Latest news with #FashionStatementStyle
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Guardian
Suede to go: leather's hippy cousin is back for 2025
From blazers to mini-skirts and slouchy shopper bags, we're spoilt for choice in suede on the high street this year. As with most trends worth following, the provenance can be traced back to Prada and Miu Miu, the latter showing neat biker jackets and knee-length skirts styled with shirts (left) or swimsuits for summer: think fitted bodysuit with a sleek suede skirt and a minimal sandal. The suede blazer or short jacket is an incredibly useful wardrobe addition. A blazer adds instant interest to a jeans and a T-shirt look and keeps a mini skirt look modern when worn with a chunky flat sandal or loafer. It's perfect for that in-between April weather. There are a multitude of updated colours aside from classic camel and taupe, look for interesting shades from cognac to olive green. Whistles's western-style overshirt with tassels, crafted in a rich green (£399), works well with summer neutrals and all shades of denim, or go all-in with Zara's khaki co-ord (4, below). Meanwhile, shades of brown and tan marry perfectly with florals. Consider swapping your denim jacket with a suede overshirt, or Mint Velvet's tan classic collar patch pocket jacket (£285) that adds utility spin to a summer dress look. Have fun exploring the vintage suede jacket market. Look for retro details featuring western style, particularly fringing and shearling finishes. Beyond Retro has a great selection of motorcycle jackets and aviator bombers to 70s belted coats, all starting from £65. Lastly, a roomy suede bag is the easiest way to wear the trend: we love Massimo's Dutti's dark green bucket bag (£169) and Sezane's camel Gabin maxi bag (£360) that doubles as a weekend or carry-on bag. 1. Jacket £260, Topshop 2. Bag £195, 3. Jacket £349, Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion 4. Jacket £34.99 and shorts £29.99, 5. Skirt £270, 6. Jacket, £225.
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Prada's €1.25bn Versace takeover: a new era for Italian luxury
Prada has agreed to buy the Versace fashion brand for €1.25bn ($1.38bn) from the fashion conglomerate Capri Holdings. It comes after months of speculation about a potential deal to combine the two Italian fashion houses and, more recently, rumours that the acquisition was set to collapse after market upheaval in response to President Trump's tariff policies. Insiders say the original deal was expected to be agreed at $1.6bn, but a discount of about $200m was achieved because market turmoil has hit the retail industry particularly hard. Capri, which also owns Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo, originally bought Versace for $2.1bn in 2018. After an $8.5bn attempt by Tapestry – the American group that owns Coach and Kate Spade – to acquire Capri was blocked last year by the US Federal Trade Commission, Capri has been under pressure to sell off Versace to reduce its debt. According to those close to the deal, Prada was one of the earliest bidders. In a statement confirming the news, Prada's group chair and executive director Patrizio Bertelli said the group was 'ready and well positioned to write a new page in Versace's history'. Bertelli added that both companies 'share a strong commitment to creativity, craftsmanship and heritage'. While Capri failed to create an American luxury group to rival fashion companies such as LVMH and Kering, the acquisition hints at an attempt by Prada to strengthen its position as an Italian powerhouse. Versace will join the fashion brands Prada and Miu Miu, the footwear brands Church's, Car Shoe and Luna Rossa, the America's Cup sailing team Luna Rossa and the pastry brand Marchesi. It is not the first endeavour by Prada to add to its portfolio. In 1999, it acquired Jil Sander and Helmut Lang and, in 2000, it added Alaia to its lineup. However, by 2007, after a series of disputes and financial challenges, it had parted ways with all three brands. Now, the Versace acquisition offers them another opportunity to intensify the global reach of the Made in Italy group. While the luxury fashion market has been facing a significant slowdown, the Prada Group has enjoyed rare success. It reported revenues of €5.4bn in 2024, 17% higher than the previous year. This increase was partly driven by Miu Miu – the brand behind those viral micro-miniskirts and satin ballet shoes – which has almost doubled its profits this year, hitting close to £1bn in sales. Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion Last month, it was announced that Dario Vitale, a former image director at Miu Miu, would be succeeding Donatella Versace as creative director, a position Versace had held for 27 years. Instead, Versace will take up the role of chief brand ambassador, overseeing the house's red-carpet dressing and philanthropic work. Prada and Versace are often pitted against each other as Italian fashion rivals, but their designs are diametrically opposed. Versace champions the traditional tropes of femininity with unabashed enthusiasm – see high hemlines, high heels, big hair. Miuccia Prada, who holds a doctorate in political science and, prior to joining the family business in 1970 was a Communist, is often referred to as 'fashion's intellectual'. She has previously described her work as ugly clothes in hideous fabrics. However, the two women have a perhaps unlikely friendship. Speaking to The Telegraph in 2012, Versace said: 'We just talk, talk, talk. She's so inspiring. We make fun of each other and teach each other. She says, 'I could never make sexy clothes, but I love them.' And I say, 'Well, I love what you do'.'
