SARA SAMPAIO AND SHANINA SHAIK WEAR RALPH & RUSSO TO THE VICTORIA'S SECRET PINK CARPET

9th November 2018

 Sara Sampaio and Shanina Shaik stunned in Ralph & Russo at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show After Party last night in New York City.

 Victoria's Secret Angel, Sara Sampaio, wears a silver mirrored strapless mini dress featuring hexagonal laser cut stones and square crystals from the Spring/Summer 2019 Ready-to-Wear collection.

 Model, Shanina Shaik, wears a petrol satin bustier hand embroidered with silk thread, crystals and glass beads, with a pale pink tulle overlay skirt adorned with metallic floral thread-work from the Autumn/Winter 2017 Couture collection.

Chloe Paris Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019 : Hippies

What you see is what you get at Chloé, and the tactic seems to work with a new fan base, who rocked up to the show in head-to-toe looks. The collection, Ramsay-Levi explained, was divided into three parts: nomadic (a buzzword this season), “old Ibiza,” and finally the goddess dresses that closed the show, inspired by Pasolini’s Medea. Her de-intellectualisation of fashion is interesting in that it’s in no way uninformed or silly, just miles away from the complicated and sometimes wanky narratives in which so many designers love to indulge. It makes for instantly shoppable fashion that needs no dissecting, analysis, or interpretation. Other, of course, than why Ramsay-Levi chose the reference in the first place? “I love hippies and I think it’s a great counter-culture. It’s inspiring still today because it’s people who reboot to a new zero; an idea of how you can reinvent life, your link to sensuality, to community. I think it’s still very relevant and I want to bring it to the city.” 

In times that can easily feel apocalyptic – global warming, wars and refugees, species dying out – you can understand why people would want to reflect the peace, love and harmony of the original flower children. If a new gang of modernist hippies ever need a symbol for their cause, Ramsay-Levi delivered it in big golden ‘C’ – for Chloé – logo buckles adorning the copious amounts of bags featured in the show. In a Paris Fashion Week that sees the return of Hedi Slimane to the runway tomorrow, when he takes the reins at the newly-styled Celine, it was hard not to think of the C bag he has just launched for that house.

Maison Margiela Paris Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019: An homege to the mutinists

Today’s show was an homage to the mutinists: the non-conformist line-up of faces which John Galliano has appointed to front his new fragrance (Teddy Quinlivan, Sasha Lane, Willow Smith, Hanne Gaby Odiele, Princess Nokia and Molly Bair). But also to the people he now surrounds himself with on daily basis. Contradicting the idea of a designer in an ivory tower, Galliano populates the Margiela atelier with students on work experience placements: the small team of stagiaires who assist on his collections is involved in the entire process of its creation, as well as opening his eyes to their ways of seeing the world. He is a fervid Instagrammer, seeking out young people like Javier de la Blanca to collaborate with – “Obsessed… obsessed!” he exclaims, on his seasonally-released podcast. “The freedom! The shapes he’s throwing!” – and invites them into his world (he flew Javier in from Spain to walk his runway to express the “attitude, individuality and defiance” that Galliano so loves about him).

It is that open-mindedness, that earnest, expressive liberation that permeated this collection so tangibly. John Galliano’s career has been fraught with various difficulties, but since joining Margiela he has reconnected with the excitable spirit of his youth, with the vitality he felt upon arriving at Central Saint Martins and finding his people, both there and in the clubs of Soho. “The whole world changed when I found likeminded people; that’s when I started to connect,” he recalled. “[My mutinists] being who they really are is something that I find really inspiring because for so long I couldn’t be who I wanted to be… That’s why now, when I see such self-expression, it’s a joy for me.”

Moved to Paris : Gucci Spring Summer 2019

It’s been 30 years since Jean Paul Gaultier put men in skirts here in Paris, but the image of the male body in a dress is no less stigmatised in the public forum today, even if we like to think so. That’s why the moment when Michele sent out a buzz-cut boy with tattoos and tennis socks in a slinky baroque-print scarf dress and a big backpack felt momentous. In this age of gender fluidity, a man in a dress should be the most insignificant thing to us, but it still got the camera phones going like no other look in the collection. It was great. It helped to fuel Michele’s most sexually loaded collection to date, which had men in super lowcut leotards and leather and rhinestone dance belt cups – in most sinister Clockwork Orange style – and opened with a horror short film that featured a man and a woman torching their tongues with a lighter over a bidet. Must have been Monday.

