Dubiously competent fashion photography at the National Museum's Ancient Egypt party.

Yesterday I went to the National Museum of Scotland adults-only night, because anything that puts sarcophagi and booze in the same locale is A-OK by me. Compared to some of the late-opening museum parties I've been to in the past it was a little underwhelming, partially because tickets weren't free, but since this is only their second event I'll let that slide.

The theme was Ancient Egypt, which meant gold, jeweled body-art, mummies, and the sort of Egyptian-themed cocktail only a Scot could make up -- the Tutankhamorangie, a Glenmorangie whisky promo. To my disappointment not many people had come in costume, outside of a few performers and the dressing-up area.. However, having my camera with me I decided to do a spot of extremely amateur fashion photography. The Sartorialist I most definitely am not.

I'm kicking myself over not getting a better photo of the jacket worn by the guy on the right, a formal iteration of what has been sweepingly and inaccurately called a kimono jacket for the last few decades. Sadly, I'm far from adept at approaching strange men and saying, "Can I take a photo of your back?" when I'm so clearly not a "real" photographer.

My friend and I were both very impressed with this dude, both because of his great style and because that length of ginger wizard-beard takes dedication. That + pink combat trousers + earrings + assymetrical layering = 10/10.

This person is beheaded because they are me. Vain enough to smugly photograph my own outfit, yet unwilling to show my face on the internet. This is my all-pink embroidery ensemble for when I want to look needlessly eye-catching, including a waistcoat obscured by my brocade jacket. I'm pretty impressed with myself for managing to find so many semi-matching clothes by accident, all from charity shops.

This enormous coat was some real Edinburgh style, otherwise known as wrapping youself in blankets from head to toe until the icey wind no longer feels like it's flaying you alive. I enjoyed the pattern-mixing among this lady's accessories and cane.

Utilikilt? Yes, people in Scotland do wear them, plus his lack of tartan on the bottom half seems somehow balanced by the plaid on top. And I loved the contrast between the purple-laced sneakers and the kilt. All he needs is a neon skean dhu! This couple's outfits complemented each other very well, intentional or not.

'I love your shoes! Where did you get them?" "Prada." Right, then. Metal reinforced toes: all the better for kicking you in the bank-balance.

 Obviously my favourite outfit of the night. Shave 300 years of aging off this and I'd wear it every day.

Millennia-old Sarcophagus and empty liquor containers: an accurate summation of how our evening went.

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London Fashion Week, Fall 2012: Mary Katrantzou.

Digital prints have been on the rise for a while now, but Katrantzou is still queen. She's been on the radar for less than four years, but youth and the fact that she runs her own label give her liberty to pursue her strengths. And what that means at the moment is that she's producing entire shows of unique digital-print clothes season after season. Thanks to a combination of critical accolades and publicity for her new Topshop line, Fall 2012 was her true breakthrough London Fashion Week show.

pics from Style.com

Mary Katrantzou shot to the top of my favourite-designers list as soon as I saw her Fall 2011 collection last year. She deserves her good reviews for a multitude of reasons, but most importantly to me, she's creating clothes that are drastically different not only from the current fashion zeitgeist but from anything I've seen before. She's the sort of expert that creates itself -- an artist who has been developing her own visual brand for years, waiting quietly for the rest of the world to catch up. I have no doubt that there are other, lesser-known designers who don't have London Fashion Week slots who have explored prints in equally innovative ways, but Mary K is the only designer in mainstream fashion whom I'd describe as a true master of the art.

In previous seasons, Katrantzou's prints have taken inspiration from various sources. This time last year it was porcelein art and Ming vases; a show full of delicately painted koi swimming around ornate fish-ponds of dresses, and imagery taken directly from decorative tiles and wallpapers. Six months ago the prints took on a far more abstract theme, and this week she's gone in yet another direction: everyday household objects. Take a look at the white dress above. What's that design around the waist? Spoons. The magic of Mary Katrantzou is that through an almost mathematical repetition of shapes within each design, pictures can lose their meaning and just become another part of the pattern. Her clothes are fun, but -- unlike a spoon-themed print in the hands of many other designers -- they're not a joke.

One of the major developments this season was that instead of having each outfit be a mish-mash of different colours like the images from which they were originally inspired, the collection as a whole was divided into sections by colour. A smart decision, because while Katrantzou has been getting excellent reviews for several seasons now, people are more likely to wear clothes that hit one or two points on the colour-wheel rather than, you know, all of them.

