Thursday, October 8, 2015

Fashion trends for spring 2015

Spring fashion season is upon us. As the snow melts and the temperatures start to rise, we're swapping out our winter coats and earmuffs for cardigans and light scarves. In addition to pulling out our old favorites, we're looking to find the latest trends for the style season ahead. Naturally, people are turning to Google Search in the moments that matter when it comes to their wardrobe this spring. Here we look at Google Search data to identify and curate the up-and-coming fashion trends for the spring season.
By categorizing past apparel-related queries based on similar search-demand patterns, we were able to distinguish between the trends to watch and the trends to forget. And by looking at geographic data along with co-search behavior (such as words and phrases being searched alongside a particular fashion), we can get consumer insights into fashions that will be hot this season. Below are three up-and-coming fashion trends for spring 2015.

Tulle skirts spread in popularity

Who says you need to be a ballerina to wear a tulle skirt? According to trending Google apparel searches, tulle skirts are growing in popularity just in time for spring fashion, up 34% from January 2014 to January 2015.
Originating on the West Coast, the tulle skirt trend is making its way across the U.S. according to Google searches. Consumers are seeking this skirt in all colors of the rainbow (and even in rainbow), but the most popular colors are the classics: black and white.


Searches for Tulle Skirts
Consumers aren't interested only in buying tulle skirts, either. Top searches indicate that a majority are feeling inspired to get crafty and make their own. Armed with more than 20,000 tulle skirt tutorial videos on YouTube, we can understand why.

Jogger pants see mass appeal

While tulle skirts may not be for everyone, jogger pants are a trend that just about anyone can get excited about. We're seeing top searches for jogger pants for men, women, boys, girls, and even toddlers, indicating mass appeal for this apparel item.
Looking at the terms often searched in conjunction with jogger pants (such as men's, women's, brand names, and styles), it seems that consumers are already well-versed in jogger pants and are turning to Google Search to learn more about them by searching which brands offer the best selection and deals.
In looking at the particular styles of jogger pants searched, we see that people are willing to step out of their comfort zone on this trend. The top most-searched style? Emoji jogger pants.

Top Styles Co-Searched With Jogger Pants


Source: Google Internal Data, Indexed Search Query Volume.

Midi skirts catch on with a little inspiration needed

Not quite a maxi skirt, and definitely not a mini skirt, the midi skirt is a revived trend from the 1960s. Recently brought back in the U.K. in 2013, the trend is making its way back to the U.S. While lower in search volume than tulle skirts or jogger pants, the midi skirt has seen 9X growth in searches over the past three years—and is still in its early stages of growth within the U.S. market.

Search Interest Over Time for Midi Skirts


Source: Google Internal Data, Indexed Search Query Volume, January 2009–January 2015.
Top searches about midi skirts, such as "how to wear" and "outfits," demonstrate a lack of education on how to incorporate the trend. Consumers are turning to Google Search for advice and inspiration on styling a midi skirt as part of their daily outfit.
Because the trend has been growing in the U.K. over the past couple of years, there are already so many variations of silhouettes and styles displayed on the internet. Top silhouettes include pleated, pencil, A-line, high waisted, skater, circle, and flared, to name a few. With such an overwhelming list of styles, it's no wonder consumers are seeking tips on how best to pull them off

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Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Once Upon a Glass Ceiling at Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen

Once Upon a Glass Ceiling at Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen

OCT. 7, 2015

PARIS — There has been a lot of talk recently about the under representation of women in positions of power when it comes to industries such as film and technology. Less discussed, but equally startling when you look at the numbers, is how few women are designers at the head of major fashion brands (or even minor ones). Of the 91 shows on the official Paris schedule, fewer than 20 percent are brands with female creative directors (or their titular ilk). Where are the women?
It’s not clear (and this would be the subject of an entirely different story in any case) — and there’s no question that the female representation is better now than it has been and that it is in other cities — but of the women who have arrived, some of the biggest names appeared on the same days in the final stretch of the spring 2016 season.
This quasi girl ghetto may be a coincidence of the schedule (and of creative appointments), in the same way the Japanese are largely grouped together over the weekend, but it does have a kind of odd implication: that there is some sort of sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits.
It’s time to put an end to the stereotype.
Certainly Stella McCartney’s guiding principle has always been her own insouciant brand of cool, shared largely by the friends who populate her front row — women like Dasha Zhukova and Suki Waterhouse — and expressed this time around in thin knit plaid polo shirts twisted onto the diagonal and lengthened into dresses; two-tone strapless pleated tunics and skirts, both cut on the curve to rise over a hip or a knee and dip down on the other; and relaxed trousers and long jackets shaped to the body and covered in ribbons of curlicues. All temptingly non-neurotic, with a winking edge.
And patently less complicated than the hybrid aesthetic of Chitose Abe atSacai, which was born from an effort to question received diktats about what clothing is worn when, and where daywear morphs into evening wear, and outer wear becomes inner wear, often all in the same garment.
This season she was cutting and pasting (and twisting and torquing) a travelogue of sorts, from silks printed with cheerful souvenir cityscapes and gardens to reminders of the American West — bandannas and rhinestone cowboy prints and Navajo blanket stripes — all recombined into dresses and separates that worked best when the ideas were layered lightly one atop the other. Trousers sliced up the legs like skirts had a two-for-one appeal, but skirts that gaped at the legs or the back to expose their alternate inner workings or that bunched at the waist seemed pointlessly convoluted.
Conventional wisdom has it that female designers make clothes they want to wear, and that male designers make clothes they want to see their dream woman wear; the latter speaking more to fantasy, the former to functionality. But that’s too reductive an explanation, and one that no longer holds true — when it comes to either gender.
There is no question, for example, that Giambattista Valli can’t quite seem to stop idealizing the decorative potential of the 1960s and ’70s, iterating version after version of high-necked, high-waisted, high-hemlined sparkling shifts and suits, only to follow with floor-sweeping silk hostess dresses, retro-perfect for anyone eager to hitch a flying carpet to the past.
But at Akris, Albert Kriemler found his muse (if you can even call it that) in the work of the architect Sou Fujimoto, and sent out abstract geometric prints and Swiss-cheese-like cutouts in crisp white cotton shirts and shorts; shift dresses tiered in a corkboard print and flashing a peekaboo square at the hip; and terrific gold and silver trouser suits, hexagons etched into the weft. Though shorts with long half-skirts on top (a weird styling trick that has inexplicably popped on other runways as well) built a neat visual structure, they are probably going to be a hard sell.
Such distilled constructions exist seemingly at the opposite extreme from the glorious fantasia of Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen, all Huguenot migrants and 17th-century Spitalfields silk weavers and rose bowers, in sweeping vistas of long, ruffled floral jacquards, frayed lace and frock coats.
Also, there were trousers cut on a knife-edge and sleeveless vests draped in pearl-trimmed silver watch fob chains; dove-embroidered bias-cut black and white gowns; even gem-encrusted couture-detailed denim. It all seemed like high romanticism of the most ethereal kind — until you looked at the shoes.
Which were clogs. Inlaid and elaborate, yes, but entirely grounded.


Ms. Burton has slowly and subtly been sanding away at the harder, darker edges established by the brand’s founder, Mr. McQueen — the body-reshaping corsetry and face-erasing masks — and this collection was, despite its fairy tale veneer, her most liberated yet.
In the end, the clothes were made for action, not static posing. They were a stride forward
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Runway Warrior Woman


Gigi Hadid: Runway Warrior Woman

OCT. 7, 2015




“My casting is part of the Balmain DNA, what I’m trying to build,” he said, while around him, Amazonian models like Alessandra Ambrosio and Joan Smalls were being powdered and glossed in their Amazonian outfits, their hair pulled into high, tight ponytails that looked ready be deployed as whips, should the need arrive.Backstage at the Hotel InterContinental before his Balmain show here last Thursday, Olivier Rousteing, the label’s 30-year-old creative director, was explaining the importance of casting for his runway shows.
“It’s strong women, diversity, different ages, different backgrounds, different colors,” Mr. Rousteing continued. “They come from the world. They are part of my Balmain army.”
One of his most favored soldiers, at least at present, is Gigi Hadid, a reality television star turned runway presence who, at that moment, was wrapped in a cognac-colored crop top and metal collar, having her arms bronzed.

