Chanel Plans To Open Spa At The Ritz Paris

Chanel confirmed to WWD that the storied fashion house will open "Chanel au Ritz Paris" — a spa dedicated to its skin care — in the city's Ritz Club by the end of 2015.
No details have been revealed about the Ritz Paris spa's opening date.
"The strong bond that unites Chanel and the Ritz Paris was initiated by Mademoiselle Chanel who lived 34 years at the Ritz. Located in the Ritz Club, 'Chanel au Ritz Paris' will provide women with a unique sensorial and customized experience," the brand said in a statement, according to The Cut.
The Ritz has been closed for renovations since July 2012. The Paris hotel is known for its Coco Chanel suite, which is also being remodeled.
"The story linking Chanel and the Ritz Paris would not be complete without the opening of a new Coco Chanel suite inspired by the one she originally occupied and by the decor she loved so much," stated the Chanel brand.
According to WWD, the shape of the Chanel No. 5 bottle was reportedly inspired by the arrangement of buildings on the Place Vendôme, where the Ritz sits in a prime corner location.
Many fashion shows have been held at the Ritz Paris' basement pool. Versaceshowed its collection at the location in 2012 (right before it closed for renovations). The fashion brand also held many runway shows there between 1990 and 2004, including Gianni Versace's last runway show in 1997.
"It is with tremendous emotion that I return to the Ritz where I shared so many special moments with my brother," Donatella Versace told WWD in April 2012.
"The closing of the Ritz Paris for two years represents the end of an era but also the beginning of a new one, so to be able to show Atelier Versace there one last time will be a memorable milestone," she said.
Obviously, the renovations are taking longer than originally expected.

How to Write About Fashion

Fashion writing is a funny business. Nestled next to lavish ads, it can’t easily say what it really thinks. “Ugly” becomes “conceptual”; “looks like grandma’s nightie” becomes “a return to old-fashioned femininity.” The fashion writer and scholar Anne Hollander—who pinpointed some of these empty niceties in a 1997 column for Slate—was not among the panderers. In her pieces for The New Republic and in her groundbreaking book Seeing Through Clothes, she presented clothing as it really is: art, armor, frippery, fantasy. Here, she playfully chronicles the 1960s and 1970s revolution that brought turtlenecks, bell-bottoms, and wide ties into men’s wardrobes. “There is no tradition of clothes criticism that includes serious analysis,” she once complained. But she wrote exactly that.
The last decade has made a large number of men more uneasy about what to wear than they might ever have believed possible. The idea that one might agonize over whether to grow sideburns (sideburns!) or wear trousers of a radically different shape had never occurred to a whole generation. Before the mid-sixties whether to wear a tie was about the most dramatic sartorial problem: Everything else was a subtle matter of surface variation. Women have been so accustomed to dealing with extreme fashion for so long that they automatically brace themselves for whatever is coming next, including their own willingness to resist or conform and all the probable masculine responses. Men in modern times have only lately felt any pressure to pay that kind of attention. All the delicate shades of significance expressed by the small range of possible alternatives used to be absorbing enough: Double- or single-breasted cut? Sports jacket and slacks or a suit? Shoes with plain or wing tip? The choices men had had to make never looked very momentous to a feminine eye accustomed to a huge range of personally acceptable possibilities, but they always had an absolute and enormous meaning in the world of men, an identifying stamp usually incomprehensible to female judgment. A hat with a tiny bit of nearly invisible feather was separated as by an ocean from a hat with none, and white-on-white shirts, almost imperceptibly complex in weave, were totally shunned by those men who favored white oxford-cloth shirts. Women might remain mystified by the ferocity with which men felt and supported these tiny differences, and perhaps they might pity such narrow sartorial vision attaching so much importance to half an inch of padding in the shoulders or an inch of trouser cuff.
But men knew how lucky they were. It was never very hard to dress the part of oneself. Even imaginative wives and mothers could eventually be trained to reject all seductive but incorrect choices with respect to tie fabric and collar shape that might connote the wrong flavor of spiritual outlook, the wrong level of education or the wrong sort of male bonding. It was a well ordered world, the double standard flourished without hindrance, and no man who stuck to the rules ever needed to suspect that he might look ridiculous.