Typwriter dress!

Katrantzou's designs aren't all print, though. Her go-to silhouette is already quite easy to identify: neat sleeves, sharp shoulders, and usually either a peplum or some extra layering at the hips. In order to showcase the prints correctly the fabric on the majority of the dresses is unusually rigid and there are far more flat planes than one usually finds in this type of outfit. The end result is that the restrictions necessitated by Katrantzou's primary concern, the print designs, have caused a recognisable Katrantzou silhouette to emerge.

Within the strong colour divisions, each colour was represented by a different object. Earlier on we saw the red typewriter dress and the white spoon dress, but green was themed around something even more banal: grass. The gown pictured below combined images of hedge-mazes with green jewels at the hips, oversized jewels being an ongoing motif in Katrantzou's designs.

This yellow and pink dress blows my mind a little. It looks great and all -- very frothy-Hawaiian-cocktail, very Capitol City from The Hunger Games -- but God is in the details. See the swirl pattern on the body of the skirt? That pattern is made of pencils. Not pictures of pencils -- actual pencils with the erasers still attached at the end. I don't have any close-up pictures here, but there's a video of the show at the end of this post and this dress is 3.55 minutes in -- take a look. It's a really exquisite example of Katrantzou's desire to take mundane objects and make them into something unrecognisably glamourous and fantastical.

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NYFW Fall 2012: Ralph Lauren, Alexander Wang, Badgley Mischka, Creatures of the Wind, and more.

Ralph Lauren

As someone on twitter put it, this is like looking into my brain. Ralph Lauren's Fall 2012 show was heavily influenced by pre-war British menswear, included multiple flavours of tweed, and was soundtracked by the Downton Abbey theme music. At least half the collection was made up of Edwardian/1920s trouser suits for ladies, about which I could not be happier.

catwalk pics from Style.com

This was one of those situations where objective criticism falls by the wayside. I love early 20th Century suits, especially on women; I love knee-length trousers; I love Downton Abbey and continue to masochistically watch it despite the fact that I spend most of each episode shouting obscenities at Julian Fellowes' soap-opera hack style of screenwriting. Yes, this is something of a pastiche collection, but I think it plays around enough with 1910s/20s style (plus being genderswitched) that it doesn't fall into the category of directly-copied period costume.

Ralph Lauren isn't one of those labels I get pre-emptively excited over, unlike Mary Katrantzou, Alexander McQueen, Haider Ackerman, or Gareth Pugh. However, I've come to realise that every season, Lauren turns out the largest number of "conventional" outfits that I unequivocably adore. None of what we're looking at today is a product of groundbreaking design experimentation, but instead is the result of years of detail-work and attention to the ultimate goal of creating perfect tailoring for extremely rich people who want to look stylish and adult without making a statement.

This collection ranged from more working-class inspired suits with cloth caps and brown tweeds, to the glossy aristocracy of top-hat-and-cane suits. Also noticeably present were some riffs on the early women's suits -- ie, pantaloon-like short trousers, brown lace-up shoes, cloche hats, and the ubiquitous grey-brown patterned jumpers.

This is where the modern touch comes in.

There was something about this three-piece suit that screamed Ralph Lauren, to me.

After a moment, I realised that it was the fabric, which reminded me of this Ralph Lauren Purple Label ad from (I think?) 2009. Am I concerned that this level of fashion pattern-recognition is eventually going to take over my brain and fill up all my memory space with clothing and costume knowledge to the detriment of everything else? (Answer: yes.)

The latter half of the collection concentrated on more traditionally feminine eveningwear, which to my eyes paled in comparison to the suits. Thankfully they didn't go particulalarly heavy-handed on the 1920s influence, presumably because the designers were aware of just how many Jazz Age gowns the fashion world has in store for us this year already.

Alice + Olivia
Retro-cheesy mod style? Yes please. I hope someone wears this on a red carpet at some point -- it's very eye-catching. 

Anna Sui

Alexander Wang
This season's focus was fabric, specifically laminated fabric and plastic fibres. Everything was waterproof, artificial, and vaccuum-sealed to within an inch of its life, although without the aid of Wang's design notes I don't know if I would have picked up on much of that. With a few exceptions, this collection was a bit of a miss with me. I couldn't really work out what his goal was, or his audience, especially since he seemed to have traded in his usual ultra-modern American comfort for rigid, armour-like jackets that looked like they'd behead the wearer if she tried to bend her neck.

