Movie costumes I have loved: Pepper Potts in the Iron Man franchise.

Thanks to Tumblr, I'm absorbing way more promo material for the new Avengers movie than I otherwise would. Which isn't to say that I'm not psyched about The Avengers (I am!) but I'm definitely thinking about it more than expected. Effective marketing, you guys! (N.B. The most effective marketing of all is Clark Gregg's Twitter -- ie, the guy who plays the Men In Black-style Agent Coulson in the Thor and Iron Man movies. Seriously. He's awesome.) Anyhow, today I was thinking about Pepper Potts, and how much I love her.

One of my favourite things about Pepper Potts is how terrible the character seems on paper. She's the PA to a self-destructive billionaire playboy who regularly ignores her advice and almost gets her blown up on multiple occasions. She stays with him because she loves him. He bribes her with expensive shoes whenever he's done something especially atrocious. Now, from that description the Tony/Pepper relationship sounds all kinds of awful, like some dire Mad Men/Miss Moneypenny throwback to the days when mainstream films didn't have to keep their rampant misogyny on the down-low. But the surprising reality is that Tony and Pepper are one of the most charming and engaging onscreen superhero couples ever, and that's mostly down to the casting. I mean, it's widely agreed that Robert Downey Jr basically is Tony Stark. Did you see his and Gwyneth's Tony/Pepper-in-all-but-name routine at the Oscars this year? Perfection.

Their couple-name is Pepperony. Almost as good as Peeta/Katniss from The Hunger Games = Peeniss!

I didn't realise it until after Iron Man 2, but Gwyneth Paltrow is really inspired casting for this role. Obviously her performance is engaging and she has great chemistry with RDJ, but physically speaking she really just... looks like the kind of person Pepper Potts would be.

Watching any blockbuster movie requires a certain level of disbelief-suspension just in order to accept that a bunch of people who look like movie stars are anything other than movie stars. How likely is it that every member of the X-Men is coincidentally going to look like Hugh Jackman or Halle Berry? I'm not seriously complaining about movie stars looking hot, but I'm still not wild about the fact that outside of chick-flicks there's rarely much acknowledgement of the fact that maintaining those looks is damn hard work. In real life, Scarlett Johansson is probably given free cosmetics and designer clothes on a regular basis, has a personal trainer and spends an hour in the makeup chair before filming, but her character in Iron Man 2 is a government agent who receives none of these benefits yet still looks like Scarlett Johansson.

Everyone knows that being a successful Hollywood actress hinges on image and appearance, but most of the time when a character played by one of those actresses is shown spending the same amount of time and effort on her appearance then she's portrayed as being neurotic or a bitch. I'm sure that any hardened pop-culture feminists reading this are now rolling their eyes because this isn't news, but it does bear repeating.

Gwyneth Paltrow is openly obsessed with the kind of New Age remedies and diets that a) often sound like nonsensical pseudoscience, and b) exclude everyone who can't afford juice cleanse ingredients and yoga retreats. But the flip side is: unlike the many women in the public eye who feel pressured to claim they look like poreless works of art without any outside intervention, Gwyneth talks about the effort she puts into maintaining her sylphlike figure. She's practically the poster-girl for weird famous-person dieting, and works out for several hours a day.

For Pepper Potts, this is perfect. She's a "career woman" (please feel free to imagine obnoxious finger-quotes around that particular phrase), and if she'd been portrayed as another female character who "just happens" to be stunningly attractive then she immediately would've been less authentic. Because Pepper probably does diet and spend intimidating amounts of money on pedicures and facials. Not only is looking good a job requirement for someone who has to be the sane face of Stark Industries whenever Tony's off getting wasted on a private island or crashing a robot into the Chrysler building, but I'd also guess that she just likes looking pretty. I find it oddly heartwarming to see, for once, a character in a comicbook movie who is acknowledged as being feminine and girly but not mocked for it or relegated to a damsel role. She's the kind of person who relaxes by going to the spa, which is vanishingly rare among the hero characters in geek/genre narratives.

