Fashion Festival is stylish success

    Looking fierce: a model takes to the runway in the 2018 Bermuda Fashion Festival where local and international designers and models showcase their work on the big stage on Front Street (Photograph by Blaire Simmons)
Organisers have hailed this year's Fashion Festival as a huge success.

They said that Bermudian designers had been offered international opportunities as a result of the event.

Danilee Trott, executive producer of the festival, was thrilled by the quality and reception of this year's event.

Ms Trott said: "We had a really broad range of international guests that participated as designers, models and mentors.

"They were reality stars, celebrity stylists, red-carpet designers, supermodels — it was definitely one of the highest-calibre group of guests we have had come and be a part of the festival."

More than 2,000 people watched the three runway shows, with standing room only at some events.

Local designers also earned their place in the spotlight.

Ms Trott said: "Their collections blew me away and I am just so thrilled for the opportunities that they earned that will help them take their brands to the next level.

"The mentors were so impressed by them that on the spot, as they were judging the winners, they were offering up additional prizes of internships and externships. The decisions were not easy to make."

Charda Simons, Nicola Lucas and Desiree Riley all won trips to Atlanta, Georgia, to learn about marketing and business from fashion designers Ken Laurence and businesswoman Lisa Nicole Cloud.

Ms Lucas, of Aqua Designs, said: "The Bermuda Fashion Festival was an amazing experience for me, having never really been featured in a runway show or even attended one.

"The local models were amazing and it was such a great highlight to also have an international supermodel walking in one of my designs.

"I am honoured to have been chosen to go to Atlanta for the externship where I'll get more hands-on experience in brand marketing and building my business."

Ms Riley, of Dezir Designs, added: "It has definitely offered up many opportunities for me such as shooting my line in New York with famed photographer James Hercule, as well as working with other international designers for their shows.

"Evelyn Lambert spoke to me about opening her show at New York Fashion Week and Lisa Nicole Cloud has already approached me about a few of my looks for a red-carpet event."

Ms Simons, along with Rochelle Minors, also won the chance to show their collections at the Fashion Gallery New York Fashion Week in September, with free flights offered by JetBlue.

Taijhuan Hollis won an internship in Los Angeles with fashion gurus Adolfo Sanchez and Viktor Luna.

Jessica White, an American supermodel, said she enjoyed being able to walk the catwalk in Bermuda.

She said: "Bermuda is such a majestic place full of beautiful people. I'm honoured I had the opportunity to grace your island.

"I look forward to coming back and special thanks to the Bermuda Fashion Festival team for having me and who worked so very hard on an amazing production."

Melissa Leach, who served as a mentor at this year's show, was pleased to see the festival evolve over the past three years.

The Bermuda resident, who has worked with fashion industry heavyweights including Burberry, Jimmy Choo and the British Fashion Council, said the event had become a "solid platform" for Bermudian designers.

Ms Leach said: "I am pleased to have been a part of the programme this year and I look forward to continuing my support of the festival and of the emerging design talent by sharing my knowledge of the business side of fashion, giving our local designers the best possible chance of success."

Lisa Nicole Cloud, international designer and mentor for the event, said: "The show was a quality fashion production and the hospitality shown to me during my visit was exceptional."

Boys can be girls: What we learned from Paris fashion week

As Paris men's fashion week comes to an end Sunday we look at four things we learned from a packed and at times emotional six days:

Men don't have to be men

The pressure is off, boys. Dress like you did when you were a kid raiding your mother's wardrobe. That seems to be the big message from a fashion week where the gender lines have never been more blurred.

We have had men in dresses aplenty before on the Paris catwalk but never has the male wardrobe itself been so comprehensively feminised. Blur's "Girls & Boys" could have been the soundtrack for a week where genderless meant men borrowing all the best bits from the girls to sex up suits, shirts and trousers.

Margiela's John Galliano said the time had come to "liberate" men from their sartorial shackles. For him that meant silks and satins, daring to be "louche" by going shirtless under a suit, and most of all wearing clothes cut on the bias -- the technique he has used for years to make his clothes for women so fluid and sensual.

"Gender doesn't matter any more -- it's 2018," Kim Jones told AFP before his triumphant debut at Dior Homme where he showed a transparent organza and tulle shirt embroidered with tiny, delicate white feathers.

Flowers and floral toile de Jouy blossomed out of a long run of other pieces, "but it is still menswear," he insisted.

Loewe used not a little humour to herald fashion's rebirthing of man, opening its presentation with a naked young man sitting on a chair sauvely fingering his trumpet.

Pink power

Naturally in such circumstances, pink -- once the "boy's colour" before it was supplanted by butch blue in the 1940s -- was in full blush. From Dior's pale pink double breasted suits and trench coats to Thom Browne's Vichy check and bubblegum pink lobstar coats and the old rose of timeless Hermes, the colour threw its puff powder hue everywhere.

Vuitton's Jones said it was time to bury the old wussy prejudices. "In LA kids in the street wear pink all the time. So it's not, 'Oh it's pink, I won't wear it', anymore," he added.

