Modeling the world

The final day of Paris Fashion Week yesterday saw three very dissimilar shows from Louis Vuitton, Miu Miu and Hermès as the three labels showcased their Spring/Summer 11 collections.

Louis Vuitton was camp, colorful and fancy. The show began with cabaret-style red velvet curtains drawing back to disclose another pair of sparkly tiger-print ones, from which models showed between three stuffed tigers.

The chic black marble catwalk hosted models in fringed 1920s-style flapper dresses and tailored coats in profligate block colors such as red, purple, pink and gold.

Gorgeous accessories included jeweled shoulder and clutch bags in citrus shades such as orange and yellow, and regal tones as well as turquoise and gold.

The animal theme continued with sequin pandas printed on tunic tops, zebra-print dresses and giraffes showing on the back of stunning white silk trouser suits.

Meanwhile, Miu Miu’s show was all about celebrity and ambition, with stars such as Dakota Fanning and Alexa Chung on the front row.

Paris Fashion Week is doing much more for the plus-size model movement than New York Fashion Week, where the only distinguished plus-size model casting was Crystal Renn at Z-Spoke.

Jean Paul Gaultier, who has become known for casting Renn in his runway shows and present fall 2010 campaign, cast Beth Ditto to open and close his show Saturday. Renn was one of the few extra plus-size models on the runway.

Gaultier told reporters after the show, what counts is personality; there is not just the one form of typecast beauty. This collection’s pleats can be worn by any size and settle in to different body shapes.

British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, for one, is strenuous of “shock” casting. She told the Guardian, “Instead of a fuss being made about a little cause célèbre exceptions on the catwalk, what I’d actually like in its place is for most models to be a size 10 rather than a size 8.”

John Galliano’s devotion to a theme is only one of the immense things about the man. He got so into the sailing, tropical theme for his spring 2011 Dior show, which walked this morning in Paris, that he took his bow wearing a pirate outfit, his hair in two beach-perfect fishtail braids. Those plaits were only one scrap of the excitement!

The models, some of whom wore leis, worked their small sailor hats by giving salutes at the end of the runway, which was made to appear like a rusty slipway. The girls appeared at the other end from a set that looked like a desert island.

Little flowers germinated toward the floor from the crocheted middle of one, looking almost like Christmas-tree ornaments poised by tentacles. Some skirts resembled grass hula styles, creation the show seem at times just a coconut bra away from a no-food luau.

But the most exciting thing about this collection is that it ties rather to the mermaid theme that’s been teetering on the edge of full fashion-world acceptance for concerning a year. As soon as a celebrity cool goes out in a seashell bra, the ‘maids will in fact be in business.

Fashion designer Catherine Walker, a pet of Diana, Princess of Wales, has died at the age of 65, her family said.

She fought a long battle with cancer previous to passing away at a hospital near her Sussex home on Thursday.

Born in France, Walker made a name for herself in Britain as one of the country’s foremost couture designers.

She provided Diana with numerous of her most iconic outfits, having first worked with her three months following her wedding to Prince Charles in 1981. The Princess was buried in a black dress designed by Walker that she had bought in the weeks important up to her death.

In a statement, her family said: Catherine Walker conquer young widowhood and fought cancer twice with enduring bravery.

She built one of the most victorious British couture brands and at the same time increased a loving family. Catherine Walker has dressed many of the world’s most gorgeous women.

Long ago, in a far-off land called the 1970s, the fashion spreads in magazines for young teens utilized to be drawn, not photographed. I loved those drawings, of tall, slender, elegant creatures, all with precisely the same faces, figures and hair, in absolutely fitting, perfectly draping clothes.

At the time, I thought extends were drawn because the women they depicted were too unfeasibly idealized to exist in real life. Last Saturday, the vastly rated stylist Katie Grand recreated those 70s drawings precisely, using real women, and real clothes, for London Fashion Week’s Topshop Unique catwalk show. I’d forgotten the drawings until I saw them brought to life, similar to weird magic, like amazing out of the Nutcracker.

Now I appreciate that the 70s presentation of teenage fashion was now a much cheaper and less labour-intensive way of doing things, back when fashion wasn’t fairly the huge British industry it is now.

In 1970, Grand could incredibly well have been drawing clothes manufactured in Britain. In 2010, she commands a massive budget and loads of staff, to show clothes manufactured abroad to an audience of writers and photographers employed to clarify them. Forty years of profound economic shift, all summarized on one catwalk.