Into this stable system the width-of-tie question erupted in the early sixties. Suddenly, and for the first time in centuries, the rate of change in masculine fashion accelerated with disconcerting violence, throwing a new light on all the steady old arrangements. Women looked on with secret satisfaction, as it became obvious that during the next few years men might think they could resist the changes, but they would find it impossible to ignore them. In fact to the discomfiture of many, the very look of having ignored the changes suddenly became a distinct and highly conspicuous way of dressing, and everyone ran for cover. Paying no attention whatever to nipped-in waistlines, vivid turtlenecks, long hair with sideburns and bell-bottom trousers could not guarantee any comfy anonymity, but rather stamped one as a convinced follower of the old order—thus adding three or four dangerous new meanings to all the formerly reliable signals. A look in the mirror suddenly revealed man to himself wearing his obvious chains and shackles, hopelessly unliberated.
Now that fashion is loose upon the whole male sex, many men are having to discard an old look for a new, if only to maintain the desired distance from the avant-garde, as women have always known how to do. Just after the first few spurts of creative masculine dress in the mid-sixties, like the Beatle haircut and the wide ties, daring young women began to appear in the miniskirt, and men were temporarily safe from scrutiny as those thousands of thighs came into view. The other truly momentous fashion phenomenon to arise at the same moment, the counterculture costume, established itself absolutely but almost unnoticeably among both sexes while all eyes were glued to those rising hems. In fact miniskirts were the last spectacular and successful sexist thunderbolt to be hurled by modem women, before the liberation movement began to conspire with the nature movement to prevent semi-nudity from being erotic (hot pants, rightly short lived, were too much like science fiction). Men who might have longed in adolescence for the sight of unconfined breasts were perhaps slightly disconcerted when breasts at last appeared, bouncing and swaying on the public streets in the late sixties, since they were often quite repellently presented to the accompaniment of costumes and facial expressions somehow calculated to quell the merest stirring of a lustful thought. But that was only at the beginning, of course. Since then the visible nipple has become delightfully effective under proper management.
Following bare legs, free breasts and the perverse affectation of poverty, dress suddenly became a hilarious parlor game, and men were playing too. Chains, zippers, nailheads and shiny leather were available in any sort of combination. Extremely limp, tired and stained old clothes could also be tastefully festooned on anybody who preferred those. Universal ethnic and gypsy effects, featuring extraordinary fringes and jewelry worn in unusual places, vied with general romantic and menace effects, featuring dark glasses, sinister hats and occasional black capes. In addition all the parts were interchangeable. Both sexes participated, but then finally many people got tired and felt foolish and gave it up. Men, however, had had a taste of what it could be like, and all the extreme possibilities still echoed long after the extreme practices had subsided, even in the consciousness of those who had observed and never tried to join.
During the whole trend men floundered, and still do, longing for the familiar feel of solid ground. Hoping to appease the unleashed tide with one decisive gesture, many men bought a turtleneck dress shirt and wore it uncomfortably but hopefully with a medallion on a chain, only to discover within three months that it would not do. Many a conservative minded but imaginative fellow, eager to avoid new possibilities for feeling foolish and to look at least attuned to the modem world, had expensive tailoring done in a bold and becoming new shape, hoping to stay exactly like that for the rest of his life, or at least for a few more years. He then discovered himself still handsome but hopelessly dated in a season or two. Mustaches sprouted and hastily vanished again, sidebums were cultivated and sometimes proved to grow in upsettingly silver gray. Hair, once carefully prevented from exhibiting wayward traits, was given its head. Men balding on top could daringly relish luxuriant growth around the sides, and the Allen Ginsberg phenomenon frequently occurred: a man once cleanshaven and well furred on top would compensate for a thinning poll by growing a lengthy fringe around its edges and often adding an enormous beard. The result was a sort of curious air of premature wisdom, evoking mental images of the young Walt Whitman spiced with swami. Other, more demanding solutions to the problem of thinning hair among those wishing to join the thick thatch with sideburns group required an elaborate styling of the remaining sparse growth, complete with teasing and spray and a consequent new dependence, quite equal to anything women submit to, upon the hairdressing skill of the professional, the family or the self.
Early in the game, of course, long hair for men had been just another badge. Most men had felt quite safe from any temptation to resemble those youthful and troublesome citizens who were always getting into the newspapers and the jails. Some young people, eager to maintain a low profile, had also found the hairy and ragged look an excellent disguise for masking a serious interest in studying the violin or any similar sort of heterodox concem. During all this time no one ever bothered girls about the length of their hair, or found any opportunity to throw them out of school for wearing crew cuts for instance. Even if half-inch fuzz had been the revolutionary mode for girls, they would have undoubtedly been exempt from official hassling, except possibly by their mothers. But, as it happened, the gradually evolved migrant worker, bowery bum costume worn by the armies of the young required long hair for both sexes. The very similarity of coiffure helped, paradoxically, to emphasize the difference of sex. After a while the potent influence of this important sub fashion that was at first so easy to ridicule came steadily to bear on the general public's clothes-consciousness. The hairy heads and worn blue denim legs all got easier to take, and indeed they looked rather attractive on many of them. People became quite accustomed to having their children look as if they belonged to a foreign tribe, possibly hostile; after all under the hair it was still Tom and Kathy.