I'm so used to being bombarded with token female characters like Megan Fox's sex-object role in Transformers that I end up overvaluing characters like Natalie Portman's Jane Foster in Thor, just because she wears sweaters and plaid shirts like a Normal. By superhero movie standards Jane Foster is a great character, but when I compare her to Pepper Potts, I can't help thinking... isn't it a little disingenuous to suggest that Natalie Portman looks like a workaholic physicist who lives in a trailer in the desert, on a diet of Pop Tarts and cereal? This isn't so much a criticism of Jane Foster (whom I loved) as a personal qualm I have about the trope of "normal"-looking female characters being played by world-famous beauties. When it comes to female beauty and its relationship with makeup/vanity (oh, the good old "natural-look makeup" debate) there are already about fifteen levels of backlash.

Closely related to this is Hollywood's love of casting extremely thin women, an action that's frequently followed up by a shrilly defensive exclamation of, "But she eats like a horse!" -- Case in point Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a character who lives off energy drinks and oven pizza but is portrayed by an actress who was more-or-less ordered not to eat for the duration of filming. I feel like although Pepper is an unusually slim person, there's a tacit acknowledgement that she's not among the ranks of the Salander-like "I eat like a horse!" characters, and that's partly due to casting.

from here.

In her role as the other side of Tony's coin, Pepper dresses the way the head of Stark Industries should be dressing, even before she's promoted to CEO. Thanks to the boardroom uniform of two-piece suits it's a lot easier for men to look businesslike than women, but Pepper's an expert. Tony only seems to wear a suit when Pepper picks one out for him, otherwise he'd be perfectly happy to show up at press conferences in the same Styx t-shirt he'd been wearing for the last fifteen hours in the lab. Pepper, on the other hand, is a very careful dresser and has a distinctive style. With the exception of formal/party outfits, everything we see her wear is either black, grey or white, and all of it is very closely tailored. In fact, Pepper's wardrobe is quite similar to what Gwyneth Paltrow wears in real life, which must have been helpful for branding purposes while promoting the films. I recall that during the publicity tour for at least one of the Iron Man movies she wore 5-inch heels for all her interviews and TV appearances, still visually in-character as Pepper.

In the above still from the new Avengers trailer, Pepper's wearing something that looks quite similar to the outfit she wore to the Oscars, with the same type of structured shoulders. The only major difference between Gwyneth's own style and the costumes she wears as Pepper Potts is that Pepper more closely toes the line of suit/office themes. (Seriously, google-image "career woman" some time -- every single picture is a woman wearing a black skirt-suit.) Pepper's costumes are feminine and very chic, but generally incorporate some aspect of the classic suit, such as faux lapels or squared-off shoulders. She's the perfect Vogue-editorial CEO.

Links
Previously on Movie Costumes I Have Loved: A fan's introduction to costume design.
More costume design reviews can be found with my Movie Costumes I Have Loved tag.

Costume design review of Iron Man 2 at the Clothes On Film blog.

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Girl Walk // All Day

I first heard about Anne Marsen via The Good Wife, because I'm the kind of square who learns about viral-video street dance phenomena via TV shows about lawyers. In The Good Wife and, as far as I can tell, in the real world, Anne Marsen is a charming-badass-weird improvisational dancer who combines talent and training with an irresistable aura of total balls-out glee. Marsen started off in classical ballet before she quit and began to study as wide a variety of dance styles as New York City could provide. Girl Wall//All Day, the feature-length dance video inspired by Girl Talk's mashup album All Day, mirrors this journey to a certain extent, with the heroine freaking out during a ballet class and fleeing for the Staten Island Ferry in a jacket stolen from her teacher

All Day by Girl Talk is, first of all, a brilliant album. I'd been listening to it for months before I had any idea that there was an accompanying film, so I can confirm that it stands up on its own. You can download it free from Girl Talk's homepage or (as I prefer, because I'm a geek) listen on Mashup Breakdown, where each component sample is highlighted onscreen while you listen. But Girl Walk//All Day transforms each track into more than just sections of a great album -- they become memorable moments of a narrative. Girl Walk is very much a product of the internet and remix culture: funded on Kickstarter, produced with no official involvement from the creator of the (free to download) mashup album it's based on, and screened on Vimeo.

