Coco 2010

Everyone adores a Chanel jacket. You know, the soft tweed, the boxy cut, the braid or the chains, the patch pockets. Everyone adores them, they're the index garment for so many fashionistas ("Someday I'll have a Chanel jacket,"), they've inspired countless imitations and untold envy. Except in me. I find them boxy & frumpy and for me they cannot shake the dowager-having-a-tea-party image, no matter how they are worn. I know some folks swear it's the most versatile garment ever created, blah blah justifytheexpenditureonastatussymbol fishcakes blah. Pair it with jeans to dress it down, whatever. ::yawn::



As I have pointed out before, if you can make Penelope Cruz look dumpy, you've really accomplished something. (Not something you should be proud of, but something nonetheless.)

So. While those jackets are a complete turnoff to me (and no, you're not going to convince me, so don't even bother), I do love that quintessential Chanel vibe that harks back more to the work she did in the 20's and 30's than her late-career resurgence. I love the easy, slouchy knits she pioneered, and it's hard to go wrong with her favored black & white color scheme. I just like to mess it up a little.




Here's me from this weekend doing my version of Coco. It's my black bandage skirt worn with tights and some real-thing motorcycle boots that I bought oooooooh, let's see now, I honestly cannot remember how long ago. Maybe 15 years? (Motorcycle boots are cool. They just are. They always have been, they always will be, and believe me, if I drop a bottle of wine on my foot while I'm in these things I'm not even going to feel it. They? Are sturdy.) The t-shirt, which, yes, is a bit of self-conscious irony of which I do not usually approve in clothing, but I'm being ironic about my obsession with Paris, so I'll give myself a pass. 'Cause I love Paris. What really makes this look gel for me, though, is the cardigan. It's a tipped cashmere cardigan in exactly the right shape and length. Chanel loved a cardigan and goodness knows so do I, but it's very easy to slip into mumsy with them. Keeping it long & lean prevents the mumsy.

I was so happy in my tipped cardigan that I wanted to share the love, so I hit the Series of Tubes to find you some.

Black and white! Cleverly detailed! Fabulous!

Sometimes a little color does a body good.

Kinda perfect.

Sweet but not twee. A fine line to straddle.

Stripes! Gives it a more collegiate air, but livens things up.

Here's the gray one in a great pink.





Marni. Worth the investment, as is all Marni.

More stripes.

MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA LONG V_NECK CARDIGAN

This is why we love Margiela (click on the text for the link). They can take the most basic of garments and make it completely desirable with the smallest twist. Yes, the hemline is asymmetrical and yes, it's meant to be. I adore this.

You'd wear it for the rest of your life.

A teensy bit cutesy, but I'll let it slide.

Delicious blue, so perfect for spring.

Speaking of perfect... Wow. I really, really love this -- it's Exactly The Thing.

And here is Exactly The Thing in pink and gray, another classic color combination.

So that's my fashion "tip" (oh, I'm so sorry but you really didn't think you were going to escape it, did you?) for today. Now go forth and layer!

Photos: Style Spy, Fabsugar

Films for Fashionistas -- Teutonic Edition

I don't think there's any argument that Karl Lagerfeld is a hugely talented individual. (And if you have one to make, please feel free.) I for one wouldn't balk at the adjective "protean." He designs three separate fashion lines with very different sensibilities. He also has a full-fledged career as a fashion photographer, doing editorial work for magazines as well as a good chunk of the advertising for the lines he designs.

And I'm not even going to get into the DJ-ing and the art & architecture collaborations and whatnot. It's always something with Karl. So, yes, protean, and probably genius.

I also don't think there's any argument that he's... well, an odd duck. How odd? Eh. Maybe a little less so than I thought.

Last weekend I finally got around to watching this:

Lagerfeld Confidential

Considering its subject, this movie should have been more interesting. The promotional materials talk very proudly about how the filmmaker, Rodolphe Marconi, spent three years filming hundreds of hours of footage for this film and if that is in fact true, I'm afraid Mr. Marconi needs a new editor. I'm probably being unfair here, because one of the other things that gets said a lot in the press material is that Mr. Marconi wanted to approach a documentary in such a way that "broke all the rules" of documentary filmmaking. Production notes state that "He demonstrates a delicate and subtle touch by deconstructing the documentary style and the conventions of portraiture; he chooses not to be polemical; he will show no insolence or disrespect. He rejects the style of television investigations and concentrates on what he feels as an artist about the Lagerfeld legend." That's a valid artistic ambition and all (love the Pompous Artspeak couched in that wonderful, awkward, hilarious French-to-English Translate-ese), but the thing about a movie about Karl Lagerfeld is that probably most of your audience is going to be hard-core fashionistas and design geeks and we want a little more than a tone poem.






I want to know how the guy works. I want to know what his design process is like, what his studio environment is like, just how many design assistants does he have, how on earth does a person maintain the kind of artistic output that Lagerfeld is generating? I want to meet the people he works with and hear about what he's like as a boss, I want to see how things go from ideas to plans to garments on a hanger. I want the down & dirty details of how Lagerfeld makes fashion. I don't, honestly, care all that much about his relationship with his mother.