In general, men of all ages turn out not to want to give up the habit of fixing on a suitable self-image and then carefully tending it, instead of taking up all the new options. It seems too much of a strain to dress for all that complex multiple role-playing, like women. The creative use of male plumage for sexual display, after all, has had a very thin time for centuries: the whole habit became the special prerogative of certain clearly defined groups, ever since the overriding purpose of male dress had been established as that of precise identification. No stepping over the boundaries was thinkable—ruffled evening shirts were for them, not me; and the fear of the wrong associations was the strongest male emotion about clothes, not the smallest part being fear of association with the wrong sex.
The difference between men's and women's clothes used to be an easy matter from every point of view, all the more so when the same tailors made both. When long ago all elegant people wore brightly colored satin, lace and curls, nobody had any trouble sorting out the sexes or worrying whether certain small elements were sexually appropriate. So universal was the skirted female shape and the bifurcated male one that a woman in men's clothes was completely disguised (see the history of English drama), and long hair or gaudy trimmings were never the issue. It was the nineteenth century, which produced the look of the different sexes coming from different planets, that lasted such a very long time. It also gave men official exemption from fashion risk, and official sanction to laugh at women for perpetually incurring it.
Women apparently love the risk of course, and ignore the laughter. Men secretly hate it and dread the very possibility of a smile. Most of them find it impossible to leap backward across the traditional centuries into a comfortable renaissance zest for these dangers, since life is hard enough now an)rway. Moreover along with fashion came the pitiless exposure of masculine narcissism and vanity, so long submerged and undiscussed. Men had lost the habit of having their concern with personal appearance show as blatantly as women's —the great dandies provided no continuing tradition, except perhaps among urban blacks. Men formerly free from doubt wore their new finery with colossal self-consciousness, staring covertly at everyone else to find out what the score really was about all this stuff. Soon enough the identifying compartments regrouped fhemselves to include the new material. High heels and platform soles, once worn by the Sun King and other cultivated gentlemen of the past, have been appropriated only by those willing to change not only their heights but their way of walking. They have been ruled out, along with the waist-length shirt opening that exposes trinkets nestling against the chest hair, by men who nevertheless find themselves willing to wear long hair and fur coats and carry handbags. Skirts, I need not add, never caught on.
What of women during the rest of this revolutionary decade? The furor over the miniskirt now seems quaint, like all furors about fashion, and the usual modifications have occurred in everybody's eyesight to make them seem quite ordinary. Trousers have a longer and more interesting history. Women only very recently leamed that pants are sexy when fitted tightly over the female pelvis. When trousers were first worn by women, they were supposed to be another disturbingly attractive masculine affectation, perfectly exemplified by Marlene Dietrich doing her white tie and tails number in Morocco. They were also supposed to be suitable for very slim, rangy outdoor types low on sex appeal. Jokes used to fly about huge female behinds looking dreadful in pants, and those who habitually wore them had to speak loudly about their comfort and practicality. Gradually, however, it became obvious that pants look sensational, not in the least masculine, and the tighter the better. Long trousers, along with lots of hair, breasts and bareness, became sexy in their own right. Everybody promptly forgot all about how comfortable and practical they were supposed to be, since who cared when they obviously simply looked marvelous. They are in fact a great bore on slushy pavements and very hot in summer but nobody minds. Nevertheless the extremely ancient prejudice against women in trousers lingered for a very long time. Many schools forbade pants for girls even though they might wear their hair as they liked, and the same restaurants that required the male necktie prohibited the female trouser. Even in quite recent times pants still seemed to connote either excessively crude informality or slightly perverted, raunchy sex. The last decade has seen the end of all this, since those sleek housewives in TV ads who used to wear shirtdresses all wear pants now, and dignified elderly ladies at all economic levels wear them too, with crystal earrings and nice, neat handbags. After all these anxious and newsworthy borrowings, all the classes and the sexes remain as distinguishable as ever.

Her Modern Family Co-Stars Dish on Upcoming Nuptials

Julie Bowen insists she hasn't received her save-the-date for Sofía Vergara andJoe Manganiello's wedding yet, but that doesn't mean she's not thinking about the big day.
"I'm sure her wedding will be extraordinary," Bowen told me at the TV Academy screening of Modern Family's season finale (airing tonight on ABC at 9 p.m.). "My only question is, is it going to be four people or 500?"