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Bad taste? Balenciaga coffee cup bag is luxury fashion's latest everyday flaunt
Lauren Sánchez attended a meeting in LA recently carrying a cup of coffee. So far, so unnewsworthy. But what first appeared as her morning caffeine fix was, in fact, a luxury handbag. The Balenciaga design, which is crafted from calfskin, sells for about £4,346.60 more than the average takeaway coffee in the UK. It mimics the reusable Balenciaga coffee cup – made of porcelain and polypropylene, it sells for £85 – and throwaway vessels. Sánchez, a former journalist who is the fiancee of Jeff Bezos, is not alone in opting for an accessory that mimics a consumer good but retails for several thousand pounds more. The supermodel Gigi Hadid recently wore a £1,541 Moschino vintage leather handbag made to look like a carton of orange juice. The brand also offers a clutch in the shape of celery. There is a Louis Vuitton bag designed to resemble a paint can (£1,980); as well as crisp packet bags, also from Balenciaga – spicy chilli, salt and vinegar, or cheese and onion (£1,450). Looking to more UK-centric consumer goods, Anya Hindmarch has built a business out of the model. Her Frosties, Perelló olives and Lea & Perrins bags are priced up to £1,300. According to Iain R Webb, a writer, curator and professor of fashion and design at Kingston school of art in London, this is not new. 'Historically, fashion has always appropriated the common place and utilitarian,' he said, citing 'Marie Antoinette dressing up (or down) like a shepherdess' and the £185 T-shirt from luxury label Vetements riffing on the global logistics company DHL. But Orsola de Castro, an author and a cofounder of the activist group Fashion Revolution, thinks these consumer product-mimicking designs are best relegated to the past: 'This kind of thing stopped being relevant after Andy Warhol did the Campbell's soup tins. Then it made sense. Then it had a rebellious spirit. Then it was making a point.' She added: 'If the coffee cup had existed then, the depiction of a coffee cup bag would have been some kind of a statement on plastic or on the unnecessariness of it all. But now it is simply just vulgar.' The optics of Sánchez, who as an author, pilot and Emmy award-winning journalist reportedly has a net worth of more than $30m (£23m), carrying a mundane object given a mogul makeover are particularly loaded. Dr Gaby Harris, a lecturer in fashion cultures at Manchester Metropolitan University, sees 'coded within these items … the privilege of the wealthy to engage with mass consumption while retaining exclusivity'. And with coffee prices at a record high, the play on a cup has even more significance than, say, a head of celery might. 'We are observing the inflation of goods while incomes remain stagnated. Thus, everyday staples such as coffee bear greater expense while top earners continue to amass wealth,' said Harris. Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion The coffee cup bag chimes with the confusing current status of status. There is the rise of boom boom, the aesthetic of 80s-style greed and conspicuous consumption, that has been in the ascendant since Donald Trump returned to office. 'Sadly,' according to Webb, 'politically and economically we are witnessing a reflection of the 1980s, so it is not surprising that the showoff aspect of conspicuous consumption should again raise it's ugly head: fashion that is as flash as its price tag, fashion that says, 'I have loadsamoney'.' But the picture is nuanced. As Sean Monahan, the trend forecaster who coined boom boom, recently said: 'The American elite is in flux. For a long time, it was about people not wanting to flaunt wealth … Now, it's unclear where people are in the status hierarchy.' In this context, a luxury handbag in the shape of an everyday cup of coffee makes a certain topsy turvy sense.
