Pre-Fall 2012: Alberta Ferretti, Balenciaga, Issey Miyake, Alexander McQueen, Emilio Pucci, and Viktor & Rolf

Alberta Ferretti
Alarm bells immediately began to ring when I set eyes on this collection. FIRST JAZZ-AGE INSPIRED SHOW OF THE YEAR! The first of many, since one of this year's unavoidable manufactured trends is going to be faux flapper styles, all thanks to the already overhyped Great Gatsby remake. Do you know when Gatsby comes out? December. And considering the fact that the quality of Baz Luhrman's films seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of money and star-power pumped into them, it's probably not even going to be a very good movie.

pics from Style.com

No doubt my tone already sounds unreasonably irritable, but despite the fact that I liked several pieces from the Alberta Ferretti show I still view it as a harbinger of annoyances to come. A rehash of 1920s fashion is almost guaranteed to be dull and tired, and by the time December rolls by every actor in the Great Gatsby will be so overexposed that even the most fashion-apathetic of us will be sick of speakeasy-themed photoshoots. I guess I'm just the type of person who tends to rain on your parade when you say things like "I wish I lived in the 1920s so I could be a flapper!" -- because you don't. The 1920s sucked. It's like someone in a hundred years saying, "I really wish I lived during the economic meltdown of the 2010s!" and then dressing up as Kim Kardashian. Except the 1920s were worse because women didn't have autonomy and everyone had syphilis.

Yeah, I'm harshing the vibe. 1920s fashion is so pretty! I enjoy going to retro cabarets and speakeasy costume parties (so long as you acknowledge that they're a total fantasy)! I love Art Deco as much as the next guy! But, oh yeah, one other problem with the whole flapper-style... it's a trend that fits perfectly into every terrible body-image issue the fashion world currently dictates. What's the perfect figure for this type of style? The "boyish physique" -- ie, thin, flat-chested, and toned. Which in a way is worse than we've got right now, since mainstream fashion tends to favour "thin but with big boobs" (unlike catwalk fashion's love of the size-zero), meaning that "not thin but with big boobs" is still... you know, half-OK. It allows a little wriggle-room within the restrictions of our unreasonably specific beauty standard. But the original flappers used to bind their breasts, so this type of drop-waist, box-shaped dress pretty much only suits someone who weighs 120lbs, is wearing a sports bra, and lives on a diet of cocaine, lindy-hop, and illegal hooch. If the neo-flapper trend brings with it a new interest in radical feminism, I'll be psyched -- but something tells me that won't be included in most of the style-page articles.

So, now I've got my inaugural 1920s fashion rant out of the way, I'd like to add that I actually rather liked all three of the dresses pictured here. The last one most of all, since it's suitable for women of all ages -- so long as you're the wife of a pre-Wall Street Crash manufacturing tycoon, of course.

Balenciaga
Included for comedy value. This show essentially amounted to the dregs of 1980s fashion, the sort that only the most dedicated of ironic hipsters and retro-fanatics could bear to wear today.

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? -- Oh, it's just the reflection from my fluorescent trashbag trousers.

Issey Miyake
Miyake is always a favourite of mine. This season isn't quite as structural as his designs often are, but I was glad to see the return of the patterned tights from last season. In much of this show, the tights were very clearly a component of the outfit as a whole, rather than a mere backdrop or accessory.

Alexander McQueen
Not as out-there as Couture season, of course, but recogniseably McQueen nonetheless. The collection opened with some gothic Little Red Riding Hood dresses, complete with the wide corset belts that have been a staple of the last couple of McQueen shows.

McQueen designs are famously luxurious and detailed. The head designer, Sarah Burton, often helps detail them herself, and I always feel like that kind of obsessive love and work-ethic shines through.

The high necklines and full skirt/narrow waist silhouettes had aspects of the Victorian to them, but not Victorian to the extent that they seemed like recycled period costumes. It was, however, Victorian in temperament. The colour schemes were subdued, almost to the leven of mourning dress, and there was restrained lack of the fangs, claws and hooves McQueen has often been known to include.

Emilio Pucci
The name Pucci makes me think of sensible wraps for rich ladies to wear to the opera. It's ordinarily not to my taste. But recently I began watching Avatar: The Last Airbender (ie, the Nickelodeon cartoon which I am quickly learning is -- no jokes -- the best television show ever made. Including Firefly.) and these thick, ice-blue patterned capes and dresses remind me of the costumes of the Northern Water Tribe. Real-life Princess Yue, anyone?