Vergara has said the nuptials will likely be a big affair.
"We all kind of get that…she's not Gloria. She doesn't actually wear floral prints on floral prints all the time," Bowen said. "She's incredibly tasteful. Her [fiance] is as tasteful as tasteful can be."
Ed O'Neill expects to get on a plane for the wedding. "It should be fun. It will probably be somewhere not here," he said. "There'll be some travel involved…She knows how to do it."
Just this past Saturday, Vergara's bestie, photographer and real estate agent Barry Peele, hosted their engagement party at Soho House in Los Angeles.
Vergara's 22-year-old son, Manolo Gonzalez Vergara, posted a photo of Manganiello's Sabotage co-star Arnold Schwarzenegger making a toast. "Congratulations to these two ugly people. It's so sad, but luckily they have me to aspire to, physically.
Vergara recently revealed to Redbook magazine that she and the Magic Mikehottie will likely have a baby.
"Joe is younger than me. He's 38. He's never had kids," the 42-year-old funny lady told the mag. "How am I going to say no? I tell him if we're going to do this, we have to do it, like, now, because I don't want to be 50 with a baby."
Manganiello popped the question on Christmas Eve while he and Vergara were on vacation in Hawaii.

Miuccia Prada hates the idea of being a collector

For the journalist used to the Gatwick Express and EasyJet, delivery into the lavish embrace of Prada is somewhat disconcerting. “I could get used to this,” you think, even as you worry that your shoes are all wrong, that your bag will fool no one, being neither new season nor vintage. At the 18th-century Palazzo Prada (its real name is Ca’ Corner della Regina, though only rarely does anyone seem to use it) on the Grand Canal in Venice, no fewer than four black-suited young men are on hand to greet me: one to help me from water taxi to jetty, another to spirit away my luggage, and two merely to smile at me. “Please,” says a PR, leading me through the palazzo’s exquisite rooms (since 2011, these heavenly spaces have been used by the Fondazione Prada to display art). “Do go upstairs, where a buffet lunch will be served.” A buffet? Well, yes, the food is indeed arranged on a table. But when I approach a dish of gleaming asparagus – it’s so perfect, it might as well be by Manet – a waiter practically dives into my lap. If I’d like to sit down, he will bring me everything that I require.
It is the first week of the Venice Biennale. This lunch, doubtless one of dozens of similar gatherings around the city, is to celebrate the opening of Portable Classic, a new show at the palazzo which explores the miniature copies of classical sculptures that were such status symbols in later centuries. Needless to say, it’s a hot ticket. Who doesn’t want to be close to Miuccia Prada, an increasingly powerful figure in the art world?
Loitering, glass in hand, at one end of the room, I spot plenty of big names, Anish Kapoor and Carsten Höller among them – though it’s only when I clap eyes onHans Ulrich Obrist, the itinerant and irredeemably well-connected curator and co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, that I know this is really the place to be. Obrist, of course, is already deep in conversation with our hostess, Mrs Prada – everyone calls her Mrs Prada, even those who have worked with her for decades – who slipped into the palazzo without fanfare a little earlier, and for a while I watch the two of them. While he is animated, arms windmilling wildly, Prada cuts an altogether quieter figure. Small and (unexpectedly) blond, she is a wearing a white cotton dress with a pleated skirt. In her hand is a silk drawstring bag. In her ears are antique garnets or, more likely, rubies. On her feet are the kind of flat sandals, navy and white, that your granny wore at the seaside.
Two hours later, as the lunch is winding down and the diamonds and Chanel bags begin to exit the room, Prada approaches me and asks if I wouldn’t mind if we talked here, at one of the dining tables. It seems she has not yet had a chance to eat pudding and, sure enough, a waiter now puts in front of her a dish of panna cotta and roast peaches, an espresso (which she sends back, on the grounds that it is not hot enough) and some sugary biscuits. She eats quickly and greedily, and thanks to this, I warm to her – though it’s her face that really invites you in. Tanned as a nut, she wears no makeup, not even a slick of balm on her lips, while her expression is set somewhere between sombre and quizzical. It’s clear immediately that she couldn’t care less what I’m wearing; her eyes coolly meet mine, and never wander, not even to my (long-pondered and moderately daring) brooch. It’s as if she’s about to give me a tutorial.
