Effortless Ellery goes with the flow
Asked who her ultimate customer is, Kym Ellery doesn’t pick one of the red-carpet usuals. Instead she goes left field: “Cleopatra – she’s a strong woman.”
The Australian launched her eponymous label in 2007 while a fashion editor at Russh magazine in Sydney. It’s been a slow burn: these clothes aren’t showstoppers – but you soon come to rely on the draped silk blouses, blazers and flares. “Since 2012,” Ellery says, “it’s been intense, with double-digit growth every year.”
A move to Paris fashion week fulfilled a dream for the 33-year-old, who might live more than 10,000 miles away but has “a huge crush” on the French capital and design-wise is closer to Parisian chic than her homeland’s beach-ready style. This season’s corsetry-inspired collection is a case in point: lots of black, satin blouses, ruffle sleeves and cuissardes boots. “Volume is our signature. We use it in new ways, giving more fluidity around the body,” Ellery explains. “The idea was to make 18th-century essentials relevant again.”
Arguably her great strength lies in making clothes that are widely relevant, worn by Solange Knowles and Miranda Kerr, but also stocked at matchesfashion.com and net-a-porter.com where anyone can buy her no-nonsense chic. “Style should be effortless,” she says. “We talk about modern classics, timeless things women can use to build their wardrobes.” Cleopatra included. elleryland.com
A taste for the rude and crude
With labels such as Vetements, Gucci and Henry Holland forcing us to redefine “ugly” and “beautiful” aesthetics, the Barbican exhibition The Vulgar feels prescient. The show explores vulgarity in fashion from the Renaissance to now, looking at “exposure, performance and self-fashioning”, according to curators Judith Clark and Adam Phillips.
There will be specific sections focusing on bodily concealment and exposure (think: the Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren “tits” T-shirt) and fashion excess including a pair of 18th-century mantuas with an overskirt 2.5m wide. The exhibition, featuring work by Elsa Schiaparelli, Marc Jacobs and Raf Simons, is set to be an interesting intersection of ideas and examples. “Because fashion experiments with taste, it is more alive as an idea and creates an opportunity to consider a variety of uses and abuses,” Clark says, adding that modern fashion is meta about its relationship to the concept of vulgarity: “Pretending to be free but constrained by standards of taste, it is contemporary fashion that most tellingly exploits the predicament as parody and interpretation.”
The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined is at the Barbican from 13 October; barbican.org.uk
Shine bright like a diamond
So there we were watching A/W16 catwalk show number 467 and, admittedly, a level of ennui had set in. That is until these jewel-encrusted sliders clacked by. Cue sudden and sustained interest in what looked to be the sort of slippers Louis XIV might have provided for his guests at the Versailles spa. Sliders have been A Thing in fashion for a couple of seasons and by piling on the embellishment, Miuccia Prada at Miu Miu has upped the slipper stakes. The result? Yet another reason to ignore heels – it’s the weight not the height of the shoe that matters now.
If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere...
In 1932 RM Williams started making boots for the rigours of the Australian outback. More than 80 years on, their enduring practical design takes Manhattan: a store opens on Spring Street this month. rmwilliams.com.au
Lonely Hearts love naval looks
There is something of the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band about fashion at the moment, the psychedelia at the Gucci show being the most obvious example and the naval jackets at Givenchy and Dolce & Gabbana more the subtle nods. Buyers, who basically earn their keep by betting on clothes’ shapes, told us that the naval jacket is set to be this season’s replacement for the off-duty biker jacket.
The rise of high low style
As far as Christelle Kocher is concerned, the new revolution in Parisian fashion – with Vetements, Gosha Rubchinskiy and her own line Koche – is actually more of an evolution. “Paris has always been the centre of creativity,” she says. “Now there is a new area of fashion with youth taking over.”
And Kocher is at the centre of it. Christelle launched Koche – a play on her surname – in 2014, and designs it while holding down a day job as artistic director of Christophe Lemaire. The collections bear the hallmarks of an illustrious career in design, including stints at Dries Van Noten and Chloé. She dubs the aesthetic couture-to-wear which means intricate embroidery and fabrics mixed with prints and T-shirt shapes. “They are items with the taste of couture,” the 37-year-old says. “We mix different aesthetics and create a dialogue between street and couture. It’s a brand where these different elements have a conversation.”
The mix is truly international – though born in France, Kocher has lived everywhere from London to Hamburg to New York. “It’s not just Parisian,” she says. “It’s a taste of all the places I’ve been.” koche.fr
Very graphic T-shirts
Anyone hankering after something a bit more X-rated in menswear will get their satisfaction with Pieter. The label, by 28-year-old Dutch designer Sebastiaan Pieter, is now on its third season and becoming known for bringing a bit of a smoulder to style. For autumn, he was inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe but added the modern reference of gay dating app Grindr to bring the photographer’s work bang up to date. “I was always interested in Mapplethorpe and have one of his images on my studio wall,” Pieter says. “It’s a very traditional portrait but two of the men happen to be wearing leather and chains. It’s familiar and disturbing at the same time.”