On a less frozen-kingdom-of-the-North note, Pucci also produced more normal-looking dresses such as this one, which I couldn't resist posting because of the beautiful pattern.

 Viktor & Rolf
A claustrophobic, gothic, but ultimately uninteresting show from Viktor & Rolf this season.

Weirdly, more people find this blog searching for Viktor & Rolf than for anything else, including the phrase "Hello, tailor". More even than all the people googling my bafflingly popular post about the wallpaper of BBC Sherlock. Google is so mysterious.

The sides of this dress reminded me of the gills of a fish.

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Dolce & Gabbana Menswear: Fall 2012.

I think this is the first menswear post I've made on Hello, Tailor, so let me begin with this obvious yet necessary disclaimer: menswear is different from womenswear. Due to the way our society views men "dressing up", menswear tends to be a lot less daring than womenswear. I guarantee that when Fall Fashion Week comes along, there will be multiple looks that will make you go, "What the hell is that?" and then think, "Well, I suppose Lady Gaga/Tilda Swinton/Beyonce will be wearing it by next month." During Menswear Fashion Week there will be some bizarre and wonderful outfits on the runway, make no mistake, but I highly doubt that you'll be seeing many of them on men in the public eye. There will always be people willing to spend a three-figure sum on designer t-shirts, but there's less pressure for menswear designers to explore much further than that. Happily, there will also be an awful lot of well-tailored suits, so you can expect to see a lot of suit pictures in the upcoming weeks.

photos from Style.com

Dolce & Gabbana is only the second show I've looked at this Menswear Fashion Week, but I'm already sure that it's still going to be one of my favourites come the end of the season. D&G have expertly trod the line between traditional suits and eye-catching runway fashion, ending up with something that mixes unexpected fabric choices, three-piece formal suits (always a winner), and old-fashioned luxury without often straying into the territory of over-the-top opulence.

My love of richly-embroidered fabrics meant that I was biased towards this collection almost immediately. The show itself was steeped in heavy-handed operatic melodrama, with the models walking to Pavarotti along a darkened runway with red and gold antique furniture in the background (footage here). A great deal of typical D&G trad menswear followed (not pictured here because there were 76 looks in this show and I'm not wasting space on the ~20 near-identical black tuxedos included therein), occasionally modified with Italian opera capes, or Tistera.

After I saw BBC Sherlock's "A Scandal In Belgravia" I reread the original Holmes short story "A Scandal In Bohemia", meaning that the description of the King of Bohemia was fresh in my mind when I saw this collection today. "His dress was rich with a richness which would, in England, be looked upon as bad taste." "...impression of barbaric opulence..." and so forth. The heavy coats and capes over dark three-piece harkened back to late 19th/early 20th century formalwear, although definitely more European than British.

Trousers aren't a typical place to find brocade, and although I think the jacket pictured below went a little too far on the embroidery and decoration stakes, I love the steady creep of curlicues up this model's legs, like the growth of some type of coral or ice-crystal.

The heavy fabrics were a particular delight for me, since they'd been purposely weathered to avoid being too bright, giving the appearance of an antique. Although I wouldn't classify this show as remotely steampunk, I'm sure it'll find many fans in the steampunk community. When it comes to dressing up, you often have to go back to the early 20th century and beyond for menswear inspiration, since so many trends in the latter half of the 20th century are not easily mined for wearable menswear looks (cf. DISCO). Unlike womenswear designers, who dig up the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s ad infinitum.

I particularly liked this next look (and the sweater + embroidered cape pictured earlier) since it neatly combines different eras without seeming jarringly retro. Ignoring the poorly-tailored trousers for a moment, the shape of the sweater is very trendy and new while the embroidery could easily come from some minor Russian royal's home furnishings circa 1850. And then the gold-studded shoes are perfectly modern as well. (I've been racking my brain to remember where this type of stiff, wide, half-length sleeves come from -- I thought somewhere in the Himalayas but Google has not been forthcoming in this regard.)

There were several pajama outfits in the collection, complete with slippers. Or at least, I hope they were intended to be pajamas because the collar certainly suggests that, never mind that they were all worn with a jacket over the top. The fabric choices, once again, were excellent.

