Alastair Carr, design director, and Benoit Duverger, managing director, at Pringle of Scotland talk to Carola Long, FT deputy fashion editor, about the rebel teenager who inspired their Autumn/Winter 2012 look, the brand and the commercial importance of showing at London Fashion week.
One of the weirder pieces of news to emerge from London Fashion Week so far comes not from a boldface fashion name, but a Savile Row tailor, Cad and the Dandy: it has just gifted a suit to Kim Jong-eun.
Yes, that is correct: North Korea’s new leader. Forget Alexa Chung and other front-row stalwarts seen at shows from Mulberry to Matthew Williamson. This puts a new spin on celebrity dressing, not to mention penetrating the Asian market.
Stella McCartney
The London 2012 Olympics may not start until July, but Stella McCartney’s personal marathon begins in February.
The designer, who is creating the uniforms for Team GB as well as various bits of sartorial memorabilia for the tourist hordes, has agreed to return to London Fashion Week for a one-off extravaganza on February 18. This actually follows a pre-collection presentation in NY in January and a perfume launch, and precedes her usual autumn/winter collection show in Paris on March 5.
It’s exhausting just thinking about it.
Though Ms McCartney, who also has a line with Adidas which has been shown in London, she has not had a full-fledged main line show in the UK capital since she joined Chloe in 1997. According to her office, the February event will not be a catwalk show, but rather a presentation focused on eveningwear.
Nevertheless, expect drumrolls of pre-publicity, fights for tickets, clogged thoroughfares – expect, in other words, an effective dry run for the main event.
The Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, French fashion’s governing body, has just announced that Versace is returning to the Paris couture schedule eight years after leaving it due to cutbacks. Is this good news?
Or rather, is it enough good news?
For Versace, the answer is presumably yes: couture is a neon sign that it has its house in order. The company can afford to publicly reenter a low margin, mostly for prestige, super niche area.
Follow the FT’s latest reports from London Fashion Week.
Follow the FT’s latest reports from London Fashion Week.
Onlookers watch the Burberry show at Piccadilly Circus -- Getty Images
Today at about 4 pm UK time (I say about, because we are talking fashion time, which is always a fungible concept) crowds at Piccadilly Circus will get a treat: broadcast on the big promo screen for all the people to see, the Burberry fashion show, in real time. OMG!
Guess they aren’t worried about the traffic.
Indeed, this is being billed by the fashion supremos as a Great Leap Forward, bringing the otherwise exclusive Fashion Week to the broadest possible audience. Along with screens in the London Underground broadcasting highlights and tweets from the shows, and another outdoor screen in the courtyard of Somerset House showing, well, shows, to the great unwashed who didn’t make it into the tents, it comprises the new digital strategy of the BFC, demonstrating the super-cool way British fashion is embracing the future. At the same time, it reveals the confusion within the fashion world about the purpose of shows. Though I think the latter wasn’t really their intention.
Follow the FT’s reports from London Fashion Week.
Skirts are not the only thing getting longer this season; so, apparently, are job titles. Tom Florio, the ex-VP of the Vogue Group (which once consisted of four magazines but shrank during the recession to two magazines and some web sites) has just landed at IMG, the sports/fashion management monolith, as “Senior Advisor for Fashion to the Office of the Chairman.” It’s a mouthful.
It also sounds awfully like those Minister Without Portfolio titles beloved by so many heads of state, and almost always disliked by everyone else (like cabinet ministers), who feel said minister is spending too much time interfering in other people’s official and titular business.
Certainly the fact that Mr Florio’s job “will be…identifying new, high margin product offerings across all of IMG’s Fashion related businesses” (this from the press release) cannot be encouraging for the folks currently at IMG’s fashion-related business, who apparently were not so good at identifying those opportunities themselves. To allay such fears Florio told the New York Post that when you work with an entrepreneur like IMG chief Ted Forstmann, titles were “irrelevant.”
How reassuring. If you believe that, you might be interested to know Hermes is for sale.
By Nicola Copping, deputy fashion editor
London Fashion Week is drawing to a close today but not without a final finale from luxury fashion house Burberry. Live streaming their show to hundreds of eager consumers in stores across the world, it was the ticket of the week. Not least for the politicians. Sat in the front row was Ed Vaizey, UK minister for culture, and also, perhaps surprisingly, Michael Gove, secretary of state for education.
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Vanessa has been the FT’s fashion editor since 2003, and is based in New York, though she lived in London for 12 years.
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