Sarah Palin’s Unassertive Fashion Statement

she is doing quite well whent i comes down to fashion

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s style is exceptionally ordinary. Nothing about it connotes authority. No detail announces that she is in charge. And that’s what makes it so powerful.

The rimless glasses that dominate her face are as banal as modern spectacles come. The entire goal of their design is to have them go unnoticed. They are not meant to frame her features as much as they are crafted to avoid detracting from her big brown eyes.

Her clothes are unpretentious, but they are also unremarkable. They have nothing to do with Fashion. It’s fashion show season now, with designers unveiling their spring 2009 collections in New York, Milan and soon Paris. So far, none of them have suggested that the next new thing for the power-wielding woman is a straight black skirt with a boxy, oyster-colored blazer, which is what Palin wore when she accepted the vice-presidential nomination in St. Paul, Minn.

In the narrow confines of political style, the accepted rule is to dress in a manner that implies empathy for one’s constituency — so don’t wear anything too expensive — but also conveys authority. Palin has embraced the former and utterly ignored the latter. Nothing about her style jibes with the image of power. She does not dress like a boss lady, an Iron Lady or the devil who wore Prada.

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Antwerp’s Fashion Rebels Get Serious About Business

a really nice article!

For two decades, Belgian designers have been the fashion industry anti-conformists.

The Anne Demeulemeester boutique in Seoul(pictures:wsj.com)

Now, they’re emerging as business forces as well, trying to balance their dissident identities with the increasingly commercial needs of the fashion world.

Maison Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten are opening stores and entering into licensing agreements in order to boost their sales.

But in an effort to differentiate themselves from ubiquitous marketing powerhouse labels such as Gucci, Prada or Louis Vuitton, these Belgian brands are still trying to preserve their niche value. They’re opening stores off of main shopping streets, avoiding flashy logos and not using advertising. More significantly, their businesses are still focused on clothes rather than accessories, which are generally considered the more commercial, and profitable, end of the fashion industry.

“We can do all the things other brands do, but in a different way,” says Giovanni Pungetti, chief executive of Maison Martin Margiela, the largest of Belgium’s fashion houses, whose sales have multiplied five-fold over the past six years. “There are more intellectual consumers than we imagine, and they can understand an avant-garde product.”

Dan & Corina Lecca

One of the creations in Ann Demeulemeester’s fall/winter 2008 collection

The Belgian houses are capturing the consumer zeitgeist. Around the world, the highest-spending fashion buyers are tiring of flashy logos and omnipresent names. As the economy worsens, wealthy consumers are still spending — but moving towards less-ostentatious fashion, according to designers.

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Prada abandons summer fashion’s easy road

i really love Prada!

Miuccia Prada is often a step ahead of the pack, so it was no wonder that her latest collection had little to do with what has been going on the Milan runway: easy dressing in light and airy styles.

Her collection shown Tuesday was indeed light — she’s into flesh-baring these days — but certainly not easy to wear — or walk in. Several models tottered and fell on the fish-decorated runway, as they slipped out of their ultrahigh-heeled platform sandals strapped at the ankle. Many finished their catwalk shoes in hand.

The latest Prada collection is divided into categories from bra tops to dresses in python and fish prints, to variations of the old-fashioned night gown, to gilded evening wear. To underline the potpourri feel, all the models walked up and down the runway at the same time, creating the effect of a fashion kaleidoscope.

Prada topped a long list of shows on the second day of the Milan fashion week that runs through Friday, including Jil Sander, Bottega Veneta, and Moschino.

The only “easy” item in the new Prada collection is the latest Prada bag — a simple leather clutch.

The bra top, an item that could never have shown up at Prada a decade ago, is worn with an off-the-shoulder jacket and below-the-knee skirt with lingerie velvet detailing, all in shimmering silk. The favorite style for the silk reptile and seashore prints is an overly loose sheath. The nightie dresses come in various fabrics and are strictly off-white, like clothes stashed away in a trunk.

A series of wooly tops worn over a flared miniskirt brings the collection back to our days, only to lose it to the future in cosmic gilded gowns.

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Real women: the latest fashion

love that!

Muscular athletes in Stella McCartney’s sportswear line for Adidas, Christopher Kane’s blonde bombshells, models well into their thirties at Giles Deacon, a little ethnic diversity across the board … One could be forgiven for thinking that fashion had developed a conscience, if this week’s London collections were anything to go by.

The reasoning behind such a move is as likely to be commercial and aesthetic as it is ethical – fashion is famed for a ludicrously short attention span, after all – but the fact remains that designers are increasingly hiring a wider variety of models and it is likely that this will continue next week in Milan and straight after in Paris.

Not many people working outside the fashion industry will recognise the name Russell Marsh, but as the casting agent behind many of the world’s most high-profile advertising campaigns, glossy magazine editorials and catwalk shows, he is extremely influential.