I wish we could have seen more of the plastic mesh turtlenecks most of the models wore beneath their coats, because I think they might have been the most saleable item in the collection. Odd-looking and probably not all that comfortable against the skin -- they looked like they were made of unwoven, moulded plastic -- but undeniably Alexander Wang, and perfect for layering into an outfit for a hint of early-2000s cyber style.

The alien-like detail on this dress, continuing directly from sleeve to glove, was one of my favourite parts of this collection. A sterile and eye-catching look.

Badgley Mischka
Yet another Metropolis-inspired collection, hot on the heels of at least two during Couture Fashion Week last month. I give this one more credit, though, because instead of running directly into the 1920s they went more thematic, with dull-sheen greens and golds, and the wild hair of all silent-movie madwomen. Also, I have a soft-spot for anything that reminds me of the green/gold motifs of the costumes of the movie Thor.

Creatures of the Wind
This has got to be one of the most eclectic collections I've ever seen. At first I was intrigued, because the inspiration was supposedly the 17th Century Scottish mythological text, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies by Robert Kirk. In case anyone was in any doubt about how much of a nerd I am, at the age of 11 or 12 I had an obsession with fairy myth and legend that was so intense I got a reader's pass to a local university library so I could go to the archive and handle an original copy of this book, cementing forever my slightly unsettling fixation with white book-handling gloves.

It's unclear to me just what part The Secret Commonwealth... played in the creation of this show. There were certain elements of peasant-skirts and so on but in general it seemed like a randomly flung-together selection of Etsy-wear. I have no doubt that it would receive a high rating from Tavi Gevinson, but aside from that I'm rather puzzled by its lack of cohesive structure.

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Movie Costumes I Have Loved: Hanna.

Regular readers will be unsurprised to learn that last month's Oscar nominations did not exactly wow me in the Costume Design category. All five nominated films are period dramas (if you're interested in more detail as to why this irritates me, try my Introduction to Costume Design post), and in my view only one of them deserves a win: Hugo, whose costume designer Sandy Powell has already been nominated ten times and won three. Her acceptance speech for The Young Victoria last year mostly amounted to, "This one's dedicated to all the costume designers who work on films that aren't about dead monarchs -- you know, the ones you guys routinely ignore." COME ON.

As for what I'd nominate, the easiest answer is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Although perhaps not an obvious contender for its costumes, my other favourite movie of 2011 was Hanna. It stars Saoirse Ronan as a girl raised in complete isolation by her father, a former spy. When Hanna reaches her mid-teens she decide that she's ready leave the forest where they've lived for her entire life, but in order to live freely they must first escape the clutches of Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), the CIA agent who has been hunting Hanna's father for years.

Not a hugely original story, but it's handled incredibly well by Joe Wright, the director of Atonement and Pride & Prejudice. He's not known for action thrillers, but rather than attempting a hit-and-miss approach to the genre (as Rob Marshall did with Pirates of the Caribbean 4) he sidesteps almost all common action-movie tropes. Instead of going the "sexy yet ass-kicking waif" route one might expect, Hanna comes across as a sweet and funny person, and displays none of the stoic angst that action filmmakers tend to use in place of characterisation.

The film opens with Hanna as the ultimate feral sweater girl. She and her father wear fur from animals they've hunted themselves, and the only other clothes on offer appear to be decades-old jumpers from before they went on the run. The implication is that they haven't left the forest since Hanna was a baby.

I tend to fixate on the need for costumes to be a conscious characterisation decision, and Hanna's clothes fulfill this specification brilliantly in that they exhibit no sense of taste whatsoever. Not in the sense that she has "bad taste", but rather that everything she wears is down to circumstance rather than choice or personal style. She's been raised away from any societal influence, with no sense of vanity whatsoever, and considering what we've seen of her life with her father it'd be ridiculous for her to be able to fit in with humanity's myriad of unspoken aesthetic rules after only a few days' experience with the outside world. The first place she sees after leaving the forest is a CIA detention centre, a grey concrete prison buried hundreds of feet beneath the Moroccan desert -- a far cry from the bleak snow and wild animals of her home. Her animal furs are taken away from her and she's dressed in a sanitised orange jumpsuit, purposefully designed to be reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay.

This film pays a lot of attention to colour palette, but not in such a way that it seems forced. The transition from the prison to the desert aboveground is made far more obvious, though, by Hanna's orange detention uniform. Against the concrete walls of the detention centre she's like a beacon, but aboveground she blends into the orange rocks and dust of the desert.

