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.

How Social Media Has Changed Fashion

When I was a little girl, I pined over my only portal into the fashion world: the glossy pages of magazines. If you had told me that one day, I would have direct access to the crazy world of fashion from a tiny phone screen, I would have brushed it off as something from The Matrix. I grew up in what is now referred to as the “traditional” fashion era, and I was obsessed with all things fashion. Those magazines were my bible, and I acted on just about every word.
                                             

At the time, I had a sense that I was far removed from the glamorous world of fashion, but I did not understand the extent to which trends were decided for me. Industry gatekeepers—like buyers for major retailers and magazine editors—kept fashion exclusive. They had their kingdom of trend-happy consumers under tight control. Fashion Weeks consisted of runway shows where high-profile editors and endorsed celebrities sat in the front row, and the chosen pieces from designer collections would not be seen in stores for another four to six months.

Consumers are smarter than ever because of the variety of products to choose from, the constant evolution of technology and the all-access mindset of social media. As they say, knowledge is power. Today’s landscape of fashion is changing dramatically, and the average consumer is becoming more and more empowered.

If a new designer collection is on the runway, you can watch the fashion show from your couch with livestreaming platforms like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Designers recognize the purchasing power that consumers hold, and today, that buying power means more than that of the traditional industry gatekeepers.

In fact, what bloggers are wearing on Instagram and other social media outlets has created such an impact on the way that consumers shop that retailers have reached out to them for content collaborations.

For instance, blogger Jacie Duprey of Damsel in Dior is an ambassador for Old Navy, mixing its affordable options with her own designer style to create one-of-a-kind looks.

French dressing

The Royal Ontario Museum's Dr. Alexandra Palmer says its upcoming Christian Dior exhibition celebrates the legendary atelier and the women who wore its creations.

One of the most meaningful post-show bows ever taken at a fashion presentation was when the entire Christian Dior atelier came out on stage at the end of its 2011 fall/winter Haute Couture collection. Fifteen-year creative head John Galliano had just been infamously dismissed, and the full team's appearance was a gesture that highlighted the fact that a designer for a brand is only one cog in the creative execution wheel.
                                                       

               
We've seen unprecedented results from international fashion exhibitions; why do you think there's such an appetite for these kinds of shows?

Fashion is something that everyone can relate to in a very personal way, whether you love it or hate it. It's a daily, ongoing relationship or trial that we have. With fashion, you can try on things and discard them or take them on physically in a way that you can't with any other form of decorative arts. It's also a way of expressing ourselves in very complex social, psychological and artistic ways. But fashion is very much associated with women and frivolity and vanity, so we have these huge complexes about it. Museum fashion exhibitions valorize it, and make it all right to think about fashion in an intellectual way.

Was there the same kind of gravitas to wearing a Dior label as there is today?

It was always prestigious to wear Haute Couture dresses. They're beautifully made and from Paris, so there's this magic about that. But it was a different time. Women wore the dresses for their social functions, for their daily lives, and for a lot of the philanthropic work they did — The Art Gallery of Toronto, as it was called, the symphony, the ballet, the hospitals. A lot of these women wore their suits to the committee meetings to plan the events. But what's really different is the consumption. Wardrobes weren't as huge and over-the-top as they are today. People really valued their clothes and they wore them a lot. The clothes were expensive, but not outrageously expensive. They were "affordable". They were for the elite, the women with means, but then they would donate them. There was no real vintage market until the late nineties, so they were given to the Hadassah Bazaar or the Junior League. As a member of the Hadassah or a member of the Junior League, that's what you did. And then they were also given to the museum, because the ROM's Betty Brett, the curator, was consciously trying to build up an Haute Couture collection at the Museum as examples of good design for Canadian designers and the public to learn about, and to be able to study.