In her home city of Milan, the Fondazione Prada has just opened a vast “campus” for art on the site of an old distillery close to a railway line. I saw it the day before, and gasped at its size, its ambition, its severe industrial minimalism (even the children’s play area is grey and white). At 19,000 square metres, its collection of exhibition spaces – one is several storeys high and called the Haunted House, another is a grotto deep underground – is twice the size of Renzo Piano’s newWhitney museum in New York, and at least three times as elegant. Designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, and filled mostly with work from the permanent collection of the Fondazione Prada, it has been received with some rapture by the critics, and with some gratitude by the Milanese, who will doubtless continue to make good use of its retro cafe – a 50s fantasy in green vinyl designed by the film director Wes Anderson – irrespective of whether they ultimately fall for the charms of Damien Hirst’s Lost Love (a gynaecologist’s chair in a large aquarium the artist made in 2000) or Nathalie Djurberg’s The Potato (a walk-in fibreglass tuber complete with purplish eyes that dates from 2008).
But is the woman who conceived it triumphant, over the moon, high on a combination of acclaim and relief? No, she is not. Only with the greatest reluctance, it seems, would Prada ever describe herself as pleased. “I’m always thinking about the next thing,” she says, her mouth turning down. “So I don’t enjoy anything.” But it’s so generous, her city of a gallery, with its square, its library, its cinema (visitors will be able to spend the day there for €10). She shrugs. “Well, I don’t feel generous. The result is maybe generous, but I didn’t start with that. I started with an idea, which was to do something that I think is important and relevant. I wanted to make culture attractive to the young [so that they would see] that it is necessary to your life. My intuition – and after many years, I realise that my main quality is intuition – was that it would be good to have a place where people could live with ideas.” Culture, she insists, must come to be perceived not as an extra, as a form of “decoration”, but as deeply useful. In what way useful? “It can answer political and even existential questions.”
She and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, the chief executive of Prada, established the Fondazione Prada in 1993, and it was only after this, she says, that they began buying art. “We had to learn, and quickly. Until that moment, my cultural background was in literature, politics, cinema, theatre and dance. Art? I was never interested in it.” So who did they buy first? “Nino Franchina [the Italian sculptor and painter] was probably the first… ” She grimaces. “You know, you look and you study and you like it and you appreciate it and eventually you buy it. That’s not very noble, the buying part, but I have to confess it. I grew up with the idea that art is for everybody and not a matter of private ownership, but sometimes you want to have it.”
Happily, she finds she’s now less interested in buying than before: when I tell her, for instance, that the loveliest things I saw during my visit were the two boxes by the American artist Joseph Cornell displayed in a 15th-century marquetry studiolo-cum-sideboard, her reply is unsentimental. “I’d always liked Cornell, but I bought those because I wanted to have something to put into the studiolo,” she says.
Her resistance to – or embarrassment about – the concept of ownership extends to the word “collector”: she and Bertelli may own some 900 pieces of contemporary and modern art, but she flinches if you use the term in her presence. “I hate the idea of being a collector,” she says. “I really hate it. I’m not a collector.” Nor is she willing to be described as a patron, for all that she is well known for commissioning artists (no interview with Prada is complete without mention of the Carsten Höller slide by which she may, if she so chooses, depart her office at night). “As much as I don’t feel like a collector, I’m even less a patron. I am and want to be an active part of shaping culture, but I am patronising nothing. I hate all of that. I don’t want to be perceived like that, which is why we never sponsor exhibitions.” So what is she, then? “When I started becoming friends with the artists, there was a shift. It was like sharing personal problems.”
Crikey. Building galleries and commissioning work is some way to share personal problems, not least because, however she likes to describe it, it brings with it such responsibilities: she has it in her power not only to make or break a career, but to influence the market. Does this ever make her anxious? “I can’t speak about the market,” she says. “But it is a problem in every field: the hunger for the new. In fashion, everyone wants a genius, and in another few days, they want another. It’s really bad. The problem is that people think an artist has only one great period. But we all live longer now: an artist can have a comeback.”
Prada and Bertelli have always strived to keep their fashion business and their interest in art quite separate. I think this has to do with their fear of vulgarity. They would hate anyone to think the Fondazione Prada was simply another, albeit more esoteric, way of selling handbags. But even so, the two realms must influence each other. How could they not? She smiles. “Yes. I prefer that they don’t in principle. But of course they do. I’m very proud of my job [as a designer]. I used to be ashamed of it because I was educated, I was a feminist. But finally, I am proud of it. I earn my own money, which is a huge thing for a woman. The speed of fashion has taught me so much, and it’s a very open world by its nature. Movies, music: we need culture for our job. This speed is useful in the art world, and for sure the art world is useful in my job. It’s such an obvious collaboration, and deep down my life is one. Every man and woman wants to dress well. That’s how they express themselves.”