GUCCI SPRING SUMMER 2019

Gucci moved its presentation to the first evening of the Paris shows to close a French trilogy that started with a pre-fall collection shot in Paris locations significant to 1968 and took out the Alyscamps cemetery in Arles for its cruise show. Alessandro Michele’s choice of venue, the fabled Le Palace nightclub and theatre in Montmartre – so gritty and dusty Gucci had to change the carpet – was a perfectly suitable choice for his underground elves. But it was the noticeable progress of Michele’s plentiful shtick and his bold styling moves that made this collection more compelling than his usual theatre.

It was in homage to Leo and Perla, who didn’t just have the best cat names ever but set Italian experimental theatre on fire with their provocative takes on Shakespeare in the 1960s. Michele’s typically indecipherable show notes came with much ado about Leo de Berardinis and Perla Peragallo, but their impact on the collection seemed to be rooted in the confrontational, the alluring and the highly sexualised. Those tendencies were an unexpected and great move on Michele’s part; more of that, please, sir. “I realised something when I was going back to my room,” he said after the curtain had closed on his theatre and bows were taken.

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Paris Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019: Christian Dior

It was her first time at that rodeo, but not for the fashion industry, which has so often mixed performance art and runway shows to cringeworthy lows. Perhaps that’s what made this one so thrilling. Rarely has any foreign element in a fashion show been so entrancing, or added as much character to a collection as the one Chiuri commissioned from Sharon Eyal’s dance company this afternoon, in a dimmed tent in Bois de Boulogne. Maybe it’s because it wasn’t trying to be poignant. Rather, it was energised, spirited, ravishing and totally transfixing. You could have sat there all day getting shivers watching those racehorse bodies tripping and floating like they were trapped somewhere between underwater weightlessness and on fire, white rose petals dropping from the ceiling in thousand-fold. The soundtrack was amazing and hard to describe.

“I’m lucky to open the week. There’s only another show tonight,” Chiuri said, referring to Paris Fashion Week’s special guest star Gucci, who would have opened the ball had Dior not moved its show to Monday afternoon; not that it wouldn’t look as mesmerising on Tuesday at 2.30. “Because during fashion week the shows go by so fast and sometimes you lose the experience. And now, with the new media, you see the show through a phone. So, it’s important to convey the idea of us living in the moment. I hope that with this performance we can create something that people want to experience and get involved with us. Not behind a phone,” Chiuri paused. “Probably I dream!” (Indeed, putting on a mind-blowing dance performance isn’t exactly the way to make us stop Instagramming.) “I try to speak more about experience and less about just clothes,” she said. “We are speaking about the future of fashion. Something more. Fashion is not the same as when I started out. We are living in another moment.”

Jacquemus Spring Summer 2019 : Mediterranean

Jacquemus’ brand has been built off the back of his South of France heritage, and through channeling the insouciant sensuality of the women he grew up admiring. This season hardly rocked the boat - he explored his Riviera fantasy, of women “going to the casino on the seashore, dancing, drinking cocktails” – but it made for as lovely a vision as ever. “I’m a South of France boy; I never want to say anything about Paris. I want to say something about the Mediterranean,” he shrugged. “On the Riviera, you can dress the same to go to the beach as you do the red carpet and that mix is exciting to me.” 

The artfully-undone beach-to-bar pieces he presented made a convincing case for his sustained interest – and, paired with glitzy earrings and wedges dangling plastic Js from their soles, were Italo disco through and through. Remember that scene in Call Me By Your Name, when an assortment of beautiful Lombardy teenagers lose themselves to Psychedelic Furs? Camille Hurel, dressed in her hot pink hot pants and slinky silky halter could have been pulled directly from the cast. 

Milan Fashion Week : Marni Spring Summer 2019

There is no better way of describing what has gone on chez Marni since Risso took the reins there some two years ago. Like a mad scientist, he blows our minds on Sunday mornings in Milan, continuing his gothic stories of eccentric, dystopian creatures in garments that look like they were ripped from the tapestries of fabled old houses. He is a master of his own entirely idiosyncratic game, and that’s the best position any designer could find themselves in. (Huge credit to Renzo Rosso, his boss at OTB, for placing designers like Risso and John Galliano at the fashion houses he owns, Maison Margiela included. We need them.) It’s a treat to the eye, from the truly soulful garments to the fanciful sets. This season, the All Too Humanexhibition at Tate Britain where Risso became enthralled with nudes in bedroom settings by painters like Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville, inspired a massive communal bedchamber where beds doubled as seats.