Ms. Hadid, 20, needs no runway to make tabloid headlines. She is a gossip-blog mainstay: for palling around with Kendall Jenner, who was also buzzing around the backstage area in her Balmain bodysuit, taking photos in Power Ranger poses; for her romance with Joe Jonas; and for just being Gigi, doing Gigi-ish things like picking up coffee or going to the airport.
But just before the start of Paris Fashion Week, she set off a major media reaction by issuing a cri de coeur on her Instagram account: a heartfelt and impassioned defense of herself against online comment-section critics, who have been quick to point out her curves, her slightly jumpy walk and her reality-TV pedigree.
“No, I don’t have the same body type as the other models in shows,” she wrote. “I represent a body type that wasn’t accepted in high-fashion before, and I’m very lucky to be supported by the designers, stylists and editors that I am: ones that know this is fashion, it’s art; it can never stay the same.”
By the time she made it to the backstage area of Balmain a few days later, Ms. Hadid had been deluged by support and said she had been approached by “everyone from designers to other models to drivers.”


Gigi Hadid’s Busy Month


But, “the ones that touched me the most were the models,” she added. “Everyone from Victoria’s Secret Angels to plus-sized girls that texted me, thanking me and saying that they feel so much of that bullying. It’s amazing, the spectrum that it affects. It doesn’t matter if people are saying you’re anorexic or too fat. It’s just that people are bullies. I was just kind of hoping that it would spark conversation. At first I did it for myself, but I think that a lot of people are scared to comment on the industry that they’re in and they feel like they’re not allowed to have a voice. I think that that’s not true.”
It did spark conversation, immediately. High-profile models and famous friends posted congratulations. “Couldn’t agree more,” Karlie Kloss tweeted. “Proud to call you a friend. #preachgirl.”
“I haven’t met you yet @gigihadid but I FEEL you so much,” Tyra Banks wrote on Instagram. “Your words are powerful. Your words are necessary. Your words are vulnerable. Your words are real. Sending you love and hugs. From one model that had curves and a unique walk to another, Tyra.”



Mr. Rousteing was vocal in his support. “I love what she wrote,” he said. “It’s really, really interesting and it’s really smart to write that now. We need more girls that actually have a real body. Gigi has the most insane body. I love her — she is my icon.” He cast her, along with her younger sister, Bella, as one of the sibling pairs in his fall Balmain ad campaign; Ms. Hadid also appears in the ads for Balmain’s collection with H&M, which arrives in stores in November.
Ms. Hadid has been walking steadily throughout fashion month, appearing at shows like Tommy Hilfiger and Diane von Furstenberg in New York and Moschino and Versace in Milan. In Paris, besides Balmain, she walked the runway for Elie Saab and Giambattista Valli, and attended the 95th anniversary party for French Vogue in a Versace minidress — the same one she wore in the brand’s show.



Her post had been a cathartic moment, she said, one seized and undertaken without warning to any of her industry agents. “I just did it,” she said. “My whole life, I’ve always written things down to get it off my chest. I’ve always had a journal for that reason. I feel like this would have been a journal entry except for the fact that I think it relates to a lot of people.”
Mr. Rousteing seems to agree. “I think we are in a moment where fashion is way more pop — and pop means popular,” he said. “We have been really elitist, really closed, in the 2000s. I think we’re back in something that is way more open.”
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French Vogue Celebrates 95 Years

In Paris, French Vogue Celebrates 95 Years

A Vogue Birthday Party

PARIS — What does one do in Paris when one turns 95? Party, of course.
At least that’s what French Vogue did to celebrate its 95th anniversary on Saturday night as seemingly all of fashion descended on a private mansion just south of the Arc de Triomphe.
“Drinks!” bellowed Kanye West when asked what he was looking forward to most. The rapper and designer, who attended several Paris shows last week, had completely ignored the black-tie dress code and arrived with his mother-in-law, Kris Jenner, as his accessory.
“Drinks, drinks and more drinks,” he said. “That’s what I’m feeling tonight. Let’s get on with it. It’s time to get this party started.”
Upstairs, wave upon wave of fashion executives, editors, stylists and guests mingled in a series of candlelit chambers, the walls lined with magazine covers. Natalie Massenet, the founder and recently resigned executive chairwoman of Net-a-Porter, rubbed shoulders with the Vogue Japan editor-at-large Anna Dello Russo, while Mario Testino, camera seemingly permanently in hand, announced: “I’ve grown up with Vogue. The Vogue world and many of the people within it feel like my family, I wouldn’t have missed tonight for the world.”