She can’t believe the snobbery that exists around fashion. “It’s an injustice,” she says. But isn’t it the case that some people also take it far too seriously? It’s only frocks, after all. For a moment, she is silent. Perhaps I’ve offended her. But then she breaks into laughter. “Actually, I don’t care,” she says. “I really don’t care at all!”
In Milan, I went on a pilgrimage – or at least a research trip – to the original Fratelli Prada store in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, which Miuccia’s grandfather, Mario, opened in 1913. Mario made travel goods for the Milanese elite: in 1918, his collection included a lizard bag with marcasite and a buckle of lapis lazuli. But the chief object of interest in his shop’s hallowed windows was not a trunk or even a bag, but a socking great pair of sunglasses made of wood and leather and bolted together with metal staples. Bulky and unwearable, I almost laughed out loud when I saw them. They were so hideous, and yet I longed for them, an unnerving kind of covetousness that Prada has been inducing in customers and window shoppers alike since the early 90s (she inherited the business in 1978, but did not begin making clothes until a decade later). As Giorgio Armani has occasionally complained, her designs are “sometimes ugly”. Nevertheless, in her hands, such “bad taste” is chic. According to Forbes, Prada’s annual sales currently stand at $4.65bn.
She took over at Prada reluctantly. Fashion, business: these weren’t her things at all.
Having earned at doctorate in political science from the University of Milan, in the mid-70s she studied mime at the city’s Piccolo Teatro under the legendary director Giorgio Strehler; she also joined the communist party, whose leaflets she is said to have distributed while wearing Yves Saint Laurent. Even now, she insists it was only thanks to Patrizio – the couple met at a trade fair; at the time, he also had a leather goods business – that she moved from bags into clothes (he told her that if she didn’t do it, he would have to bring in a professional to design a collection). “I really have no idea where it [her determination] comes from,” she says. “Someone once said to me: Miuccia, you are a monster of ambition. But it’s not that. My best quality is my instinct. When people ask: ‘Are you happy it turned out like this?’ I say: ‘Bah! I don’t know. I never had a goal.’ I act and I react. I have a special guide inside me.”
Does she ever doubt her instincts? “So far, I trust it.” Only once has she sent out a collection and thought: uh-oh. “It was many years ago, my third show. I invented vintage. Now, vintage is normal. But then, it wasn’t. WWD [Women’s Wear Daily, the industry bible] wrote that it was like the Flintstones meets the Jacksons, which to them was the biggest insult, but to me was the biggest compliment. Anyway, it was completely unsuccessful.”
Her success, like so many things about her, is paradoxical. “I was never classical enough for the classicists, and never avant-garde enough for the avant-garde. It was always uncomfortable, I always did something wrong.” But she pressed on, and in the end, it was this very wrongness – oh, those ridiculous wooden sunglasses – that came to be acclaimed.
Prada is 66, but she can’t ever see herself giving up fashion; not even the art world could lure her away. “My work keeps me grounded. It’s the place where I really know what people want. Of course, it’s more complicated now. Before, the world was small. Until the 80s, it was mainly white and western and Eurocentric. Now, you have to face the big picture. It’s globalised.” At the Fondazione Prada in Milan, there will soon be a dance programme, and its choreographer would like those who take part to perform naked. “And this is the Hebdo and Houellebecq problem. How can you insist on your own culture if you want to open up to the world? You have to start a kind of censorship. You must compromise. The political correctness of today – in the US, you can’t even show a nipple – I feel very deeply. People take offence so quickly. But if you believe in coexistence, you may have to give up something that’s yours. If you don’t, you may end up back in medieval times.”
I wonder if she feels things are going backwards in other ways. How does a 70s feminist like her feel about the pressure on women to look permanently young and taut? Wouldn’t she like to use her influence to do something about it?
“First of all, I had this problem – worrying about looking old – when I was 33 and thank God I got over it and it never came back. Second, we will arrive there. The world is ageing, so from a commercial point of view, eventually people will start saying: it [being older] is fantastic. You won’t convince people with [older] models, but when each of us really believes in ourselves, and feels good and beautiful and sexy and secure, that will be it. And in any case, if we work who cares? If you don’t work, of course you think about the problem of your wrinkles from morning until night! If you work, you have something better to think about. That is the beginning of every possible kind of pride, and with those women [who don’t work] I really have no conversation.”
Love and work… that’s all there is. Freud, she agrees, was right about this, and the two cannot really be separated. “If you don’t work, if you depend on a man for your bread, how can you be happy? If you are young and blond, maybe he will love an older one with black hair. So just live your life. This is so obvious. I think women can go on having lovers until they are 100.”
