Jewellery

From FT.com June 14, 2013

Just as pre-fall appears in stores, pre-spring (aka resort) appears on runways. But how to make sense of a season that spans from November through to May? The answer for a number of designers: skin. Sometimes yours, sometimes an animal’s, sometimes something that looks like an animal’s. Read more

Posted in Accessories, Beauty, Fashion, Jewellery, Luxury goods, Menswear, Womenswear |
From FT.com June 7, 2013

Last weekend I experienced an unfamiliar clothing trauma (I know, I shouldn’t admit it). Coming from New York, where it was muggy and 32C, to Europe, where it was 13C and rainy, via a stop in London to see the Chime for Change concert, with two black-tie events and a conference on the menu, I was paralysed by the question of what to wear. Having decided June qualified as summer, and having packed away my winter wardrobe, I simply couldn’t get my head around what I knew I needed to bring, which involved the words “cashmere” and “knit”. It felt philosophically wrong.

Generally, as I have written before, I have a wardrobe stocked with clothing bought to solve specific problems (black-tie work events, where you need to be fancy but appropriately covered; pre-work meetings with your children’s teachers, where it’s better not to be too glossy) but the transformation of climate into a fungible concept has proved difficult. Having been trained to think in a spring/summer vs autumn/winter dialectic, I find it difficult to accept a new philosophy. Even though, to paraphrase Francis Fukuyama, it increasingly seems the End of Seasons is nigh. Read more

Posted in Accessories, Beauty, Fashion, Jewellery, Luxury goods |
From FT.com June 7, 2013

Dries Van Noten is one of the world’s most successful independent designers. An original member of the Antwerp Six, the group of Belgians who transformed the city into a locus of avant-garde fashion in the mid-1980s, he is sold at more than 500 outlets worldwide, and has won the international award of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA).

Elizabeth Peyton is an American artist known for her stylised figurative portraits of well-known people; her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou in Paris, and the Kunstmuseum in Basel. The two have been friends since 2009. Read more

Posted in Accessories, Beauty, Fashion, Jewellery, Luxury goods, Ready-to-wear |

Richemont’s Johan Rupert redefines luxury as a year off

May 16, 2013 3:26 pm by Vanessa Friedman

The announcement that came along with Richemont’s 2012 annual results this morning that chairman Johan Rupert (left), is taking a year off from running the world’s second biggest luxury company starting this September is by far, to me at least, the most interesting part of the statement. For a man who has built the largest watch and jewellery Group to take a year off at age 62 – which, let’s face is not so old — at a time when the exponential growth trajectory of the luxury sector has started to slow is a little, well, surprising. And leads to all sorts of interesting speculation.

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Posted in Fashion, Financial results, Jewellery, Luxury goods |

Moda Operandi’s Met Ball click’n'pay red carpet

April 29, 2013 7:12 pm by Elizabeth Paton

Moda Operandi’s announcement this morning that it would be selling designer gowns seen on celebrities and society mavens direct from next week’s New York Met Ball has really lifted the veil on the extent of the commercialisation of the 21st century red carpet.

The three-year-old company, which made its name offering high fashion looks straight from the catwalk and has widely been touted as one of the few e-commerce start-ups with a real shot at competing with queen bee of the pack Net-a-Porter, first made waves earlier this year by announcing its sponsorship of the “Punk: Chaos to Couture” themed event. Read more

Posted in Fashion, Finance, Hollywood, Internet, Jewellery, Luxury goods |

Why gold jewellery won’t drop with the dropping price of gold

April 16, 2013 4:36 pm by Vanessa Friedman

I know most people aren’t thinking about this – they are thinking about hedge fund managers and how much they may, or may not, lose on their bets – but yesterdays’ dramatic drop in gold prices is going to have an interesting knock-on effect on jewellers and watch makers. Not because it will make their products, which have been creeping upwards over the last decade along with the price of their raw materials less expensive – but because it WON’T. It can’t. Here’s why.

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Posted in Jewellery, Luxury goods |

Tiffany, Neil Lane and Van Cleef milk Oscars red carpet

February 25, 2013 11:26 am by Vanessa Friedman

Forget clothes; the red carpet is all about the jewellery now. Would be that of an after-awards morning my in-box would be full of who-wore-what emails. Not any more! Now it’s jewels, all the way down (or pretty much). Yet I can’t help feeling that there’s a difference between fine jewellery and clothes, even really expensive clothes, and the “if-it-worked-for-fashion-it-will-work-for-gems” theory is wrong.  Read more

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Posted in Fashion, Hollywood, Jewellery, Luxury goods |

Of scandals and fashion: horsemeat, John Galliano and CNN

February 14, 2013 2:10 pm by Vanessa Friedman

British designer John Galliano

It’s been a big week for scandals; Europe’s horsemeat-in-the-beef-lasagna crisis, John Galliano’s appearance in New York in what some construed as faux-Hasidic garb, and CNN’s decision to run a piece comparing war photography and fashion photography. It’s hard to know where to start. Here are some thoughts – in no particular order.

1. Horsemeat: reading my colleague John Gapper’s column today about the supply chain issue being at the heart of the matter, it occurred to me that this bears a notable resemblance to the blood diamond scandals, which resulted in the Kimberley Process. Like the supermarkets that sold the adulterated meat, the jewellers that sold the sparkly end product had never really pushed themselves to know where it came from. When the truth was revealed, they were horrified and embarrassed. It had never occurred to them they needed to take ownership of the supply chain if they were responsible for the end product, and the experience changed luxury’s strategy completely. Read more

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Posted in Couture, Fashion, Jewellery, Luxury goods |

Swatch adds sparkle to image with Harry Winston

January 14, 2013 2:50 pm by Vanessa Friedman

And just like that – OK, just like that with $750 million plus the assumption of up to US$250 million of pro forma net debt – Swatch becomes a major luxury jewellery player. Today they announced the acquisition of the luxury arm of Harry Winston Diamond corporation. It is an image-changing buy.
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Posted in Jewellery, Luxury goods |
From FT.com January 10, 2013

Tiffany & Co. Getty Images

The post-Christmas gloom in parts of the US retail sector deepened on Thursday as Tiffany & Co, the jeweller, and Aéropostale, a fashion retailer, reported weak sales that sent their shares falling.

But, in a reminder that the sector still contains some winners, two other stores that sell fashion to young people – American Eagle and Urban Outfitters – reported strong sales growth.

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Posted in Accessories, Jewellery, Luxury goods |
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