Some of the best moments of the film are when we see the world through Hanna's eyes. Once she's broken free of the detention centre, her first sight of everyday human life is this group of women, singing as they wash clothes by the river. Hanna has never even heard music before, only heard it described by her father from their much-reread encyclopaedia, and you know that this scene already contains more colour than she's ever seen before in her life.

The one constant among Hanna's various costumes is shapelessness. My favourite is the smock she steals from the river-laundry, because it makes it so immediately obvious how alien she is, both in Morocco and in the wider sense of human society in general. A white girl, by herself, wearing mens' clothing and probably not even realising how odd she looks because she's only ever spoken to about five people in her entire life, and she met all but one of them in the last couple of days.

This is far from a humourless action movie. On her journey to reunite with her father, Hanna befriends a British family, a collection of semi-stereotypes who any British viewers will immediately recognise as an affectionate mockery of a certain type of well-off, Guardian-reading neo-hippie family.

The daughter is particularly entertaining: a stroppy, spoiled teenager rebelling against her mild-mannered parents. She gives the impression of being a Mean Girl, but not all Mean Girls are mean girls, and she and Hanna end up becoming friends -- possibly just because both of them are so bemused and intrigued by the other that they can't avoid it.

The mother and daughter's costumes cracked me up because they were so spot-on. The daughter is clearly taking great pains to be as girly and trendy as possible, nattering on about reality TV and boys and various other teenage pursuits that leave Hanna utterly confused. The mother, on the other hand, is a wonderful portrayal of well-meaning middle-class British liberalism, a university-educated feminist who used to backpack around the world and is now trying to relive the experience with her family. She commends Hanna for her apparent independence, but it's evident that she doesn't fully understand what that independence really entails.

Hanna's final costuming transition is when she reaches Berlin, by which point she's gained more experience in blending in. A hoodie and jeans: the ultimate urban camouflage outfit. But even though it's appropriate to her environment, you know she's not dressed like that in order to assimilate or look more like a normal teenager. It's just another disguise, as practical as the furs she was wearing when she first came onscreen.

Marissa Weigler is the perfect counterpoint to Hanna's wild, curious innocence. She's introduced to the viewer by the sharp click of heels against the hard floor of government buildings, and the arresting image of her cleaning her teeth until she bleeds. She's a perfectionist in a world of minimalist grey conference rooms and sterile hotels.

Marissa wears almost the same thing in every scene. Her suits were designed by Giorgio Armani, and she wears several variations on the same one -- a smooth grey skirt and jacket, with a soft blouse that ties around the neck. For a woman working in such a regimented environment, I thought this was an ideal choice. Marissa is highly efficient, and seems like the type of person who would just buy five copies of the same outfit once she'd found something that struck the correct balance between formal and feminine.

It's as close as a woman can get to the classic government agent "grey suit and nondescript tie" uniform code we're used to from every spy/law enforcement movie in existence. Officewear is hard.

Lucie Bates, the film's costume designer, said that Marissa Weigler was explicitly intended to be a fairytale villain. She stalks Hanna across Europe, merciless and manipulatively charming as she orders her minions to hunt down Hanna and her father. As Hanna continues to frustrate her kidnap attempts, Marissa gradually changes from the calm, all-grey palette of the CIA headquarters to vivid, poisonous greens.

More often than not, Marissa is seen wearing gloves, the universal signifier of onscreen killers from Darth Vader to every James Bond assassin ever. Black leather gloves when she's outdoors; surgical gloves so she doesn't get her hands dirty when she has to kill someone; green gloves for the final scenes, once she's reached the point where she's dressing entirely in green.

An unusual amount of focus goes to Marissa's shoes. High heels, especially pristine high-heels stored carefully in a display cabinet, are one of the most recogniseable visual shortcuts to "American career-woman" one sees in modern pop-culture, I think. Marissa is a person very concerned with appearances; one who is willing to go through a lot of pain to look the way she does. Twice, we see her bleeding from the mouth as she carefully cleans her teeth with what looks like surgical instruments. And one of her few moments of physical weakness is when she has to take her shoes off while she's hunting for Hanna at the Grimm's Fairytales house in Berlin. Her vanity is like that of Snow White's Wicked Queen, with Hanna as a far less passive version of Snow White.

Links
Interview with costume designer Lucie Bates, at Clothes On Film.
Giorgio Armani's sketches for Marissa's costumes.

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