The jacket The Girl steals from her dance instructor is iconic enough that it was chosen as the logo of the film. She wears it for the first couple of chapters, a symbol of her don't-give-a-fuck attitude, weird and out-of-place as she dances through the crowds at the ferry terminal and out into the city.

One of the things that makes Girl Walk so entertaining is the fact that it embraces the hand-shot Youtube video culture, with all the pitfalls and unscriptable moments of true improvisation. Improv Everywhere's videos (motto: "We Cause Scenes") are so ubiquitously viral that I expect most people reading this will either have seen one, or some kind of advert that plays off the flashmob craze. Successful feel-good viral videos, like jokes, tend to rely on the element of surprise, whether it's fifty people breaking into song in a suburban shopping mall or a girl dancing fearlessly through crowds of tourists and commuters, and Girl Walk manages to sustain this for 72 minutes. And because the audience for a 72-minute improvisational mashup dance movie is most likely made up of the reality TV/Youtube generation, we're invited to notice and accept that yes, the camera person does exist, that this is more like documentary footage than pure fiction. When any of the dancers are further away from the camera, you know for sure that the reactions of the people around them must be genuine, because how could spectators even know they're being filmed? Sometimes the camera will be on one side of the street, filming The Girl as she dances unselfconsciously through the crowds on the other. Most of the participants in this movie are bystanders: laughing, gawking or attempting to ignore the crazy girl dancing to music (it's fairly likely) only she can hear.

The idea of a full-length film of a girl dancing through New York does, I admit, sound a little on the cutesy side. But honestly, even my cynical British self didn't feel a fraction of the discomfort I experience when put into contact with something by Zooey Deschanel and the rest of the Free Hugs brigade. The Girl of Girl Walk may be charmingly child-like in parts, but she's not remotely infantilised. She's childlike in the splashing-through-mud sense, in the sense that she's openly doing what she wants and not caring what other people think about it, but she's not a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl.

Aside from the few street-dancers The Girl meets on her travels, the other principal characters are The Gentleman and The Creep. While The Girl's style is a jumble of music video references, sloppy improv and classical training, The Gentleman and The Creep are more traditional street-dancers. To the casual observor, The Girl might give the impression of being a nonprofessional dancer having a total bug-out in public (at one point she's even escorted from a NYC landmark by the police), but The Gentleman and The Creep are a little more conventional, which only serves to highlight the freshness of her style.

The Gentleman lives up to his name. Dressed in a pristine white shirt and wearing a fedora, his style harks back to the golden age of musicals. He's also something of a silent movie hero: romantic, distant, and beset by difficulty. As a side-note, I particularly appreciated how in Girl Walk's trailer, The Girl is described as "courting" The Gentleman as opposed to being courted by him. Instead of the expected Male Gaze moment where the the camera might pan up and down The Girl to signify The Gentleman's interest, The Girl spots him dancing at the park, and, well:

You'll have noticed that by this point, The Girl's first costume change has taken place. When samples from Beyonce's Single Ladies appear in the mashup -- one of the most memorable music video dances of the past few years -- The Girl persuades some passers-by to act as her backing dancers, and in true diva style their resulting performance requires a costume change. The black leotard and leggings may be a reference to Beyonce's own outfit in the video, but more likely they just provide a comfortable basic backdrop to her cheerful pink blouse, another outfit that makes it easy for us to pick her out of the crowds.

The Girl and The Gentleman travel together for a while, taking part in an impromptu subway dance party with commuters including this gentleman:
Like Anne Marsen, the dancer playing the part of The Creep has a real skill for physical comedy. His moves are a mixture between body-popping street-dance and Looney Tunes villain. He sports a skeleton tracksuit, for extra added evil:

The Creep, as his name suggests, is a creeper, following The Girl until she (with a little help from The Gentleman) discourages him. When he first meets her, the heart on his skeleton shirt becomes exposed, but is that necessarily a good thing?