On Wednesday he told The London Fashion Week Daily, a free news sheet funded by the British Fashion Council: “I like reality, especially in times like these. We need a wake-up call. I think it’s time people saw things for how they are. Grow old gracefully, I say.”

Given that, for years, Marsh has been at the forefront of a mindset decreeing that seeking out the youngest waifs in the world to model is the last word in high style, this seems like quite a radical about-turn. In particular, Marsh works for Prada, whose catwalk famously launches the careers of a fresh crop of models every season. Because of this, the more established names (and established can mean a model who has worked for six months or, if she’s lucky, two or three years) have become almost as disposable as the clothes they wear. But that, may be about to change.

“The models need to be athletic, confident, powerful,” Marsh continued, putting his money where his mouth is by casting Lara Stone – who is positively pneumatic by fashion standards – to open Christopher Kane’s show on Tuesday. “Lara is everything you want,” Marsh said. “She’s slightly bigger than the other girls and on the runway that really makes a statement.”

Marsh made a not entirely dissimilar “statement” when he cast Jourdan Dunn, an 18-year-old British-born model, for Prada’s previous show six months ago: she was the first black model employed by this designer since a young Naomi Campbell. Dunn has appeared in every heavyweight fashion and style magazine and stars in Topshop’s current advertising campaign. “I think the look of the models is definitely changing,” said Sarah Mower, a contributing editor to the American Vogue website style.com, reporting from London this week. “Fashion is always changing and people are just really bored by that characterless, Caucasian look. Neither is it demonstrable that it sells clothes any more.

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Fashion house Jil Sander being sold

I did not expect that

Fashion house Jil Sander AG, a maker of luxury ready-to-wear clothing for men and women, will be sold to a Japanese apparel group, the private equity firm that owns it said Monday.

In a statement, Change Capital Partners said it reached a deal to sell Jil Sander to Tokyo-based Onward Holdings Co. Ltd and its European subsidiary GIBO Co. SpA for €167 million (US$244.2 million).

The deal comes after Hamburg-based Jil Sander orchestrated a turnaround since 2005, with operating profit reaching €6.1 million in 2007 compared with a loss of €12.9 million in 2005 as it expanded its distribution networks in the U.S., Europe and Japan, and opened more stores.

Change Capital acquired Jil Sander in 2006 from Prada.

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Designers’ Defense Mechanism: Outrageous Fabrics

it´s all in the fabric :

In a world where H&M and Uniqlo and Zara and Top Shop (and a million other labels) are able to recreate runway trends at a fraction of the price with two-week turnaround times, what’s left for the high end designer? The Financial Times says it’s all in the fabric. Designers such as Prada and Balenciaga are now focusing heavily on textiles as a way to differentiate themselves from the mass of cheaply made but on-trend labels. Bringing back long forgotten craftsmanship and experimenting with revolutionary techniques, designers are taking a stand and trying desperately to save face.

Prints, texture and rich embellishment were other avenues of exploration. Dries Van Noten revisited a 1920s printing technique created by Swiss inventor Orbis Wirth. With producers Jakob Schlaepfer, the label created incredible marble-ised patterns using an elaborate system of printing layers of coloured wax from a cylinder on to wet fabric. Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga meanwhile (remember the chain-mail leggings from last year?) drew gasps for his collection of dresses covered in elaborate hand-painted landscapes and embellishments and varnished latex.

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Helping Madonna dress to thrill

somehow,she is still the queen of pop

As the ageless superstar begins a new tour, Hannah Betts talks to the woman behind her costumes

Madonna, who turned an unconvincing 50 at the weekend, is on the brink of a new tour – and inevitably it is generating a fashion frisson. For rather than opting for Country Casuals and elasticated waistbands, the woman who has enjoyed more incarnations than Proteus himself will, as ever, push the sartorial boundaries.

	Dressed to thrill: Madonna on tour

The Sticky & Sweet tour, which opens in Cardiff on Saturday, features an intriguing mix of gangsta pimp, dominatrix and gipsy costumes. And with looks designed by Givenchy’s Ricardo Tisci, shoes by Miu Miu, thigh-high boots custom-made by Stella McCartney and sundry items from Yves Saint Laurent and Roberto Cavalli, it leaves no fashion stone unturned, as these exclusive preview sketches show.

Although eyebrows are occasionally raised at the singer’s off-duty wardrobe – her penchant for grubby tracksuits and silk bloomers, not least – her stage attire provokes nothing but awe.

“Madonna was the first of her kind,” says Lorraine Candy, editor of Elle magazine. “Stars such as Debbie Harry, Patti Smith and Jane Birkin had distinct looks and their own natural styles. But Madonna really entered into the fashion world. Her relationship with Gaultier made her like the supermodels of the time. It’s never a catwalk look, it’s creating a whole new self, and exploiting cultural references to get this self talked about. In doing so, she transformed herself into a brand.”

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