Cadre Noir by Helmut Newton, 1980 | Source: Osborne Samuel

NEW YORK, United States — I once began a fashion meeting at French Vogue in Paris with a question to the rest of the team: “Why do we take pictures of clothes?” Everyone just gave me that look and said “Debra!” I know it probably seemed crazy for a fashion editor to say this, but sometimes we need to ask ourselves the question and I think now is a great time to revisit this topic.

Franceline Prat, an editor at French Vogue and a mentor to so many of us, always reminds me that the most important work she did for the magazine was less often inspired by the clothes themselves than by the great stories that she and many of the forces in fashion’s creative ecosystem pulled directly from their own life experiences.

As Franceline said herself, “always remember the great characters you meet in your life, they will inspire you later on and you never know when.” Our own life stories will always be, for fashion, the strongest and most powerful reference of them all.

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NEW YORK, United States — From Jean-Paul Gaultier at Montreal’s Musée des Beaux Arts to Hussein Chalayan at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, this has been a year of high-profile fashion exhibitions. The grand daddy of all these shows is the Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Last week, I finally managed to catch the exhibit in its final days.

In total, 661,509 people passed through the exhibition, making Savage Beauty the most visited fashion exhibition in the museum’s history, putting it in the same league as the Treasures of Tutankhamun (1978) and Mona Lisa (1963). So high was the demand that the Met extended the exhibition’s run by week and stayed open until midnight on the final two days, releasing a statement explaining that this was the first time that the museum had ever kept its galleries open so late to accomodate the “extraordinary response”

But despite this “unprecedented interest” in Mr. McQueen’s body of work, museum officials said that Savage Beauty will not travel to any other museums because it is composed almost entirely of loan. What a shame.

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Chanel Couture A/W 2011 | Source: Ecouterre

LONDON, United Kingdom — Death and disgrace do not often darken the world of fashion. In the case of the first, a designer normally dies long after retirement and his demise is of only local interest. In the case of the second, it rarely happens and can usually be covered up by one means or another. But in the last eighteen months there have been two tragedies that can neither be covered up, nor ignored. They are, of course, the death by suicide of Alexander McQueen and the disgrace of John Galliano at Christian Dior.

Their effect, traumatic enough when the events occurred, have ramifications not merely for London and Paris, but for the whole structure of the international fashion world. And the questions they raise must be answered.

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Burberry A/W 2011 Campaign | Source: Burberry

LONDON, United Kingdom — Fourteen years ago, Burberry was all but put out to pasture, suffering from a dusty image and its logo being pasted on cake tins, doilies and aprons. Rose-Marie Bravo was put in the saddle and took Burberry for a ride down Chav lane to the gates of the luxury racecourse. Despite doing a great job in fixing Burberry over her nine-year tenure, setting the foundations for her successor and consistently beating market expectations, the jury was still out as to whether Burberry could ever become a thoroughbred luxury brand.

The next phase of growth was spearheaded by Angela Ahrendts, who joined Burberry in 2006. Since her arrival Burberry has galloped to the top of the luxury valuation leaderboard, more than doubling in turnover and market capitalisation to £1.5 billion and £5.8 billion respectively, twice the rate of growth of LVMH’s turnover and market value over the same period.

The recent results announcement was very strong with revenue growth of 27 percent and operating profit increasing 37 percent. However, initial market reaction was muted by the company’s warning that more investment was required in its flagships and that margin growth would suffer in the short term as a result.

In this article we will examine how far the brand has come, where the potential for growth lies and what pitfalls it may encounter along the way.

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London skyline | Source: Vemma on Flickr

LONDON, United Kingdom — Design is generally about function leading form in a problem-solving exercise that almost always starts with a sense of discontent with what is generally available and a strong determination to make it better and even change radically a template that might have been used for many years. The result, in the hands of the right practitioner, is a completely new solution to the problem, a solution that works for the times, and makes previous thinking irrelevant.

In most design situations there is certainly some looking back and learning from the past — what modern architect would be modern if he didn’t know of the great masters from Palladio to Le Corbusier? But the knowledge is there only to inform new thinking, with no attempt to re-present old ideas as something new in design disciplines.

With the exception of cheap mass housing that works on the principle that deep in our psyches lies a desire to live in something as near to an eighteenth century country cottage as modern technology can create, fashion stands alone in its desire to put form before function and revisit earlier and often quite recent dress eras, in an almost endless series of revivals.

In an increasingly desperate attempt to hide the banality of current fashion thinking, some clueless designers, drafted in to revive old-established labels, actually sell exact copies of the original maestro’s most successful creations from the past, which is about as futile as car kits that clothe a modern machine in a pastiche of a roadster of 70 years ago. Pathetic in car kit sellers; disgraceful in highly paid and ludicrously over-valued fashion stars

Why does all this happen? … Continue Reading