And there is a LOT of talk about his mother. She sounds fascinating, don't get me wrong, one of those classic beaux monstres that are almost a cliché of the Artist's Mother -- a kind of post-Weimar Sally Bowles meets Auntie Mame. If Lagerfeld is to be believed, he's been openly gay since he was pre-adolescent, and his family, especially his mother, were always perfectly okay with it, even blasé about it. Given that this would have been mid-1940's Germany, that seems remarkable. On the other hand, Lagerfeld does seem an extraordinarily singular personality, so I guess it stands to reason that he was raised by unusual people.

Still, the fact remains that I personally am much less interested in finding out what makes Karl tick than seeing how he ticks, and there's precious little of that in this film. We do get this delicious nugget, footage from what I think is a Chanel Couture show:








::sigh::

I'd sure like to see more stuff like that rather than what I presume are home movies of the child Karl frolicking in the surf somewhere. (Are they Karl? Where was the surf? Who took these? We're never told. That really annoys me. It's pretty to look at, but Style Spy wants information.)

My favorite section of the movie comes exactly midway through it. It's a short interlude of Lagerfeld talking while he sketches.

He works in marker and correction fluid, mostly, and it's fascinating to watch. He's an extremely sure-handed sketcher, the pictures takes only a few minutes to complete and there is no hesitation whatsoever in Lagerfeld's movements. In my ideal version of the Karl Lagerfeld movie, we see him make that sketch, and then we find out how that garment is realized and see it worn by someone with a pulse.

But this isn't my movie, it's Mr. Marconi's movie, and in his ideal Karl Lagerfeld movie it's more important to know what Karl thinks about love, and whether he likes living alone or with someone else.

I'm not not recommending this movie. It's lovely to look at and is more information about Lagerfeld than I had before, even if it wasn't nearly all the information I wanted. It will not be a wasted 90 minutes, I assure you. (Unlike, say, the first two episodes of "True Blood," which I also watched last weekend. That's two hours of my life I'm never going to get back.) I honestly liked Lagerfeld more after watching it than I did before, and that surprised me. Yes, odd duck for sure, but his oddity seems genuine and somehow gentler than I expected it to be. I didn't get the feeling from this movie that Lagerfeld is putting on a show -- he really is this off-kilter, singular, visionary guy who lives in his own little world, but he doesn't seem particularly impressed by himself. He does make a lot of pronouncements about Life and the Way Things Are, but hell, he's earned the right. Most of his life and its activities seem motivated above all by a strong desire not to be bored or complacent, and I understand and even admire that.

So. Style Spy rating? One stiletto up (out of a possible two). Have you seen this movie? Tell me what you thought about it. Or give it a watch and report back, I'd like to hear your opinions.


Images: chanel.com, karllagerfeld.com, fendi.com, all via models.com; lagerfeldconfidentiel.com

The Beauty of the Blank Page

The Chanel Haute Couture show hit the runway last week. It all looked like this.

Ummmmmm...

Yeah, well, that's pretty much all I have to say about it.


Oh, okay. It was really pretty, as couture usually is (except for Givenchy). Kaiser Karl declared that he was clearing the slate and his inspiration was a blank sheet of white paper. Which is a lovely idea, especially given the shrieks and cries of gloom and doom all around us these days. And it's not like the stuff was bad, certainly...

I mean, there's not a thing wrong with that skirt. Love the sharp tailoring and the inverted pleat -- it's classic, and if you're going to pay for one-of-a-kind, made-to-order Chanel couture, you want something you can wear for longer than four months. (Hell, if you're paying for Chanel ready-to-wear on sale at the Neiman Marcus outlet you want that. Chanel does not come cheap.)

There is something very appealing to me about the all white. I love white, am a stone sucker for a beautiful white dress. White is clean, and fresh, and after the dark of winter it is nice to see all that brightness. And then there is the "blank page" aspect of it. Despite the tough times that we're living through, there seems to be a feeling of starting anew right now, of buckling down and putting our backs into it and trying to get things revved up again and going in a new direction. Maybe it's only here in America, but that very over-used word "hope" has taken on a particular resonance lately. So the white seems appropriate in that way -- a symbol of newness and re-birth and virginal freshness. It's just that the clothes themselves didn't really echo that for me -- they were all fairly predictable, although completely beautiful.


Pretty much the first half of the show was little white suits or variations on little white suits or little white dresses. All were beautiful, all have the amazing detailing you expect from a couture show (especially Chanel couture, given that Chanel now owns a few of the specialty needlework houses like Lesage).

Things got a little fancier as the show proceeded -- the suits morphed into evening looks.

One of the most wonderful things aboutthe show were these astonishing paper hats and garlands and tiaras, created by a Japanes hairdresser named Kamo.

Stupendous. Really, really breathtaking.

The show wasn't completely white -- eventually it moved into some black and white

(Every stitch of that embroidery and every single one of those sequins -- hand-sewn. Astonishing.)

and even a few all-black pieces

If you're going to do the LBD thing, that is the way to do it. Those? Are some classy sequins.