“They felt so strong and so visceral,” he said of the paintings, “and that power to the body suggested sculptures.” He worked those in through said prints, filtering in his Frankenstein reference in ghoulishly-stitched leather bustiers and ripped lace numbers. If it sounds literal it’s because it was, but Risso’s canvas can handle it. There’s no such thing as basic in his world, often for the fact that his garments are so openly unravelling anyway. “It’s classicism with metamorphosis still in progress. You have to imagine the painters work on the canvas: it’s about trials and mistakes before getting to the sculpture and the marble. And that becomes the work itself,” he pointed out. “Drapes that are subtracted, shapes that are added, and vice versa. Fingertips that are throwing living tempera onto the pieces; and so these situates, they become alive. They bloom.”

Etro Milan Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019 : Sufer girls

For this spring collection, unveiled in a week when Etro, in celebration of its 50th birthday, is also putting on an exhibition at Milan’s MUDEC museum, the holiday vibe was literal. Etro took the surfer girl - albeit primed for a 5-star vacation - as her muse, and threw some paisley-patterned surfboards down the catwalk, plus a real life champion surfer, the implausibly beautiful Victoria Vergara, to up the street cred.

Surfer girls seem to have seeped into fashion’s collective consciousness this season, most obviously at Calvin Klein, but also at Prada (those knitted surfer bootie/sandal hybrids) and Michael Kors (sunset printed knits) but none was as literal as Etro’s take. Sun-kissed and ready-salted, this was a holiday wardrobe heading on a Pacific jaunt with pit stops in California, Hawaii, and Japan. It comprised racks of zesty-coloured silk pyjama sets and crochet mini dresses, as well as towelling ponchos and patchwork cardigans to throw over sunburnt shoulders. Shells dripped from earrings and necks, wrists and ankles, lingering above little surf shoes and brocade slides. Evening options abounded - embroidered and patterned wrap dresses plus chiffon pleated ankle-grazers. “Good vibes,” was Etro’s verdict.

Milan Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019 : Tod's

This made the highlight of today’s Tod’s show - a roomy, paper-thin leather shirt dress on the Italian Vittoria Ceretti - an altogether more impressive feat. Leather shirts don’t exactly scream “warm weather staple” but in the handling of the Tod’s team, specifically rendered in a peachy pink and worn with flat sandals, it looked just the thing for the front row, many of whom have been surprised by the sweltering heat this week in sunny Italy.

Elsewhere, the design team majored in a preppy, Italian-who’s-switched-Capri-for-the-Hamptons aesthetic that combined practicality with a modish luxury. Leather pants were cut slim and cropped at the ankle. Suede jackets with energising stripes sat neatly above politely slit pencil skirts. Most of the shoes were flat, acessorized with exuberant sprays of tassels, which lent a no-nonsense air to the collection. Shirt dresses were tailored and cinched at the waist with an attractive Tod’s signature, the double T belt, or wrapped from the waist down. The bags had silver slicks of hardware and plaited loop handles, sometimes in raffia, that perfectly summed up the season’s swoon for handicraft.

London Fashion Week Review : David Koma Spring Summer 2019

What sounds like it could be a recipe for chaos actually appeared thoroughly cohesive: rather than going full Carmen Miranda, Koma simply integrated a new dynamism into his modernist aesthetic and applied top-stitched flounces to scuba-style dresses; explored fishtail silhouettes and plenty of peplums. He is a very good technician, and some particularly good dresses, formed from vertically striped silk tulle, swung at the skirt with remarkable grace; the application of hand-stitched disks offered twinkling glitz to the show-stopping numbers (it’s a skill to make that much embellishment appear so ethereally light).

This season was Koma’s first segue into full-length gowns, and surely his customer base is simply wondering what took him so long – his woman is the sort who has plenty of occasion for them. While they might be more likely to wear them atop a yacht than to a juerga, his dresses packed plenty of punch – and their flocked polka dots will make for a good conversation starter at the inevitably abundant trunk shows to follow.

