style cravings

Thierry Mugler CTR 1997

Amazing!!

via Fashion Addict Diary

hussein chalayan's dark beauty

Hussein Chalayan  A/W 2007
all photos via style.com

Reinvigorate yourself by watching the Paris runway video of Chalayan's stunning (as usual) Fall 07 collection.

via Hussein Chalayan

felipe oliveira baptista's sci-fi chic

Designer:  Felipe Oliveira Baptista    via cafe mode

All this space travel talk has me in a futuristic mood. While Balenciaga's metallic leggings may be a bit difficult for hopping in and out of cabs, Portuguese designer Felipe Oliveira Baptista has some perfect summer dresses. Let it be said though, I am not one who believes that fashion must be limited to 'wearability.'  I would gladly don Balenciaga's metallic trouser ensemble for a cocktail party...comfort is secondary to imagination!

Balenciaga  SS07    photo: style.com

flapper jazz

6267   SS 07

Yes, the dress over trouser trend is wearing out its welcome, but an accidental link to Refinery 29's archives led me to a fresh, contemporary take on this trend by the Milanese label, 6267, designed by Roberto Rimondi and Tommaso Aquilano, who gave it a jazzy flapper makeover. Intrigued by the exquisite looseness, sharp cuts and iridescent satin fabric, I headed to style.com for more.

6267 SS07

photos via Refinery29, style.com

space travel: ss07 balenciaga chic

PARIS, October 3, 2006 –         "I was thinking of robotic articulation. Car parts. Droids. A boyish silhouette…" said Nicolas Ghesquière before he was dragged off to sort out a last-minute glitch. Moments later, his incredible futuristic vision was out of the gate: elongated black jackets with a double-layered shoulder line; cyber-goddess dresses jigsawed from patent leather; space-crew shirts with high white collars. Within seconds, the message in these refined, precision-judged looks was sending chills through an audience that five minutes earlier had been on the point of meltdown from heat. Was it worth the wait? Without a doubt. Like last season's Balenciaga retrospective triumph, this is a collection that will reset the fashion agenda, but in a different way.

Ghesquière said he'd been watching The Terminator, and 1982's Tron, the first blockbuster to combine computer animation with real actors, but that's by-the-by. What's special about these clothes is the way the designer brings his distinctively Parisian, perfectionist genius for cut and exceptional fabric into the consciousness of high-tech culture. It's not one monolithic look, easily captured in a comic-strip subtitle. Ghesquière's intense shows work through a half-dozen separate ideas linked in sequence. This time he moved from tailoring to shiny "nylon" silk-swathed dresses, to patent-edged shirtdresses, heavily-hewn sculpted leather and crocodile, metallic pantsuits, and finally to the coup de grâce: astonishing combinations of drapey silk-print tunics and gleaming bronze or gold metal robot-leggings, embroidered with futuristic paillettes.

If last season's vastly influential Balenciaga collection looked back, this one projects forward into a new era for the house Ghesquière is fast defining as his own. There is no sense of a lurch, because these ideas of space-age fantasy have always been on a slow burn in his work—along with the attenuated line and his deftness with technique. With this collection, he leapt ahead. It's true that thoughts of space-age robo-women have been circulating already this season, as well as reminders that the likes of Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier went there in the eighties, but it takes a major talent like Nicolas Ghesquière to turn a literal reference into something that is light years from pastiche.

– Sarah Mower         

via style.com