Not being a New Yorker, I'm sure there are many locational details and in-jokes that I'm missing in Girl Walk. However, there is one thing I did recognise: an accidental cameo from Bill Cunningham. Girl Walk's camera person catches the back of the famous photographer's head for a few seconds as he comes across The Creep dancing outside a department store.

The Girl's next transformation comes via a shopping spree through various famous shops, making her over into a New York fashionista. Amusingly, her over-the-top Paris Hilton strut down the street draws more stares than outright dancing had done earlier, maybe because in this case it's harder to tell whether she's for real or not. Later on comes one of my favourite parts of the film, when The Girl, still in character as her newly commercialised New York self and laden down with designer shopping bags, comes across the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

The Shopping Spree sequence was an interesting moment for me because it made me realise how odd it was to have watched a woman dance for so long and not throw any "sexy" moves. Along with a hot new outfit bought from some glossy NYC department store, The Girl's dance style makes a brief foray into sexy pop routines before returning to its usual free-for-all.

The final change is sparked on by The Girl meeting a child who rejects all of The Girl's new purchases, making her realise the importance of things that aren't Louboutins:

The Girl's last outfit is by far the weirdest-looking, and is perfect for when she joins the far more exotically-dressed crowds of people dancing through the streets in a passing city parade. This costume includes traditional elements of dance clothes (leotard, leggings and a tutu-like skirt) and the colour-scheme of the jacket she was wearing in the first act, combining her roots with her rebellion.

Girl Walk//All Day is 12 chapters long -- one sequence for each track -- and can be viewed here in its entirety, although if you're a US resident they seem to be holding live screenings/dance parties in some cities. I recommend one chapter per day before breakfast, as a panacaea against the horrors of real life.

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Links post: 18th century Danish face-coverings, Tom Hiddleston & Michelle Dockery: time travelers, Alexander McQueen's "Alien" shoes, and more.

The above picture is from Trine Søndergaard's photo series on strude, the complex scarves and hoods worn by 18th century women on the small Danish island of Fano to protect their faces from the elements. There's a full gallery of these photos at her website -- stunning, and quite the most interesting alternative to a balaclava that I've ever seen.

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Not precisely fashion, but definitely clothing: Iceland's necropants. Magic trousers made from... human skin. I wish I'd known about this when I was in Iceland! It sounds like the best museum ever.

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Alexander McQueen is known for beautifully bizarre couture, and for me this particular work of his is a real delight. I wish I'd known about it last week, in fact -- shoes inspired by the movie Alien:

Picture from HERE.

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A small follow-up on Chanel's show last month (reviewed here): Esteemed fashion journalist Robin Givhan was apparently relegated to the cheap seats because she gave a less-than-good review to Lagerfeld's last collection.

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Johanna Blakley: Lessons from Fashion's Free Culture. In the light of the current obsession among lawmakers for idiotic piracy/copyright legislation, this 15-minute TED lecture is particularly interesting. Fashion straddles the line between commercial production and artform, yet has incredibly leniant copyright law. Proof, perhaps, that embracing remix culture is a good idea?

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I'm loving this Time Magazine photoshoot with Tom Hiddleston (Loki from Thor/The Avengers) and Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary from Downton Abbey). It's... an intriguing mix of beautiful, London-based retrofuturism plus a couple of quite baffling outfits on Michelle. Click through to the article -- there's a video! It's supposedly about time travel so I'm 100% onboard, although it's not exactly Oscar-winning stuff. If you like the idea of hearing Tom Hiddleston drawl poshly about the apocalypse while Michelle Dockery sneers at him from beneath a silver pillbox hat, then I definitely recommend it.

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I capture the period pieces. A blog dedicated to the beauty of period and costume dramas, found while I was trawling Tumblr for Upstairs/Downstairs screencaps to feed my hopeless love for that show. It's just so... hilarious, and posh, and British, and... honestly, a lot more thoughtful and less overwrought than Downton Abbey, a show I generally love to hate. Check out this clip from the next episode (particularly the Duke of Kent, the chap in the admiral's hat). 

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The costumes of Aliens, or, James Cameron says Put A Gun On It.