VIVETTA Milan Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019

Vivetta has created a technicolor dream for its SS19 collection, pastel tones with fairytale, visionary fantasy, infused with an eccentric and enchanting glamour, painted in delicate hues with irony and grace.Candid swans rest on small tunics in painted inlay macramé, or on long romantic crocheted dresses; knots of blackberries in Swarovski crystals, glisten on impalpable cape dresses like clouds of degradé tulle; pretty butterflies seem to palpitate on fragile tulle bodices embroidered by hand with fringes of beads and feathers, which bloom on taffeta skirts thickly pleated as corollas of flowers grown in a fabulous greenhouse, or accompany denim trousers richly decorated with precious jewel-like embroidery.A pop rainbow, inspired by Peter Max’s 70s psychedelic graphics, illuminates suits in Nappa leather, inlaid with eccentrically Western flavour; wide skirts in sumptuous taffeta or dust coats with Elizabethan sleeves veiled by a puff of tulle are studded with magical galaxies of shiny stars.Bouquets of hydrangeas bloom on mini-dresses draped in technical organza with a liquid effect, enriched with frills and rosettes, seducing in their theatrical yet simultaneously naive glamour; fanciful blooms decorate fluffy pouf skirts worn with candid poplin shirts or balloon dresses  light like meringues.

This collection is an invitation to play together - says Vivetta Ponti, founder and designer of the brand - In my illusory and smiling world grace and fantasy triumph. As if a spell transfigured the reality, making it magical. A surreal short film that never fails the happy ending.A warm, childish sense of humour lies like a breath on the striped poplin dresses in sweet macaron shades; draped tunics are created by transforming classic men’s shirts, whose sleeves become pleated skirts or whose cuffs are wrapped around necklines - as well as contrasting bows on clean poplin blouses or cut-out inlays on palazzo trousers revealing the outline of a face.Vivetta invites us to take part in this game of illusions and smiles, in this world where grace and fantasy triumph, in a reality that, transfigured in some spell, becomes magical and surreal as in a film with a happy ending.

Styling by Georgia Tal

Production & Direction by RANDOM

Casting by Caterina Matteucci @CM Casting

Hair by Beppe D’Elia using l’Oreal Professional for Beautick

Make up by Beautick

Nails by MH artist

Music by Dorian Grey

Sunglasses by Poppy Lissiman

Prada Milan Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019 : Two opposites

Miuccia Prada wanted to represent the clash between these two opposites. That’s what’s happening in the reality out there.” She may have had to rejig a few proposals in recent seasons to get her company’s growth back in the game. A few reissued classics. Banana shirts everyone’s wearing. Something for the fans. Now she’s up by nine percent compared to three last year, but her time in the spotlight is never going to be about that. Mrs Prada is at heart a tastemaker, but her ambitions reach much further than influencing what handbag you might want to buy next season. This collection was pure politics. She detected the cliché codes of the left and the right. Tie dye vs. crystal embellishment. Swimsuit tops vs. chiffon blouses. Miniskirts vs. tennis skirts. T-shirts vs. duchess silk skirts.

The latter combo made up her favourite looks in the collection: a literal meeting between casual and formal, or liberal and conservative. “I tried to break the rules,” she said, and she wasn’t simply referring to formal codes. “When it’s too much no one will embrace it: too much fantasy, too much craziness…” It made for a certain drabness, no doubt influenced by Mrs Prada’s political mood. Sometimes she doubled up on the same codes – classic with classic, irreverent with irreverent – in the search of “something new,” a key objective in the challenge of retaining the revenue that’s back on track for her company. The dainty nylon cabans, swimwear-style cut-out knitwear, or the somewhat heart-shaped red handbags were all viable contenders for next-season big sellers, while Prada’s prints tend to hit a homerun with existing fan bases. She introduced tie dye and psychedelic motifs on skirts and minidresses, alongside a vintage print with silhouettes of women and men. And there was a fair amount of youth to the affair, in cutesy baby doll dresses, Alice bands, and tops cut like swimsuits; not to mention the branding that makes millennial hearts grow fonder. 