The Scottish designer Christopher Kane was also in the mood to celebrate. “I just feel this huge sense of relief that my collection is done, although I’ve already started working on pre-fall,” he said as guests continued to file in. “I thought this was be a perfect night off.”
Roughly an hour in, the D.J. duo Vladimir and Agathe, who until that point had been gently warming up the crowd with a series of old-school ’80s favorites, issued a loudspeaker rallying cry: “Supermodels to the dance floor, please!”
On they came, lured by the strains of Michael Jackson’s greatest hits. Doutzen Kroes and Isabeli Fontana took the stage after boogieing their way down the sweeping marble staircase, alongside Lily Donaldson, Stella Maxwell, Barbara Palvin, Lindsay Wixson and a tuxedo-clad Ruth Bell, the all-but-shaven-headed young British model who appears to have walked in virtually every show of the week.
“When I got into the pages of Vogue I knew I had made it,” said a beaming Ms. Fontana, in a shiny burgundy leather shift dress with gold buckles up the thigh. “It was the turning point of my career, and I know many of the other girls feel the same way.”
As if on cue, Madonna’s “Vogue” started to play, and a deafening cheer erupted. It was so loud that Rihanna, closely followed by a magenta-coiffed Jared Leto and with a dozen-strong entourage, slipped through the main door virtually unnoticed just after 11:30 p.m. — initially at least.
Having jetted in for the Dior show the day before, Rihanna went straight to her own table in a smoky back room.
“Even here at a Vogue party, people get a bit crazy and its kind of overwhelming,” she said. “I’m just here to have fun,” she said, settling back on a couch.
Later, she jumped up to greet the French Vogue editor-in-chief, Emmanuelle Alt, co-host of the night.
“I love this outfit — it’s just amazing,” Rihanna said, gesturing with a cigar in one hand and satay stick in the other at Ms. Alt’s metallic-silver jumpsuit.
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Julie de Libran :In the studio