Previously: The costumes of Alien. Part 1: Uniforms and characterisation, and Part 2: Space suits, retrofuturism, and Prometheus.

Each film in the Alien quadrilogy is so different that it makes me wish they'd continued to make sequels in a whole bunch of other genres -- Western, romantic drama, buddy-cop movie, you name it. Alien is the tense, slow paced thriller of the series; Aliens is the bombastic Vietnam war-movie blockbuster. As reigning overlord of American action/sci-fi cinema from Terminator to Avatar, James Cameron's vision of an Alien sequel was to take Ripley and plant her in a scenario that involves as many loud and deadly weapons as possible. Unlike the ungainly and slow-moving ore refinery Ripley works on in the first movie, even the spaceship in Aliens looks like a gun.

Ripley, Hicks, and the Sulaco.

My own personal recommendation for watching Aliens is to accept straight off that the team of Colonial Marines are really terrible. Because they are. They're really terrible. James Cameron went to a lot of trouble to get the actors into character with various training exercises alongside real-life soldiers, but the end result was still an overall impression of panicked incompetence. They're poorly disciplined, trigger-happy, and bad at thinking on their feet in a crisis. Accepting this as fact doesn't make Aliens any less gripping, and I don't really see it a criticism either of the film's quality or of the actors themselves. If the marines had been a well-organised fighting force of by-the-book professionals, there wouldn't be nearly so much narrative tension and Ripley would never get a chance to shine. The best explanation is that this squad of loudmouths and weirdos, headed up by a woefully inexperienced and uninspiring officer, were the ones deemed most disposable and therefore the best choice to check out the colony at LV-426. They're the Breakfast Club of military units.

I love the fact that the cast were told to read Starship Troopers in preparation for filming, since the infamously schlocky movie adaptation of that novel is more a parody of Aliens than anything else. All the uber-American shouting of "Let's go kill some bugs!"? The locker-room teasing? Soldiers being deployed onto dangerous alien planets with nothing more than some worryingly 20th century-looking body armour? It's a recipe for disaster -- AKA a recipe for a successful action movie, because it gives you all the violence, tension and team bonding of a war story with none of the ethical qualms of watching people kill each other over some morally-ambiguous idealogical dispute.

"The risk always lives."

As another part of their pre-filming homework, James Cameron had each of the actors playing marines decorate and personalise their own uniforms, both in homage to images he'd seen of soldiers during the Vietnam war, and presumably so as to make the characters easier to tell apart onscreen. The actor playing Vasquez painted her body armour with the slogan "The risk always lives", which she'd taken from a book of Chicana poetry she'd been reading at the time. Drake, Vasquez's partner in having an egregiously huge pivot gun, has chicken bones tied to his hat. Bill Paxton, who played Hudson, wrote Louise on his body-armour in honour of his wife. The squad's ineffectual leader, Lt. Gorman, instantly stands out as a stuffed-shirt thanks to his clean and rule-abidingly unmarred uniform.

Private Hudson's body armour.

The result is that the supposedly uniform, unified force of marines actually look far less official than the civilian "space truckers" of the previous film. The impression I got from Aliens is that the marines are less of an official army unit as we'd know it, and more like a security firm hired by Weyland-Yutani to wave big guns at people who seem like they might cause trouble. After all, who is the government? The United States namechecked by the United States Colonial Marine Corps but never heard from again? Or Weyland-Yutani, who are the first people to contact Ripley when she wakes up after her 57 years of hypersleep, who built the colony at LV-426, and who sent Ripley and the marines on their mission to explore it?

Burke visits Ripley and Jonesy at the Gateway Station hospital.

Waking up after decades of drifting through space, Ripley is alone, she's traumatised, and the world has completely changed. For the first few scenes when we see her on the Gateway Station, she tends to be dressed in clothes that emphasise her vulnerability -- first her hospital scrubs, and later on a bathrobe when Burke comes to visit her in her quarters. Her nightmares wake her up every night, and she's a far cry from the competent Ripley we know from the Nostromo.