Why is it still so hard for women to be the boss? Partly, she believes, this has to do with the issue of children, and whose job it is to look after them (her sons are grown-up now, but she was “privileged” enough for childcare not to have been too much of a problem). But it also connects to something more elusive.
“Women are complex, but command is very simple. Maybe that’s it. Also, as a woman, sometimes you want to be weak. It’s almost a pleasure. It comes from your traditional past. We interiorise sweetness, delicacy, protection: all those qualities of women. Why can’t we say we are clever? There is something wrong.”
Will a jacket or a dress change your life? She laughs out loud at this idea. “I can tell you that it won’t,” she says.
All the same, it strikes me as rather odd – or perhaps I just mean unfair – that the woman, arty and bookish, Prada seems to have in mind when she designs is also the kind of person who, in reality, would be least likely to be able afford her clothes. What are her more impoverished fans (I’m not saying I’m among them, or not out loud) supposed to do? She thinks for a moment. “I don’t know what to say. It is undemocratic. If you can afford it, you can, and if you can’t, you can’t. I would say: wear vintage. I would say: be strong and proud. Look chic with something less expensive. When I struggle, I feel good because I am not passive.”
Life, she thinks, is about ideas not jackets – though this is easy for her to say. When she gets up to leave, I notice her sandals all over again, and though she is irrefutably wearing the shoes of a Scarborough landlady dressed for best, it’s finest Venetian terrazzo over which she scoots, not a flowery fitted carpet.

Patrick Grant takes home the BFC/GQ Designer Menswear Fund

However, as last year's winner Christopher Shannon will tell you, the Vertu-sponsored award is not just a prestigious seal of approval from the fashion idustry, it's also a £150,000 grant (coupled with a year-long mentoring scheme worth around £50,000) that is designed to boost any budding British brand to the next level.
Selected by a panel of judges including Vertu CEO Max Pogliani, British Fashion Council CEO Caroline Rush and GQ Editor Dylan Jones, the Savile Row-trained tailor beat off stiff competition from the four other homegrown designer brands: Astrid Andersen, Christopher Raeburn, Matthew Miller and Sibling, made up of designer collective Sid Bryan, Joe Bates and Cozette McCreery.
Having been in the running last year for the first-ever BFC/GQ Designer Menswear Fund, Grant was shocked as he went to collect his award, surrounded by the biggest names in the fashion industry at the Rosewood Hotel's Scarfes Bar.
"It's surreal, I didn't expect this at all," Grant said upon the announcement, "I stood here twice for the BFC/Vogue [Fashion] Fund and once last year, so I know how bad it feels to miss out. But I want to say congratulations to all the other nominees. I am so proud to follow in Chris Shannon's footsteps."
"This year the level of talent and business acumen presented by the shortlisted designers was exceptionally high, making the competition both tough and intensely exciting," said Jones on the win. "Patrick demonstrated unique flair, precise craftsmanship and an inherent sense of commercial awareness, which combined with the financial and mentoring support will elevate the business placing it at the forefront of the global menswear stage."
"The opportunity to mentor such a talented group of young British designers is both inspiring and a privilege and the Vertu team of mentors was impressed with the creativity and commercial ambition demonstrated by all of the designers," said Pogliani of Grant's win. "Patrick, however, stood out not only for his immense talent, but for his appetite to build the business and openness to new commercial approaches. We now look forward to mentoring E Tautz further as it extends the business into new markets."
Adding to the good news, Pogliani also announced that Vertu would be sponsoring one, if not two more years of the BFC/GQ Designer Menswear Fund. We're looking forward to this time next year already.

Fashion’s love affair with the ’70s

What did the '70s feel like? As recalled by Bebe Buell, a singer and onetime habitué of that fabled hipster magnet Max's Kansas City: "Everybody's eyelids were very heavy. I used to chuckle to myself, thinking, 'That's the cannabis eye, the quaalude eye' — the look people get when they're feeling no pain."
What did the '70s look like? "Stylistically, it was a free-for-all," designer Betsey Johnson said of the tangy stew defining the era, a jumble of Harlowesque evening frocks, belled sleeves, flared pants, belted suede and wildly patterned caftans. Fashion in that showily dissolute decade was silky and caressing, silhouettes fluid and bras a relic of a straitjacketed past. So goes the lore.
"It was like you were walking around naked, but you had clothes on," said Phyllis Magidson, the curator of costumes and textiles at the Museum of the City of New York.
At the peak of that period, exalted in the popular mind as all that was kicky, inventive and louche, Magidson was in charge of wardrobe for soaps like "As the World Turns."
She recalled draping an actress in a slithery dress that exposed the outlines of her nipples. "She can't wear that," a sponsor huffed. So Magidson cast about for a way to make the star's breasts less, well, perky. "I'd say to her, 'Warm 'em up, honey.'"