PARIS — In the final installment of the video series “In the Studio,” which can be viewed  Julie de Libran, the artistic director of Sonia Rykiel, discusses taking on the Rykiel legacy, the treasures she found in the designer’s former office and what responsibilities she can’t trust to anyone else. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)
You work, literally, above the shop. Was this Sonia Rykiel’s first office?
This is not exactly the building where she started. The building where she started is just down the street on Rue Corneille, where now we have our contemporary line, Sonia by Sonia Rykiel. The children’s collection is actually in the space where she really started.
How long has Rykiel been in this building?
Since the ’70s. But I’ve been here for only a year. I have my private office, and on the other side there is still Sonia Rykiel’s office, preserved exactly.
Do you go into Sonia’s office for inspiration?
I have been in a few times, though normally it’s kept locked. I go in with Nathalie [Sonia’s daughter]. It’s wonderful, it’s all treasures, and there’s still some of her favorite coats and all her drawings and her pictures. There were some pins with cloverleafs, some padded jackets that were just so fun. The pins were placed on the backs, and I thought that was just such a nice surprise. And her colored pencils, and her desk and all the photos taken of her.
Does she come into the office?
She lives very close by, so I go to see her.
Did you feel a big responsibility in taking on her legacy?
Sonia Rykiel is really an icon. I was always very inspired by her work when I was in fashion design school. I was very nervous, but at the same time, I was so proud to be able to continue the next steps of her work. And I think that happiness, or that desire, just overtook the rest. I’m just having a lot of fun.
Was it important to create your own space in her space?
Yes, it’s important for me to be in an environment that is my own. It really helps me feel at ease, and I like to see things around me that create a certain sensibility and that shock me in a good way, or that make me feel inspired.
I have a Jürgen Teller photo, for example, which was actually a photo that he gave to us for our invitation for the first fashion show here at Sonia Rykiel. I’ve framed it because it’s a wonderful picture of trees that he photographed a few years ago, close to his mother’s home. It’s trees that actually show stripes, and show that stripes come from nature, and it’s the beauty of stripes that inspired my first fashion show at Sonia Rykiel: “La beauté sera toujours rayée.” It’s actually a quote from Sonia Rykiel, “Stripes will always be beautiful.”
Then I have a beautiful photo Solve Sundsbo gave me of one of the shows that we did at Louis Vuitton, where I was for more than five years, working with Marc Jacobs. The photo is taken from backstage, and it’s just a great memory of that time.
You also have a lot of books.
I collect them. I search for them and buy them at different libraries in Paris. Or I find a lot of books in the streets. And in London. One in particular, Sonia Rykiel’s “Forty Years of Fashion,” is a wonderful book from an exhibition at the Louvre, at Les Arts Décoratifs. It’s so well made. It’s almost like Polaroids of every single look of every show for 40 years. I go back to it very often. I also have a lot of Helmut Newton books. Jürgen Teller’s book. The shop downstairs is also full of books. It’s like a private library: very inspiring. Books are really a starting point for me.
What is your process when you start on a new line?
I start with a mood board, because iconography and images are very important to me. I like my images to be put together in a certain way. I do it myself. You have to do things yourself sometimes for them to be the way you want, right? I like for a whole story to be created around my images, with a starting point and an end. For spring, for example, the story is very light. The silhouette and the fabrics, everything is very, very airy, almost like birds flying.
Then I work on fabrics, put my colors together, and I search for ideas of prints that I like. I don’t work on a computer. I do research on the Internet, of course, but I sketch by hand. I have particular paper that I sketch on that is, for me, important, because it’s an incredible quality and it makes the drawing look better, though I couldn’t tell you the name. And I drape by hand. I’m very manual.
Do you work at the last minute, or are you very organized?
I would like to say I’m very organized. I try not to work till the last minute. I feel more secure and reassured when things are not unresolved. I try my best to make decisions ahead of time.
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An Unlikely Fashion Guy



Joshua Jackson of ‘The Affair’: An Unlikely Fashion Guy

OCT. 7, 2015





For Joshua Jackson, appreciating fine tailoring was a learned skill.Bryan Derballa for The New York Times

Ask for a male actor with great style, and the names Pitt, Clooney and Depp are often mentioned. Of the younger turks, add Gosling and Garfield. But what about Jackson? As in Joshua.
Sound like a stretch? Well, consider his bona fides: He has attended the Met Gala four of the last five years, and was a presenter at the most recent Council of Fashion Designers of America awards. He also lives part of the year in Paris, where he is a neighbor of Karl Lagerfeld.
Indeed, the 37-year-old actor, a star on “The Affair” on Showtime (its second season starts Sunday) who first achieved fame on the late-’90s teenage drama “Dawson’s Creek” and later the sci-fi series “Fringe,” has quietly become a fashion guy. No one is more surprised by this than him.



“Trust me, never in my life did I think I’d be carrying my groceries home and have a stop-and-chat with Karl Lagerfeld,” Mr. Jackson said the other day in the Bowery Hotel in Lower Manhattan, where he was staying while filming the show.



Mr. Jackson and his longtime partner, the German actress and model Diane Kruger, at the Venice Film Festival last month.Andrew Medichini/Associated Press