The first major transition occurs when Ripley begins to take charge on LV-426. She's still set apart from the marines, wearing blue overalls similar to those she wore in the first movie -- no longer a mandatory uniform, but a comfort during a situation where everything else is so different and frightening. The leather bomber jacket adds a touch of badassery, plus it makes her look less like a skinny mechanic hanging out with a bunch of huge, armour-clad space marines.
For all that Aliens is a film about soldiers, the fact that Ripley isn't a soldier is her main asset. Viewing the xenomorph threat both as a civilian and as the only person who's encountered one before, she's the only character aside from Newt whose priorities aren't skewed by military conditioning or personal geed. Sigourney Weaver herself is very much anti-gun, which I think shines through in Ripley's character. For all that she ends up brandishing a flamethrower, she's someone who, after finding out that she can keep her head in a crisis and survive through tremendous violence and destruction, gets a job driving power loaders rather than pursuing a life of heroism.

Ripley at her debriefing session on Gateway Station.

The reluctant hero is a trope with a long and tedious past, but Ripley is up there with John McClane in Die Hard in that she's not some mythical "chosen one", she just tries to lead a normal life until circumstances force her to pick up a gun and start saving people. Watch her face during this movie, it's hilarious: there are countless moments where the marines will be discussing some idiotic plan while Ripley stands in the background looking absolutely horrified that anyone could be so stupid, gearing herself up to step in and solve the problem for them. So her costumes, free of weaponry and body armour right up until the final scenes, support this image of her as the civilian outsider, the unwilling participant in what she already suspects is a suicide mission.

Ripley and Newt's costumes, both jumpsuits, mirror one another, a visual hint towards the maternal bond Ripley forges with Newt as the film progresses. Newt is one of the very few child movie sidekicks that I don't find irritating, partly because of her lack of shrill stage-school precociousness (unsurprising, since she wasn't a professional actress and Aliens was her only film) and partly thanks to her relationship with Ripley. I don't understand how this film can have been released in 1986, yet still be the best example I can think of when it comes to action heroines whose emotions aren't portrayed as weaknesses. It seems blindingly obvious that a thriller is more gripping when there's more at stake, but while Ripley juggles panicking space marines, murderous aliens and a newly-adopted child, most action stars nowadays are still motivated by the good ol' invisible wife or daughter being either kidnapped or assassinated in the first act, leaving the hero to run around shooting things for two hours.

"Real strength and unpredictability comes from not having an obvious weapon." -- Sigourney Weaver.

Aside from Ripley, Burke may well be my favourite character in Aliens. He's just so perfectly unlikeable. From the moment he first appears onscreen, it's immediately obvious from his demeanour, his soulless management-speak, his hair, and yes, his clothes, that he's every 1980s stereotype of a spineless corporate worm. Weyland-Yutani are so influential that it's far more effective for their power to be shown second- or third-hand rather than having some CEO show up onscreen. Burke's amoral yuppie scheming was the perfect way to develop on the first movie's portrayal of Weyland-Yutani without having to throw in too much exposition. You already know he's a dick. Look at him! His neat tie! His popped collar! Compared to the thoroughly blue-collar characters we're familiar with from Alien, he's very obviously The Man.

Anyone who's been reading this blog for more than five minutes will probably know that I love both suits and sci-fi. When the two meet, I tend to pay attention. Science fiction set in the near future and/or in space (ie... most science fiction) tends to have a bit of a problem with suits because they're an easy way to let audiences know someone's stuffy and/or going to a formal event, but it's kind of implausible to suggest that people will be dressing the same way in 100 years time as they are today. The happy medium is some type of suit that looks recogniseable but with some significant alteration. Firefly manages this quite servicably, with collarless and lapel-free suits, but Aliens remains in keeping with it's generally un-futuristic costume design with Burke's auto-popped collar: the universal signal for entitled douchebaggery. As I said: perfect.

Finally, I can't help but post this:

It kind of slays me that the shoes worn by Ripley (and, I think, Bishop) in Aliens are Reebok tie-in merchandise. I mean, that more than anything illustrates how much of a Hollywood blockbuster this film is when compared to the slow-paced, adult thriller that was Alien. Quite apart from that, this Reebok ad was based on the real Alien poster -- ie, a poster for a sci-fi action movie that depicts two female characters, both in mud-covered overalls. When was the last time that happened? Ever?

