's jeans and a navy cashmere sweater, described the collection as another character study, explaining that this time he set out to explore the idea of a new aristocracy, questioning what it means today and what can it be? The-41-year old designer said when it came to the social hierarchy he wanted to ignore the aspect of money and instead home in on their eccentricity.