If foxy is not a word you immediately associate with Uniqlo, prepare to have your mind blown. The Carine Roitfeld collaboration is elegant, on-point, grown-up and super sexy. Because it is based on an actual woman’s actual wardrobe, it is brilliantly easy to wear together: the general mood among fashion journalists at the preview was ‘how about we just buy the lot and wear nothing else?’
So yeah, it’s good. If we had to pick one highlight, it would be the coats: double-breasted, deep-lapelled Chester style. The leopard is brilliantly Roitfeld. “I love leopard print,” the former editor of French Vogue and reigning queen of morning-after chic told us, in a pope-declares-catholicism moment. “But I made this coat a soft, understated leopard so that you can wear it all the time.” But the leopard print is perhaps trumped by the black and the herringbone tweed coats, which are wear-forever classics. “I made sure the coats were mannish at the shoulders, but finish just above the knee, so that a little bit of skirt shows”, Carine told us.
Ah yes, those skirts. The pencil skirt is probably the most iconic Carine piece, after all. At the launch she was wearing a faux-leather pencil skirt with eyelets at the hem, which she said she had been wearing for three days without it losing its shape. “I wanted the skirts to be just below knee length, that’s my favourite,” she said. “And they have pockets, because that’s what gives a pencil skirt attitude.”
The little black sweater, an underrated style staple that Carine swears by (Yves Saint Laurent was a fan, fact addicts) comes with a ballerina neckline, scooped wide but not low, to show just a touch of collarbone – “it’s more feminine this way, no?” – and with long, slim sleeves, and enough length to sit comfortably with trousers or skirts with no gapping. “I don’t want to show my tummy,” Carine said.