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Chanel Fall 2012: Geological reports from the Fortress of Solitude.

Previously on Chanel: Karl Lagerfeld, Lord of the Sea addresses the proletariat via harp and conch-shell, and Karl Lagerfeld has never been to India but let's just gloss over that, shall we?

"Diverse" isn't a word that springs to mind when thinking of Chanel, but this collection was extraordinarily varied. The 68 looks ranged from billowing, translucent dresses to armour-like metallic suits, so it was just as well that the theme was easy to pick out: gems. A perfect opportunity for writers to start in on a seemingly endless wave of puns like so many Carrie Bradshaws. Look no further than this review, which summarises the show as "A gem of a collection... Solid as a rock." Just let me get my geological hammer to break into this treasure trove of -- oh, never mind.

Aside from the eyebrows, makeup was minimal. Having Vulcan brows made from tiny rocks glued onto their faces gave the models an especially stern look, adding to the typically aloof Chanel mood. I can just imagine Karl backstage: "Eyebrows are the true source of expression, but why should a Chanel Woman tempt wrinkles when she can communicate directly via the resonance of crystals? The Chanel Woman does not WEAR the diamond, she IS the diamond!"

pictures from Style.com

The show opened with some narrow-legged trouser suits that more closely resembled the looks Chanel has been producing over the past few years. Rough, relaxed fabrics, all in -- of course -- jewel tones like purple and teal.

Yes, this show did take place in the Fortress of Solitude, which is just as well because some of the outfits did look a little like something out of a comicbook. There's definitely something a little bit Thor about these chestplate-necklace/tinfoil dress ensembles.

Microwavable, and angry about it.

The dress pictured below was a real standout for me, oddly enough. A simple LBD, suitable for body-types other than that of catwalk models, and plain without being boring. The jewel in the centre of the chest and the shape of the neckline tie in with this show's theme, while the assymetrical wraparound skirt and leggings underneath are a nod to Chanel's Indian inspiration last year. 

And now we return to Vulcan. Wearing something that looks like Gareth Pugh broke into the Chanel workshops in the middle of the night and had his wicked way with one of the dresses, this particular Vulcan does not look happy to have landed on the planet of ice-crystals.

This was one of the more literal interpretations of the gemstone theme. My opinions of Chanel are so detached from my own tastes that I find things like this somewhat hard to judge. Is this something that other people would like? That they'd wear? This Doctor Who costume-looking dress that turns your nipples into the armoured points of a crystalline stained-glass window?

So that thing I mentioned earlier about diversity? Yeah. This next section of the show was drastically different from the looks it was sandwiched between -- and, incidentally, was the closest to something that I'd actually wear.

I can't work out if the Gap Yah scarves in these outfits are actually part of the dress or a separate item. The whole thing seems like a very curious choice for a Fall show, particularly one from Chanel, although I do follow that the repeated uses of translucent fabrics are probably another note on the crystal theme.

This coat was probably the trendiest thing in the show. Un-tailored tailoring, exterior seams borrowed from Gareth Pugh, and oversized rounded shoulders.

 Whereas this white suit was the most traditionally Chanel thing they had to offer: Vulcan grandmother chic.

The show's finale piece was this almost Alexander McQueen-esque gown, an intricate mesh of oil-slick scraps of fabric, with a bodice of feathers layered over one another like scales. For Chanel, a surprisingly aggressive and peculiar choice -- very Tilda Swinton as the witch queen in Narnia.

While I personally thought the shoes were hideous and chilly-looking, I'm sure they'll sell like hotcakes thanks to the very noticable crystal heel. Until someone starts making believable knockoffs, that heel will be an instant Chanel status-symbol, for people who care about that sort of thing.

Lagerfeld, wearing a colour for the first time in years.

Karl Lagerfeld note: If you have any fashion questions -- or life questions -- that you feel Mr Lagerfeld might be able to help with, then I suggest Lagerfeld Advice.

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