Fashion’s Love Affair With Guns Is on an Indefinite Hiatus

When the late British socialite Tara Parker-Tomkinson was detained for hours at Zürich Airport in 2013, she made the best of it. She played backgammon with the authorities; she tweeted about the ordeal. It was all due to a mixup. When her luggage was scanned, security spotted what looked like two guns in her belongings. But the objects that raised alarm weren’t quite the real deal. They were Chanel’s Miami Vice platform sandals — stilettos designed to look like pistols.
                                                       

             
The brainchild of Karl Lagerfeld, the shoes debuted as part of Chanel’s 2009 Resort collection. While the pumps that appeared on the runway were reportedly made of actual gun casings, the shoes for public consumption were made of plexiglass. Yet Tomkinson couldn’t easily convince airport security that the heels, also faves of Madonna and Ashlee Simpson, weren’t deadly weapons. In fact, in 2011 Parker-Tomkinson’s shoes wound up in customs for five days because of a similar misunderstanding.

Named one of Footwear News’s “10 Most Iconic Shoes from the Runway,” the Miami Vice shoes exemplify how two worlds that seemingly have little in common — high fashion and gun culture — have intersected. After Chanel released its pistol pumps, Saint Laurent debuted its Fall 2014 ready-to-wear collection, complete with gun-print shirts, dresses, purses, and jewelry worn by celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Rihanna. The pop star has also carried the “Guardian Angel” tote gun bags designed by Netherlands brand Vlieger & Vandam; those totes are still available. In 2016, country star Miranda Lambert jumped on the gun chic trend, showing up to the ACM Awards in a pair of $849 Joyce Echols gun holster heels. Those heels remain available for purchase as well.

But as calls for gun law reform have grown their loudest, and celebrities are more likely to wear orange flag pins for gun violence awareness than to mix couture and firearms, fashion has to reframe its relationship to guns, say industry experts and gun control advocates.

The Best Collections From Milan Fashion Week

Milan Fashion Week started with a retrospective. “Italiana, Italy Through the Lens of Fashion 1971–2001” showcases the formative years of the country’s ready-to-wear industry and the great names that built it. The luncheon celebrating its opening was a nostalgia-inducing affair for all in attendance, but by week’s end, it seems right to say that Italian fashion’s glory days are not necessarily all behind us. Renaissance might be too grand a word for the current state of things, but we are certainly witnessing a flowering of fresh new Italian labels. Women and men of taste have launched lines with niche appeal (Attico, LaDoubleJ, For Restless Sleepers), or, in the case of Marco Zanini, are helping to reinvigorate established companies like Santoni and Aspesi. The city’s big names had a good week, too, demonstrating not just Milan’s famous commercial savvy (a point made explicit by the Italiana exhibition), but also a commitment to ideas.
                                                       

Gucci is the envy of the global industry for the way Alessandro Michele triggers our shopping impulses. His new collection will keep things moving along nicely in stores. Michele is so confident in his vision (a sentiment clearly reciprocated by his bosses), he went high concept, transforming the company’s lately opened hub space into an eerie operating room. The show’s fake baby dragon and severed heads, created with Cinecittà’s special effects house Makinarium, were the most talked about—and memed about—sightings of the week. Marketing is part of Michele’s genius. His real achievement, though, was getting the nerds among us to read Donna Haraway’s prophetic 1984 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Talk about a head trip.

Miuccia Prada has deep thoughts of her own about exposure and protection, issues freshly relevant in our #MeToo moment. She explored them with a deft handling of the company’s signature padded black nylon and a hefty dose of fluorescent colors, which she set against the futuristic, neon-lit skyscape outside the company’s impressive art foundation. Karl Lagerfeld and Silvia Venturini Fendi traveled similar proto-feminist territory with different results. In a season when all the action is at the shoulders, Fendi had some of the boldest tailoring around—and a few of the prettiest frocks, including an especially charming embroidered handkerchief dress. Speaking of pretty dresses, the week’s most playful and inventive were seen at Marni, where Francesco Risso is proving to be a very good fit. We also appreciated an oversize, mannish coat made from compressed, recycled textiles. More of this kind of thinking!

Chloë Grace Moretz Is Having A Major Victoria Beckham Fashion Moment

When you're dating the son of one of the world's most respected and renowned fashion designers, you'd hope you'd be able to bag (or at least borrow) a few pieces from their runway collections.
                                                   

And that's exactly what Chloë Grace Moretz appears to have done, if her latest wardrobe choices at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday are anything to go by.

For the film festival, the actress wore not one but two outfits designed by her boyfriend Brooklyn's mother, Victoria Beckham.

The pieces perfectly oozed the star's laid-back vibe, with expert tailoring and a minimalistic tonal base that screamed the 'Beckham' aesthetic.

At a talk about her movie The Miseducation of Cameron Post and the Outfest Queer Brunch, Chloë wore a silky black button-down shirt, black trousers and gold heeled books.

With her blonde hair tousled into loose curls and her make-up stripped back, Moretz seemed to dress as a mini Posh Spice for the occasion.

Later in the day, the 21-year-old donned a white button-down shirt with a ruffled collar, a black jacket, black fitted trousers, and sparkly silver heels, for the Creative Coalition's Spotlight Initiative Awards Gala Dinner.

With a swipe of coral-hued red lipstick and her hair pulled into a bun, Moretz added some much-needed colour to her monochrome look and we for one couldn't love it more.

Of course, this isn't the first time Moretz has paid tribute to her 'mother-in-law'.

Last year, the actress wore a Victoria Beckham SS18 pink pinstripe suit to the Harpers Bazaar Women of the Year Awards in London, and has recently been spotted in Blighty wearing one of her navy-blue trench coats.