Among the more directly modern-looking outfits was this knitted ensemble, which included those irritatingly unflattering drop-crotch trousers that are so fashionable right now. One thing I will say in favour of this pair is that they look admirably warm. If you've read any of my Fall or Pre-Fall womenswear reviews you'll know that I have a persistant bugbear when it comes to outfits that are supposed to be worn in London, Paris, or NYC in November, yet include bare legs and a tiny jacket made from lace. I suspect that this is down to the high-end fashion world's dismally archaic view of what men and women "should" look like -- ie, it's a rare day that you see a menswear collection that highlights the delicate and fragile aspects of its wearer's appearance, or a womenswear collection that tries to make the models look strong and bulky.

The shoes in this show were a particular treat for me. They went from trendy to formal to artfully distressed, plus many of them would go with a wide variety of outfits. The neverending queues of tuxedos we see on the red carpet would be significantly more interesting if their wearers threw in some gold-embroidered shoes now and then. And I loved the urban neo-antique appearance of sock/show combos such as this:

I would wear this like a shot.

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Pre-Fall 2012: Chloe, Pedro Lourenco, Stella McCartney, Roksanda Ilincic, The Row, and Giambattista Valli.

Chloé
You can thank post-war fashion photographer Irving Penn for the popularity of the plain-white-backdrop photoshoot style that has come to annoy me so much in recent years. Back in the day it was innovative, but since many models nowadays are directed to pose with fixed expressions of boredom and/or grim dissatisfaction, having them stand in front of something that resembles an industrial refrigerator only enhances the photoshoots' lack of humanity.

I thought of Irving Penn when I saw this series of photos from Chloé, with the models posing in a corner. I don't know if this is an intentional homage or not, but it immediately reminded me of Irving Penn's series of Corner Portraits: famous figures such as Salvador Dali, Marlene Dietrich and Igor Stravinsky, all of them photographed while trapped in a corner.

Marlene Dietrich by Irvin Penn, from here.

It's not exactly claustrophobic art photography, especially since in this day and age at least half of all non-catwalk fashion shows are photographed up against the dreaded refrigerator wall, but Chloé's Pre-Fall line wasn't too bad. For example, this outfit managed to make pleat-front pants look somehow cool and feminine instead of something your grandad wears:

Photos from Style.com

Pedro Lourenco
This model looks CGI. I don't generally approve of photorealistic prints on clothing, but since the hair, accessories and backdrop all suggest that this model is either a holodeck character or an AI droidgirl from a Philip K. Dick movie adaptation, I've decided it's OK that her dress is the couture version of a Teletubby's belly.

MIRRORSHADES.

Stella McCartney
Stella McCartney is very hit-and-miss for me. Critics rhapsodise about her minimalist brand of chic, but I tend to find it dull. There's stylish restraint, and then there's turning up to everything in a tuxedo jacket. Only James Bond gets to do that, and he wears the full tuxedo.

This collection is rather different from what I usually expect from her brand, however. So here we have one hit...

... and one miss. WHAT is going on with these zippy-trousers? What? Horrible. They look like cheap supermarket trackies someone's mum wears to go camping. And then there's the one-jacket-fits/one-jacket-doesn't combo on the top half. No thanks. Also, it's one of those ensembles where the shoulders are dressing for winter but the ankles are dressing for the beach -- something I really can't abide.

The Row
I picked out this photoshootnot not because of the clothes but because of... well, the whole package.  Superficially, here is a brick-coloured velour suit. So far, so Rolling Stones. Next up: velour backdrop. And velour-covered chair, as if the photoshoot took place in someone's garage. Then the fur stole, giving the whole thing a "barbarian king on his throne" kind of look, just a little bit anime-character. The clincher is the model herself: mournful, lanky, female Snape.

Did no one explain to The Row that this is JUST A JUMPER?

Outfits like these make me want to start a Tumblr called "THAT'S NOT FASHION", but I know that if I started I'd never stop.

This final shot is a real doozy, since it utilises the "velour backdrop in somebody's garage" background to perfect advantage by taking a picture that looks exactly like a portrait of someone's gothy little sister in the mid '90s. Plus, you can't even see most of the clothes.

Giambattista Valli
Tiles: the new upholstery fabric?

Roksanda Ilincic
Strongly reminiscent of the famous Yves Saint Laurent 1965 Mondrian dresses.