Fendi Milan Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019

Fendi is one of the houses to flex its visual brand value in a major way over recent seasons, catering to young generations’ thirst for prized possessions like branded bags, trainers and even socks. Logos that used to belong mainly on accessories and the odd T-shirt are now sprinkled over everything from hoodies to skirts by the bucket load, effectively making garments hot commodities on par with leather goods, price tags very much in tow. This season Karl Lagerfeld and Silvia Venturini Fendi took that development one step further. Instead of letting the clothes inform the bags, they worked the other way around, “looking at things from a different perspective,” as Silvia said.“We wanted to have functional clothing. Not just for occasion. We wanted something for everyday life: the normal woman, the active woman. A real wardrobe,” she explained. Adwoa opened the show in a transparent coat with bonded brown leather panels and pockets, which was literally the garment take on the bag she was holding. Edie modelled a tan leather coat with multi pockets moulded into the leather as if it were a utility bag. And Kendall sported the Gen Z trend for wearing a bum bag over the shoulder, pairing it with an oversized white utility jacket with massive pockets embossed with Fendi’s double-F logo. “It’s very much about real life. As women we have these big bags and you can’t find your phone and it’s ringing,” Silvia illustrated, giving particular attention to all the mobile phone and key sized pockets that appeared on garments, belts and bags. The idea might be universally appealing but the clothes seemed aimed at no one more than the young generations and their love of branded accessories.

Milan Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019 : Max Mara

The British creative director at Max Mara had been reading retellings of ancient Greek mythology, told from the perspective of the previously marginalised or maligned women in the tales. Classics rewritten - that’s Griffiths’ task every season. This was a study in shades of brown and beige, a big colour card for spring, not least due to Riccardo Tisci’s slate-cleaning exercise at Burberry. “She’s one part amazon, one part ocean goddess,” said Griffiths, of his Max Mara woman. He talked backstage of “arming her” for the city with one-shouldered silhouettes, vinyl pencil skirts and sheath dresses, and bags slung decisively across the body. Also enlisted were curious snap-fastened leg-warmers and chic headscarves paired with bug-eyed sunglasses. He was thinking, too, about the weather, “because it’s so unpredictable. England had a hot summer but we had rain every day in July in Italy.” Today’s women need an arsenal of coats: a trench, in polka-dotted gabardine, perhaps; a parka, daffodil yellow (inspired by Mediterranean sunshine); a pea coat, in biscuity wool. But this collection’s Golden Fleece? A buttery soft leather trench in conker brown or rich olive.

Milan Fashion Week : Alberta Ferretti Spring Summer 2019

The Ferretti woman has got a jumbo crochet rucksack slung over her lemon-hued, broderie anglaise jumpsuit. There’s are some cargo pants in a hyper-flattering shade of khaki stashed in there, too, plus a pair of pink dungarees, to be worn strictly over a bikini. For nights sampling the local cocktails, she’s got a rainbow plissé chiffon maxi dress on standby, with a pale peach slip dress also in the running. Days hiking through lush landscapes will be spent in flight pants and T-shirts; lazy beach afternoons will culminate in crochet leggings and pastel-hued crop tops. If the mood takes her, she might pull on a pale orange suit in a mannish cut or a smart pair of trousers with a paper-bag waist. But she’ll be saving that for the city - these are clothes to holiday in, have fun in, really live in.

Jil Sander Milan Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019

That texture clash produced some compelling results that looked to comprise what the front row is calling “the Phoebe audition” - a bid to capture the hearts and wallets of Philo’s acolytes. There were indeed several looks that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Céline catwalk: a beautifully cut black jumpsuit, a crochet dress with a fringed wool trim, generously cut, wide-leg trousers in slightly awkward shades.

But that would be a reductive way to sum up a collection that was exacting in its attempt to major in elegant wearability. The Meiers have been gently pushing the boundaries of the stiff, sober, intellectual Jil Sander woman since they started, turning out beautifully made clothes that possess a quiet femininity, what Lucie, with her Dior couture house training, calls “warmth”. Their starting point was uniforms, which led to thoughts of boxers and ballerinas, “people who are wearing the same clothes every day to focus on getting better at something,” explained Luke. “We were interested in the moment when all that training and rigidity goes out the window, the moment when they have to perform. Boxing and ballet are both rigid, sober disciplines, but in the moment of performance there’s a release - they’re very free.” Thus, strict boxy jackets were paired with short plissé skirts; crisp coated cotton market dresses with soft leather boxing boots. Straight shirts with chunky cuffs, a slinky navy tabard worn over wide-legged trousers, a black origami-crisp satin wrap dress all looked delightfully easy to pull off. Equally appealing were the chic boxy patent bags that looked like briefcases . 

London Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019: Tisci's Burberry

It was an interesting point of departure for a fashion institution of a country so rooted in classes and subcultures that those of us, who emigrated here basically needed a handbook to understand them all upon arrival. Posh, middle-class, "chav" and all those terms have esoterically British definitions, and often sensitive ownerships. In that sense, Tisci’s ambitions were very much in keeping with contemporary waves around the world seeking to unify us all across cultures and identities. But it’s a strategy that’s also undeniably focused on markets, something to which Tisci has to cater way more at a major brand like Burberry than in his former career at Givenchy. In his final collections for Burberry, Christopher Bailey increasingly zoned in on the streetwear that gets the millennial credit cards going. Tisci wanted more than that. 

“I was the first one to bring streetwear into fashion,” he said, referring to Givenchy. “Now I think fashion has gone too street. You can dress the mother, dress the daughter. Why have just one entity when you can propose for every age, every culture; different lifestyles?” His philosophy generated a something-for-everyone collection of 133 exits, stretching from professional uniforms for the bourgeois executive to directional statement dressing and streetwear for the new generations, and sophisticated glamour for those with glitz in the diary.

London Fashion Week : Erdem Spring Summer 2019

The designer liked “the idea of people in a very conservative time, dressing to be who they were,” noting that Fanny and Stella weren’t actually convicted. “They were acquitted.” It reminded him of the Victorians’ fascination with the unusual: the things that contradicted the buttoned-up austerity of their time. Enticed, he visited the National Portrait Gallery – where his show also took place – to look at its photography collection of cross-dressers in the 19th century. His research informed a collection of Victorian extremes: the really, really feminine contrasted by the tall, dark and masculine. “I loved the idea of taking these Victorian proportions and blowing them up. I wondered what Stella and Fanny would be like if they lived today; if they lived near King’s Cross,” he said. He reflected the notion in set-in puff sleeves and an acute sense of flouncy, bow-y prettification of dresses, juxtaposed by double-breasted tailoring and men’s coats (or at least what that meant before the ongoing evolution of gender codes and pronouns). On the backdrop of the National Portrait Gallery, the collection made you feel like you were living inside those paintings on the wall. “You couldn’t quite tell if some of the girls were boys and some of the boys were girls,” he said of the show, even if that wasn’t totally the case.

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Victoria Beckham London Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019

 Like the other queen of England, she is the institution and the institution is her. Superstars have commissioned their own clothes through the ages, but no one quite to the degree of Beckham. The last decade has been an educational expedition for her own identity, and for the fans she now calls customers. She has taken her original followers with her on a modern-day grand tour from brand obsessive to fashion fan and now industry insider; her references have evolved from “some great dresses” to “these are our codes” and now find themselves connected to the art world, ooh la-la. “I stumbled upon a few pieces of her work,” Beckham said casually in a preview, referring to Nicola Tyson, whose painting Blue Knickers from 2008 informed the palette of her anniversary collection this Sunday morning, Back to Life on the sound system.

But that’s just one example. Early this summer, she hosted an Old Masters exhibition in her Dover Street Store, and today’s show took place in the gallery next door. 10 and 20 years ago, we would have laughed at that prospect, but Beckham did it: she mutated from segment to segment, keeping her personality intact. She’s got self-irony. She’s in touch with her past. Not ashamed, but celebratory. And this Holland Park gallery-goer is no snob. “It’s not a retrospective of the last 10 years. In any way,” Beckham asserted. “There’s no particular season that has inspired the collection. What we realised looking back on the last 10 years is that we’ve established some really strong codes. So, what you see in the collection is masculine/feminine, celebration of the female form, colour; strong codes,” she said. “But definitely not a retrospective.” Alright, then! No looking back! Point taken! And full steam ahead has kind of been Beckham’s motto in life, even if she embraces her former lives.

London Fashion Week Spring Summer 2019 : Ports 1961

Woven crochet dresses with beaded details were crying out for Ibizan shores; sharply tailored suiting - a Natasa Cagalj specialty - demanded Speedy Boarding. Also tempting were the jersey dresses, ruched at the hips, and the floor-skimming slips overlaid with a network of woven cords, left to fly loose from the bust down.The Philo-shaped gap in fashion’s current line-up has created an opportunity for minimalists with a crafty bent, and Cagalj staked her claim on the territory convincingly. Utilitarian coats in navy, khaki and sand looked ideal city cover-ups, while sharp blazers in placid blues and pebbly greys, and gently oversized cuts, were serious contenders for this season’s go-anywhere jacket. Lots to like here.