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.

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.