Before long, though, the languid sensuality that was part of an aesthetic flowering extending roughly from 1967 to 1973 had pretty well run its course.
And yet.
"Certain elements of the period — the garish prints and weird colour combinations — keep repeating," said Rebecca Arnold, a fashion historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. So-called '70s style, Arnold added, is actually an aesthetic mash-up, one encompassing "sophisticated pantsuits, bohemianisms and a childlike play on the '60s baby-doll look."
That's to say nothing of the slippery fabrics, folksy embroideries, jumpsuits and swingy little dresses that might have been at home amid the glitter and grit of Studio 54.
Those long-ago emblems of worldliness — and waywardness — have now returned in force, with designers scrambling to loosely resurrect an era that keeps spinning like a continuous reel in their heads. Aptly enough, Tom Ford, who in the 1990s rescued the ailing house of Gucci with a '70s rock-infused collection, was prompt in his spring 2015 show to channel Bianca Jagger and other idols of the day, issuing a bell-bottom evening suit that conjured the dandyish regalia of Jagger's tabloid days.
Chanel paid homage to the Charlie girl, "kinda young, kinda now," with a bell-sleeve blouse and cropped wide-legged trousers, and Marc Jacobs offered a wide-sleeve camp shirt and loose pants covered somewhat subversively in a naïve-looking Liberty print. Rebecca Taylor offered a sweeping diaphanous maxi, Givenchy a studded leather vest, Gucci a supple suede trench that Lauren Hutton might have worn at the peak of her modeling career.
Who can help but plunder fashion's past when its imagery is everywhere? The epoch was captured on film in "American Hustle" and, more recently, in "Inherent Vice," the hemp-saturated reimagining of the Thomas Pynchon novel. It's vividly present in rock memoirs like "Just Kids," Patti Smith's recollections of coming of age in downtown Manhattan, and in trips through the decade by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and by Joni Mitchell, muse to the designer Hedi Slimane, who highlighted the singer in his Saint Laurent spring marketing campaign.
A wealth of pop ephemera is but a click away on Pinterest boards that worship at the altar of Ali MacGraw, looking womanly-provocative in the plunging silk dress or suede trench coat she wore in "The Getaway"; or Marisa Berenson vamping for Vogue in high hippie caftans, turbans and multiple rings; or Lisa Taylor, legs splayed suggestively as she poses for Helmut Newton in a Calvin Klein dress.
Clearly the period retains an emotional pull. In retrospect, the decade that spawned the DVF wrap dress, maxi-coats worn over hot pants, and Ladies of the Canyon in battered jeans seems a garden of earthly delights.
"We didn't have the consequences that we do for our actions today," said the costume designer Mark Bridges, whose film credits include "Boogie Nights" and "Inherent Vice." "People smoked without pause; you made out with who you wanted to; and on all fronts we were in an experimentation mode. Why not? The stakes weren't as high."

Zendaya Is Our New Red Carpet Crush

If you haven’t heard of Zendaya yet your fashion sensors will soon be tingling as, thanks to her Met Gala debut, she is about to be everywhere.
The actress, who stars in Disney shows such as Shake It Up and K.C Undercover, has been clocked as a fashionista for quite a while but it’s her plunging Fausto Puglisi dress from Monday’s Met Ball that has catapulted her to got-to-watch status.
The 18-year-old managed the impressive feat of standing out on the red carpet among attention-grabbing outfits from the likes of Rihanna, Beyonce and Kim K.
Zendaya (last name Coleman) stunned in an asymmetrical black and red dress that was adorned with suns and had a lengthy train. She accessorised with a sun-inspired arm cuff and a tiara. How fitting for our new princess of style?
The beauty kept her make-up simple with a smokey eye and nude lip and used the opportunity to debut the first shoe from her very own collection – a simple black pump.
Zendaya is working with her longtime stylist Law Roach on the back-to-school shoe line and she told InStyle last month: “My inspiration is all of the young women out there who are my age and older—working women who don’t necessarily want to spend a trillion dollars, but want to get a good shoe. I want to make affordable shoes of quality that are very fashion forward, chic, and that I'm going to wear.” Where do we get in line?!
No doubt the collection will fall in line with Zendaya's fearless personal style - she recently told E! News: “When it comes to my red carpet style, I always like to do something a little different, a little edgier."
She added: “I don’t really believe in trends necessarily because I feel like whatever you like, do it all year long…I just go with whatever look I’m having that day."

While we wait for the big reveal, here are some of our favourite Zendaya looks so far...