My favorite thing of the whole show was this little number

That makes me sigh deeply. Oh, my flat-chested sisters -- we all need marvelous flowery lace bustiers for this summer, don't you think? It's an absolute little folly of a garment, and just perfectly beautiful. I'm going to sigh over this for ages.

So, yeah. Lovely things from Chanel. Lots of lovely things, actually -- there were 66 looks that marched down that runway. (Sixty-six!! Chiuri & Piccioli over at Valentino only did 39, and there's two of them!) That is a LOT of designing from the protean Herr Lagerfeld, especially considering that ready-to-wear is right around the corner and not only does he have Chanel to contend with, but Fendi and his namesake lines as well. The man is a machine. Someday, when Karl Lagerfeld has exited to that great fitting room in the sky, there is going to be a tell-all book by some disgruntled design assistant that I am really going to want to get my hands on. Until then...

Hey, if this guy were your boss, would you wanna cross him?


Photos: style.com

Shopportunity Extraordinaire

Good googly-moogly...

Tribute to Chanel Vintage Sale on YOOX.COM

Now this, my friends, is what Wish Lists are made of. The French phrase for window shopping is "lécher les vitrines," which translates to "licking the windows." Please try to keep your tongues off your monitors when exploring this collection.

Photo: yoox.com

Things I Didn't Know I Needed

Okay, I've been going through the Couture collections and it's been brought to my attention (ahem) that there are a few items out there that Style Spy is desperately in need of for her wardrobe this fall. All I can say is, thank god for fashion journalism, because otherwise I would never have known I needed these things. (A narrow escape, that!)

#1: GINORMOUS beaded necklaces:

(Both from Christian Lacroix)

Especially the second picture -- the glass or pearly ones. I really love a big, statement-y piece of jewelry, as I think I've mentioned before. Typically, I only do one at a time, which is a more real world-friendly way of wearing them, I think. But the magic of a good piece of important jewelry is that it snazzes up the most basic outfit & turns it into something wonderful. I'm imagining that oversized pearl necklace with a black cashmere turtleneck and a black leather skirt, along with black suede boots and some sort of great long jacket -- my hot pink velvet one, maybe. I can't resist (most of the time) a bit of well-chosen whimsy in an accessory or garment, and there's something a little Through the Looking Glass about the enormous scale of these necklaces that I'm completely charmed by.

(Important note: If you're petite, do not try this at home. I'm 5'6". If you're much shorter than that, these things are going to overwhelm you. Go with something that has the same idea but on a smaller scale.)

#2 Fabulous over-the-knee boots (all of these are from Chanel):



Ohhhhhh, I just love the way these look.


How's that for a way to sex up a tweed suit?

If you look closely, you can see that these aren't boots, they're actually spats over shoes.



Look! Crazy-gorgeous jeweled fabric ones!!! Oh, I could faint!

KL's been working this over-the-knee boot thing for a few collections now, and I've yet to get tired of it. It does make for a wonderfully long lean legline. Which, of course, is the source of the main problem about this look, at least for me. I have very-well-developed calves and have trouble as it is finding boots that zip over them. Factor my even more generous lower thighs into the equation and I may be talking about a complete pipe dream. But dream I will, because I love this look.

Speaking of gorgeous jeweled things, apparently I need some glittery, gem-encrusted sunglasses:

(Chanel)

These are so very, very not me and yet I'm completely in love with them.

#4: A skirt made of feathers:

(Valentino)

(Givenchy -- I think this is actually made of something like Mongolian lamb, but it reads like feathers)

I know this is going to give a lot of people pause, but I just love the way it looks.

(More Valentino -- how could anyone not love this???)

I'm also a big fan of skirts made of things like tulle & whatnot -- I really love the tutu effect. And the feathers (technically marabou -- the soft, fluffy bits that feather boas are made from) flutter so delicately -- I adore clothes that have movement in them. I already have a skirt that's made of shredded tulle and paillettes that has a similar effect to this one, although not nearly as good:

(Prada)

I've had a sneaking suspicion that this was something I was going to fall in love with since I saw that, and it was confirmed when I saw Miuccia Prada at the Costume Institute event:


I know a lot of people hated this, but I loved it. I don't think this is actually feathers, I think it's plastic strips, but you get the idea. Why do I love it? Because it's fun, because it's whimsical, because it's almost fairy-princessy.

(Givenchy -- This one, however, is full-on Swan Lake and may be a bit much.)

If you can't do the full feather, how about just a little:

(Valentino)

I defy any woman to put on that dress and not feel like the Prettiest. Girl. In the World. Oh, that honestly makes me a little week in the knees.

One more thing I need and then I'll stop (for today) -- these booties:

(Christian Lacroix)

I don't really have to explain why, do I? I just... neeeeeeeed them. Because they're wonderful.

Stay tuned -- more fabulosity coming soon! Did you see anything at the couture shows you can't live without? Tell me all about it!

Photos: Elle.com, Style.com