French Girl Style – it’s the aesthetic that just won’t stop giving. And with the Paris Olympics mere hours away, you’d better buckle up, as it’s about to become even more omnipresent. The reason French Girl Style aka garconne style resonates is its timelessness, its realness, and its rooted-in-utility-ness. Oh, and something else really important – culture.
And who better to illustrate this point than Agnès B? (more…)
It’s 30 years since Marc Jacobs’ fateful Perry Ellis grunge collection, so a good time for one revival in particular. This autumn I’m excited for the return of the kilt, the old money staple that straddles childhood nostalgia and tradition (think school uniforms and the Queen off-duty) and pop culture subversion (70s punk, 90s grunge, Cher from Clueless).
This season, Burberry has cleverly revived it as a youthful house code in an effort to ramp up Daniel Lee’s modern Brit vision. (more…)
When did self-care become a dirty word? The concept originated in the late 60s by radical feminists wanting to empower women by teaching them to get to know their anatomies. But in recent years, ‘self-care’ has come to encompass the Goopification of beauty, aka a capitalist catch-all that couches healthy habits and ancestral rituals in spa language and posh packaging. My take on self-care is somewhere in the middle. Nice-to-have products (that don’t have to be expensive) and free DIY practices to maintain health and wellbeing rather than ‘optimising’. (more…)
“Every six months, when the season was changing, I took the train from my little hometown to Barcelona and spent a whole afternoon going from Armani to Versace to Donna Karan, all the fashion luxury stores, collecting that season’s paper footprint. I was 13 or 14 years old and carried around a backpack full of catalogues. As for the brands we didn’t have in Barcelona, such as Yohji Yamamoto, I would flick through magazines and go to the gutter, the brand credits: usually on the very last pages, I would discover the telephone number of this or that store. I would ring from the house telephone to Paris or Milan – God knows in what language, some kind of English I hope – and I would request these catalogues. Even though I was a child, they would send them to me.” (more…)
