Mr Men shoes

I've always loved the chunkiness of the shoes the Mr Men wear.  The reliability of their brogues make them seem like a friendly uncle - even if they are round and red and shouting at the tops of their voices, or blue and grouchy, or breaking stuff left right and center.  They generally wear a solid shoe.

Grenson shoes have more than a touch of the Mr Man reliability about them. Hand-made and slightly eccentric with a solid sole and some exaggerated details they're dependable and timeless.

Very British stuff.

You say potatoes

For me John Galliano's arrival at Maison Margiela an unexpected move. I had heard he'd done some work (post-rehab and away from the media's glare) at Oscar de la Renta and it seemed fitting that perhaps he'd take over the house when the man himself retired (or passed on) but it didn't happen and suddenly Galliano, possibly one of the best known fashion designers in the world was designing for a house that had built its name through anonymity.

An image I saw in an article about pagan parties in Mexico caught my eye and brought to mind the image of the girl from the Maison Margiela Couture Autumn/Winter 2015 show. I hope Galliano is able to remain stable at Margiela. It's certainly not as giant as Dior (is this where Elbaz will move next, post Simons?) but very few brands are. 

I was captivated by the image of the blonde model in the sack cloth dress from the couture show. It's like Essence of Galliano right there. He is one of the few, McQueen also was in this realm, who's able to turn peasant cloth in to clothes fit for some ethereal princess. From the dirt to the stars. 

 

Gorillas in the missed

Not sure what to make of some pieces in the current Marni collection. Fur sleeves on tailored garments are lost on me.

I'm a huge fan of Marni, I love that it's a label for women, I love clothes that men don't generally understand or that don't obviously appeal to a basic instinct.

Who knows, perhaps these furry brachiams represent the primal power in women, perhaps they're just to keep us warm, perhaps this season they'll be a huge hit with the dudes.

A real lady

I wonder what it's like to be Victoria Beckham. She's my age I think, I clearly remember when the awful Spice Girls took over the world and you couldn't move for "girl power".  Then she met David Beckham and a different sort of power took shape.

I think she's probably good fun, I admire her work ethic and I don't care that she doesn't smile in photographs - I hate seeing any picture of myself these days so I can't imagine what it would be like to have a million shots of yourself out there for the great unwashed to make comments about online.

The real lady Easy V and team has done a pretty incredible job transforming her from Posh to polished, from pop-star to Post-pop toast of the fashion world.  The Spring 2016 collection is the most relaxed and confident to date suggesting the VB woman is possibly having fun getting dressed, enjoying her woman power and is comfortable in her own skin. I hope so. It's about time.

Where the water meets the sky

These haunting images were posted by Meagan Irene Abell - she found them in a box of negatives (you see, they're really ancient) in Richmond, Virginia and posted them to Facebook in the hope she might trace the women or the photographer. They're undated but to me the dresses and the hair suggest they were taken in the Fifties.

The gentle colours of their dresses reflected in the sky and water, the soft light and their gaze in to the wide unknown give them an ethereal quality. Just beautiful. Who are they and where are they now?

#‎FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives

Long Live McQueen

I tumbled in to an Alexander McQueen black hole on YouTube. What a talent. What a loss.

The internet sometimes feels like it's been around forever - you can find just about anything and everything on here - but it's been hard to find pre-internet fashion shows online. The shows weren't built for them, it was a stills-only world, with the focus on the clothes rather than the brand.

Watching them now they feel pretty amateur (McQueen was just starting out in the mid-90s so of course it was a lot more amateur than it very quickly became) - but his shows represent more than just him. They represent that very specific time and it's interesting to look at them now and use them as a guage for how very quickly the fashion world has changed and become such big business. The heels and the stakes are much much higher, the pressure and the demand greater.

It was a joy and a sorrow to finally watch this show, a show McQueen dedicated to his late friend Isabella Blow. It's a piece of art; heart-breaking, joyful, haunting and so so beautiful. I'm sorry his talent is gone.

 

Mike's back story

Here's a spot I recently worked on for Mike's Hard Lemonade. 

Directed by James Frost and shot by Mark Goellnicht (he also worked his steadycam magic on my new favourite movie MadMax: Fury Road).

Dior and I

I recently gave myself a time out and went to see the documentary Dior and I, directed by Frederic Tcheng. It's a very intimate piece of film-making. We arrive at the Dior offices at the same time as Raf Simons, just as he is introduced to the "petites mains", he doesn't speak fluent French and most of them don't know who he is.

Simons has eight weeks to pull off his first couture show for the house and needs this skilled and dedicated team to help him do so. There are tears, a bit of shouting, tensions run high (it's fashion, of course they do), there are some flowers, some more flowers, and in the end there's a truly beautiful collection.

I've known of Raf Simons since his seminal shows caused a stir with menswear editors and stylists and I knew he had a beautiful clean and modern aesthetic (he was an obvious fit for Jil Sander) but this documentary opens up his process (he doesn't sketch), shows him to be very human, there's something quite fragile about him and you're rooting for him to show that the decision to put him in charge of this French powerhouse was right. He does it in spades.

Chanel throughout the ages

I loved the colour palette at the Chanel couture. It had a twinge of Fifties pastels, sweet but in an "off" sort of way.

I also enjoyed the strong rounded shoulders; a bit Forties.

Midi skirt lengths suggested a nod to the Thirties.

The bare mid-riff probably better enjoyed by those in their Twenties.