For his collection, this translated into straps, leather trousers and zips, though they are far more SFW than those in Mapplethorpe’s work. Other designs, such as T-shirts with HH written on them – Grindr code for “high and horny” – are more risky, depending on who sees them. “The fun is that some recognise it and some think it’s just a nice graphic T-shirt,” Pieter says. “I really enjoy that.” sebastiaanpieter.com
Cool new shoes to go with great old bags
Question: how to give a classic bag, in existence since the 1970s, a new spin? Answer: add matching shoes. Longchamp have done just that with their new loafer-skater hybrid, designed to complement the Pénélope bag. With the tassels and classic colour palette of the bag, the loafers have the same no-brainer wear and wear again appeal. A great addition to any shoe closet, whether or not they have the matching bag. longchamp.com
Raey’s timeless style
Raey’s range is a wonderful midpoint between classic and futuristic, outré and traditional. It gently references both athleisure and the gender-neutral trend, but feels timeless, thanks to the quality of the fabrics. The matchesfashion.com collection features tracksuit bottoms made from herringbone and Game Of Thrones-ish knits. Creative director Rachael Proud says the collection comes from ever so slightly messing with the classics. Her starting points are always the fabrics rather than the concepts. So this season there’s gender-fluid tailored denim and hand-knitted cashmere funnel-neck tops. “If it were up to me, there wouldn’t be distinctions such as womenswear and menswear, there would just be one thing. I think men are more open to stuff these days,” Proud says. “There’s more variety in what they wear.” matchesfashion.com
Tibi keeps it clean
Tibi may not be a household name, but the label that designer Amy Smilovic defines as “luxurious, modern, refined but still relaxed and feminine” does have a devoted fanbase. The clothes aren’t directional but they are far from boring – in fact they hit the sweet spot to become that rare thing of wearable clothes that stand out just enough. Colours are often muted – lots of greys, blues and whites – and the knitwear alone justifies the cult following. Smilovic thinks this is down to keeping her goal – “to make it easy for women to look confident and effortlessly polished” – at the forefront of the design process. That, and making clothes that she wants to wear. “We design for the way a modern woman, including me, wants to dress,” she says. “I want clean styles, minimal details and designs that don’t take themselves too seriously.” tibi.com
The chicest step forward for Joseph
Women, your footwear problems are over. Louise Trotter, creative director of Joseph, has come up with shoes that are chic, comfortable and ready to wear. There will be new designs for each season, but classics will repeat. “It allows our clients to come back to us for those timeless styles that form the foundation of their wardrobes,” Trotter says. She has “spent almost every day in the white loafers”. That’s as good a recommendation as you can get. joseph-fashion.com
The Roche approach
Ryan Roche’s definitive look is based around comfort. It’s all loose-fit cashmere in gentle pinks, blues and neutrals, ranging from the sort of drapery the famous wear on long-haul flights to knitwear with edge. This is a happy marriage of texture, comfort and what Vogue describes as “ballerinas in rehearsal”.
Roche, now 39, grew up in a creative household in Indiana, “although there weren’t glossy magazines lying around”. Rather she was inspired by her grandmother’s knitting and a keen sense of familial DIY. “I lived an hour from the mall. We used to see things in the window and then copy them back home.” Though the first clothes she made were for kids, she moved into womenswear to great acclaim. It started with a shaggy cardigan that appeared in Vogue “alongside a few other things” and now her collections are being snapped up by Brooklyn types including Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jemima Kirke. She’s moved from the city to a 17th-century house in upstate New York, but her clothes remain the look for hip-luxe New Yorkers. ryan-roche.com
Christopher Kane’s head for rain
Ugly, mundane, nostalgic. Adjectives not often used in high fashion, unless describing Christopher Kane. His design CV already includes making abattoir shoe protectors and cable ties cool (niche skills there), and now Kane makes us rethink the rain bonnet. Usually found in a plastic basket on the chemist’s counter, beloved of old ladies who want to protect their shampoo and set, rain bonnets are interlopers on the catwalk. Kane’s beefed-up versions (created by Stephen Jones) were worn over wet-look hair and semaphored oddness, melancholy and humour.
The idea of elevating the ordinary is major in fashion right now. Kane’s contribution to this theme is a welcome addition because a) it legitimises wearing them at the bus stop in the rain, b) polka-dot rain bonnets sell for £6.45 for three on Amazon and c) umbrellas are just so beta.
christopherkane.com
See, buy, wear, love: Diesel denim on demand
Diesel joined the See Now, Buy Now revolution this month. A Tokyo show celebrated the brand’s 30 years in Japan – where creative director Nicola Formichetti was born – and showcased denim and ready-to-wear available to buy straight after. It all makes for an impressive example of how to get involved in a fashion revolution – and design some tough outerwear in the process. diesel.com
Gucci ghost story
In February, Alessandro Michele’s A/W16 Gucci collection was spruced up with graffitied logos. The insignia came from the hand of Trevor “Trouble” Andrew; graffiti artist/partner of Santigold/general Renaissance man, otherwise known as Guccighost. “Everyone said, ‘They’re going to sue you,’” Andrew explains, “but Alessandro got the message. He thought, ‘This guy is obsessed with Gucci, I want to work with him.’”
For Andrew, it was the DIY skate scene that opened his eyes to pen-in-hand self-expression. “I liked it because there are no rules,” he says. The Guccighost tag started life when Andrew cut eye-holes in some Gucci fabric and wandered about the streets of Brooklyn shouting his namesake to passersby. Andrew would later tag the GG symbol on bins and bathrooms around New York. “I was creating my own perception of where Gucci could go,” he says. The team-up with Gucci is a dream come true: “To work with a big brand like Gucci is like being acknowledged by the president.” That the likes of Beyoncé are wearing the GG coat is amazing, too. “I had the jacket on yesterday and it smelt like Beyoncé.” What does she smell like? “A floral scent. It’s really nice.” guccighost.com
