Ann Binlot
Fashion & Style News

Silhouettes

Moss as Muse: Great Kate Poses for Playboy

Rumors that Kate Moss would drop proverbial trou for Playboy’s January issue have been steeping since March, but they gained traction when celebrity hairstylist Oribe told Refinery 29 last week the shoot had already taken place.

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Fancy Footwork Forty Years Later: Palter DeLiso

Come autumn, footwear aficionados will see the return of a brand that disappeared forty years ago: Palter DeLiso. Reportedly, two wily entrepreneurs – Taz Saunders and Lauren Bruksch – discovered that the DeLiso trademark expired in the seventies, whereby they then bought it.

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Pussy Riot’s Lasting Legacy May Be the Balaclava Trend

“It’s very important to us that there are no designers or labels to fetishize around us,” a member of the anarcha-feminist activist group Pussy Riot told the New York Times last year. Oh, the irony! As the Met’s “Punk: From Chaos to Couture” show demonstrates (to near-unanimously dismal effect), fashion has quite the knack for co-opting countercultural signifiers.

The anti-Putinist punk collective — whose trial and incarceration is documented in this week’s HBO special “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer” — has sparked an international fashion trend. A derivative of fashion’s current mania for all things punk might be the balaclava — Pussy Riot’s talisman of hooliganism and subversion. The balaclava could be the biggest thing in radical merchandizing since the Che shirt. Continue Reading

Don’t Put Rick Owens Down for Cardio

Everyone’s favorite goth star, Rick Owens, has paired up with the German footwear giant Adidas on a collaborative capsule line. The idea is to make running shoes that suit the designer’s unconventional tastes.

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Would You Pay $68,000 for Kinderwhore Frippery?

This floral babydoll dress from Saint Laurent’s grunge-themed collection costs $68,000. Yes, the comma is in the right place. Currently sold at Saint Laurent’s new Soho store, the (admittedly cute) dress is representative of the collection that every fashion journalist and their proverbial mother excoriated last season. Compound words like “bad Topshop” and “huge joke” were used.

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Karl Lagerfeld Extols Keira Knightley, Slams Audrey Tautou, Rewrites Coco Chanel

Karl Lagerfeld was opinionated as usual in a recent interview with The Telegraph. In addition to giving the stamp of approval on Keira Knightley’s nuptials (“She had the least pretentious wedding ever…I liked the light-heartedness of this wedding”), the designer, budding cineaste, and selective Coco Chanel biographer announced plans to make a sequel to “Once Upon a Time” — his short biopic starring Knightley as a young Coco.

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Look Who’s Joining the Pajama Party

Hostile to established dress codes and indifferent to the binaries of public and private, interior and exterior, wakefulness and sleep, the “fancy pajama” has become firmly entrenched as a fashion meme. Marc Jacobs arguably started the trend at his somniferous fall 2013 show. Following the parade of satin lamé bedclothes, the designer took a bow in a handsome pair of burgundy Prada PJs.

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Dear Vogue, Regarding Your Retreat from Feminism

Dear Vogue,

As an avid reader of your online edition, I want to congratulate you on your solid work. Your guide to summer swimsuits is both informative and seasonally appropriate. Your coverage of the 2013 Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic is horsey and relevant. I was simply dying to know what Fashion Assistant Grace Fuller wore to the office last week — thanks so much for telling me! Also, Kate Upton looks smokin’ hot on your cover. However, your readers can do without the lecherous, misogynistic drivel tucked under the fig leaf of wan cultural essayism. Yes, Vogue. I mean that recent morsel of writing by British novelist and unapologetic gazing male subject, Will Self. Continue Reading

Getting Tipsy With Charlotte Olympia and Veuve Clicquot

In honor of Veuve Clicquot’s annual Polo Classic, held each summer in New York City, British footwear ace Charlotte Dellal — of her label Charlotte Olympia — has teamed up with the famed champagne brand on a series of limited-edition accessories. Continue Reading

Will Dolce & Gabbana Go to Jail? Probably Not, But Possibly

Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce

Ahh, Italian law. It never ceases to amaze, and unfortunately, in a new round of court proceedings, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana could end up on the wrong side of it. In Milan today, a prosecutor has called for a two-and-a-half year jail sentence each for the Dolce & Gabbana designers, as well as their associate, Cristiana Ruella, for criminal tax evasion.

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