Mr. Jackson’s entree to the fashion world came through his longtime partner, the German actress and model Diane Kruger. Before they met, he said, he was a T-shirt and jeans guy, a style underachiever, something he internalized growing up in a working- and middle-class environment in Vancouver, British Columbia.
“There’s a certain degree to which you don’t want to dress or be caught dressing because you’re going above your station,” Mr. Jackson said.
For most of his 20s, there was no danger of that. In an interview with Glamour magazine several years ago, Ms. Kruger lamented her boyfriend’s choice of footwear, remarking, “I definitely wasn’t fond of these blue sneakers that he wore all the time for about a year and a half.”
Reminded of the sneakers and Ms. Kruger’s opinion of them, Mr. Jackson laughed and said, “They just magically disappeared one day.”
He added that when they began dating, “whole trash bags full of clothes were suddenly going to the Salvation Army.”
On this afternoon, Mr. Jackson was dressed in jeans, a gray T-shirt, a field jacket and, yes, sneakers. But the T-shirt fit perfectly, the sneakers were old-school Adidas Superstars, and the Filson jacket was a beautiful shade of butterscotch brown.
He also wore a beard, grown for his role, which he stroked professorially, saying: “You know what I like about a beard? You can always look contemplative.”
The series, which centers on an adulterous relationship between a married father of four living in Brooklyn and a Montauk wife grieving the death of her son, is a highbrow soap, smartly written and compulsively watchable. Mr. Jackson’s character, Cole Lockhart, is the husband of the grieving wife and a blue-collar patriarch of the pregentrified East End (he runs a horse ranch).
As the faithful cuckold, Cole would seem to have the moral high ground. But he deals cocaine and ended the first season waving a gun at his wife and her lover.
“I like that our show presents life in the mucky in-betweens,” the actor said. “It doesn’t take this simple moral position that you easily could about people having an affair.”


Mr. Jackson, a star of “The Affair,” in Brooklyn recently. Bryan Derballa for The New York Times

In her version, he talked nonstop; in his, he was politely filling in the conversation because she had an allergic reaction to some flowers. Even after nine years, Mr. Jackson said: “The amount of signal to noise in any story I have with Diane amazes me. Sometimes we’re really close, and sometimes we’re so, so, so far off.”
They both agreed he should do “The Affair,” however, even with its graphic and abundant sex scenes. The show presents a noticeably mature Mr. Jackson, whom a generation of TV viewers may still identify as the baby-faced Pacey Witter on “Dawson’s Creek.”
David Semel, a director who worked on “Dawson’s Creek” and has known Mr. Jackson for more than 15 years, said it was only the actor’s early roles that were juvenile.
“He’s always been so mature beyond his years,” Mr. Semel said. “The roles he’s now getting to play are catching up to who he’s been for a long time.”
In person, Mr. Jackson, like Cole, projects logical intelligence and a masculine steadiness. His is a firm handshake.
“Josh has always had a strong, handsome, direct quality to him,” said Sarah Treem, the executive producer of “The Affair,” who cast him partly for that reason. “He’s kind of old-school in his behavior. He’ll always open a door for a woman. He wants to pay for dinner.”
Ms. Treem and her husband live down the street from Mr. Jackson and Ms. Kruger in Topanga, Calif., where the couple spend much of their time when not in Paris. Something she has noticed and admires about Mr. Jackson and Ms. Kruger, she said, is the way they closely guard their private lives while still being a high-wattage public couple.
As Ms. Treem put it, Mr. Jackson and Ms. Kruger “rock the red carpet” — something the fashion press has noticed. After the Met Gala last spring, Details magazine named them the best-dressed straight couple, praising Mr. Jackson’s scruffy beard paired with a classic peak-lapel tux.
Mr. Jackson’s friends have noticed his bold style moves, too, and keep him in check should he become a fashion victim. “There was some red carpet where he was wearing an ascot,” Mr. Semel said, laughing. “The male contingency of his friends made sure it was never going to happen again.”
The embrace of the fashion world calls to mind what Samuel L. Jackson’s character says about his eating habits in “Pulp Fiction”: “My girlfriend is a vegetarian, so that pretty much makes me one, too.” In his own way, Mr. Jackson has become a vegetarian.
By ditching the slouch wear for fine tailoring, he has also offered a model for men who find themselves dating up, stylewise: don’t rebel, become stylish yourself.
“It was really through Diane that I finally was able to hear somebody who was telling me, ‘No, part of being an adult male is learning how to dress yourself,’ ” Mr. Jackson said. “There’s a real joy she takes in dressing. I had never seen that before. I feel like that’s now part of our life and something I enjoy, too.”
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