I love these high collars, especially in contrast colours. This plus the tiny frills on many of the outfits, and the strawberry-red shoes, give for a confectionary-like appearance without being overbearingly girlish or frothy. More Charlie And The Chocolate Factory or Pushing Daisies than Dolores Umbridge.

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Pre-Fall 2012: Celine, Givenchy and Preen.

Celine

Before I started writing Hello, Tailor I used to review catwalk shows on my personal blog, dividing any designs I liked into "Clothes I'd wear" and "Clothes other people could wear", because I recognise that a lot of the time an outfit can be interesting and well-made without being to my personal taste. If I only posted pictures of clothes I personally would wear, this would be a pretty boring blog. But sometimes, even taking into account the fact that everyone has different taste, there's no criticism to make except THIS IS BAD CLOTHING.

Celine, YOU HAVE MADE BAD CLOTHING.

all pics from style.com

What is this? And where did the photoshoot take place? A 90s hotel room with shag carpeting and "modern" fixtures that consist of huge, pointless, 2001: A Space Odyssey slabs of metal attached to the walls for no apparent reason? In front of which the models lined up like so many pissed-off looking Charlie Chaplin impersonators in their ill-fitting trousers, slouching forwards as the cameraman turned the flash up to 11 for maximum ugly shadow projected onto the backdrop behind them? What a dismal scenario. You can see it in her eyes, can't you?

The thing is, I don't have any problem with couture designs that bear little relation to the body lurking underneath. What's fashion about, if not livening up the everyday human form? But there's a difference between Issey Miyake supergluing a 4-foot paper sculpture to a model's hip, and... this. This is an uncomfortable pair of pyjamas made from suit material. It looks like a sewing experiment from someone who's making trousers and a shirt for the first time, without a pattern. What design process led to this? It doesn't look good! And if it doesn't look good on a professional model, and I can pretty much guarantee it won't look good on anyone else.

Now, this one is slightly more acceptable but not much. For one: inexplicable nude shoes that make it look like the model's feet are bare and that her toes have smoothly fused together like the Penguin in Batman Returns. I kind of see where they're going with the shirt -- peplums are really in right now, and so a backwards peplum is... something? So at least I can assume that more thought went into this outfit. But still no. No.

To be fair, some of the Celine collection was OK. This outfit is very chic in that slightly inhuman, boxy way that always seems to come partnered with random leather squares, like minimalist furniture. 

White duck feet?

Givenchy

I can't tell if this photoshoot is intentionally "casual" (bleh) or if it's just incredibly low-budget. Possibly both. I think they just got the models to stand in a street and wait until no one was standing behind them. There's an equestrian theme going on here, which is kind of same-old-same-old, but remove the helmet and what you've got left is some great-looking tailoring and sweet lapel action.

Just got off my horse. You know. Just casually standing here.

Also weird knee-boot gaiter things. Not sure what's going on there, except it continues in the ever-popular trend of giving models needlessly chilly knees.

This lady rides to work. Really. You know this, because she's wearing a helmet.

If you ignore everything above the neck and below the knees, this is a great outfit. I don't really understand why they decided to go with the riding helmet thing, but c'est la vie. It's a lovely coat.

I'll be interested to see how many people shell out for taupe shin-gauntlets come "Pre-Fall" 2012. Luckily they're an easy accessory to DYI -- just get some car inner-tubes and shove your legs in there. Maybe superglue a buckle over the top, for pizazz. SORTED. <-- shin-gauntlets are the biz. What outfit is complete without them? (Trick answer: all outfits.)

Permanent bruise on her nose from the helmet hitting the sunglasses.

Preen
Here's an outfit for stylish gallery curators and sophisticated trophy wife characters to wear on TV, although probably not with tights.

LOVE this dress. First up, I'm easy for high-collared, skin-tight dresses with long sleeves. The print on this one seems to be a photo of some kind of cable-knit (?) pattern, and it's colourful enough to look awesome. This is a whole outfit in itself, just slap a jacket over it and you're done. Total fashion-magazine fare.

One part Mary Katrantzou, one part teacup pattern, one part... spanx belt? This dress is kind of weird-looking in my opinion, and way less versatile than the all-blue one above, but it's certainly striking and manages to use the orange-highlight thing that's so ubiquitous right now without seeming too obnoxious about it. And it works with black tights.

This model is confused as to why all the OTHER models aren't wearing tights.

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