The Guardian
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jonathan Anderson to leave Loewe as fashion houses' creative upheaval continues
A dizzying round of designer musical-chairs in the fashion industry has picked up pace with the announcement that Jonathan Anderson is exiting Loewe. The 40-year-old designer from Magherafelt, Northern Ireland, transformed Loewe during his 11-year tenure from a sleepy Spanish handbag house into the hottest ticket of Paris fashion week. The news follows last week's surprise appointment of Demna, whose time at Balenciaga has been marked by controversy and catwalk stunts, at Gucci, Italy's temple to elegant loafers, Jackie Kennedy handbags and jet-set glamour. Fashion's unpredictable mood is reflecting a cultural moment. The jittery global economic climate and the chaotic tone of public discourse that have followed Donald Trump's return to the White House are being echoed in a bone-shaking upheaval in fashion's corridors of power. Boardrooms are panicking as tariffs threaten to deepen the luxury slowdown, while the Maga-led shift towards a move-fast-and-break-things culture is putting maverick designers, rather than safe pairs of hands, in the frame for high-profile jobs. The previous Gucci designer, Sabato de Sarno, was hastily shown the door only weeks before he was due to show in Milan last month, and his 'quiet luxury' aesthetic replaced by its polar opposite in Demna, who likes to poke fun at fashion's obsession with status. As well as Demna's debut at Gucci, this year there will be new designers at Chanel, Givenchy, Tom Ford, Calvin Klein and Dries van Noten. Anderson is widely rumoured to be poised for promotion within LVMH, the owner of Loewe, to the much bigger house of Dior. The official announcement of his departure was effusive in its praise, seeming to confirm that Anderson is moving upwards in the ranks. 'I have had the pleasure of working with some of the great artistic directors of recent times, and I consider Jonathan Anderson to be amongst the very best,' said the veteran LVMH executive Sidney Toledano. 'What he has contributed to Loewe goes beyond creativity.' Anderson thanked his Loewe team for 'the imagination, the skills, the tenacity and the resourcefulness to find a way to say 'yes' to all my wildly ambitious ideas.' However, there has been no announcement at Dior, where designer Maria Grazia Chiuri remains in situ. Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion The appointment of Demna represents a radical shift in aesthetic in Milan. Under Sabato de Sarno, Gucci took a bet on becoming Italy's answer to Hermes, selling timeless classics as recognisable markers of affluence. But Demna, who dropped the surname Gvasalia from his public identity, likes to challenge and provoke consumers rather than cater to established tastes. He has dressed Kim Kardashian in yellow duct tape, and flooded a darkened sports stadium for an apocalyptic Paris fashion week show where baggy jeans dragged along the catwalk sodden with murky water. He directly referenced the Russian invasion of Ukraine a week after the beginning of war in 2022 with a show staged in a bleak snowstorm, which revisited his own experience as a child refugee who fled civil war in his native Georgia with his family, escaping on foot after their car broke down. He dedicated that Balenciaga show, at which Ukrainian flags were placed on every seat, 'to fearlessness, to resistance, and to the victory of love and peace'.' Gucci is four times the size of Balenciaga, and the role will test whether Demna's leftfield fashion point of view can appeal to a mass audience. His appointment is a remarkable vote of confidence by Kering, owner of both houses, two years after the designer's career appeared to have been derailed by a controversial advertising campaign featuring teddy bears in bondage gear, for which Balenciaga was forced to apologise.
The Guardian
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Donatella Versace defied expectations to become a fashion icon of her own
When Donatella Versace took over the house of Versace in the aftermath of her brother Gianni's murder, most observers privately assumed that her reign would be no more than a postscript. The bottle-blond younger sister, with no formal training and a drug addiction that was the fashion industry's worst kept secret, was seen as a sentimental appointment by a shell-shocked family. She proved everyone wrong. Versace is now defined as much by Donatella as by Gianni. She steps down from designing after 27 years as an icon in her own right, one of the most successful female designers in modern fashion history. Sober for 20 years, she has steered Versace to become a global household name, valued at $2bn (£1.6bn) when it was sold to Capri Holdings six and a half years ago. Versace found her voice as a designer and as a champion of LGBTQ+ rights. She was praised for taking a stand against Italy's anti-gay policies after saying in a speech in 2023: 'Our government is trying to take away people's rights to live as they wish.' She looked destined to be consigned to the fashion history books with the untimely death of Gianni Versace. But the talent and determination of Donatella have helped the brand thrive as a living force that still has the power to set trends, and made it potent and desirable to a generation of consumers who have only ever known her as its designer. Gianni recognised and championed her instincts – the safety pin as a Versace motif was an idea she brought to his atelier – and her fluency with the codes of the house fuelled a growing self-confidence. With an appetite for pop culture, many of the defining moments of Versace, from Jennifer Lopez in the jungle-green dress slashed to the navel in 2010 to a collection co-designed with Dua Lipa in 2023, have happened under her watch. She has been a hands-on presence in the design studio. 'Versace is what it is today because of Donatella Versace,' said Emmanuel Gintzburger, the chief executive of Versace, when the succession plan was announced. In private, Versace is kind and generous, funny and self-aware. When a journalist enquired how old her adored jack russell was, during an interview in 2016, she replied 'Audrey is eight – but can you write six?' Her cartoonish image – shellacked walnut skin, platinum hair, petite frame jacked up on spike heels – belies a lack of ego unusual in a star designer. She has always seen herself as the custodian queen of Versace, with a responsibility to keep her brother's spirit alive. That she is handing her job title to Dario Vitale, a well-respected designer and image maker who has played a major role in the success of Miu Miu, one of the hottest brands in the world, demonstrates her desire to champion the Versace name, not just her own. 'I am excited to see Versace through new eyes,' she said in a statement. Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion Donatella will remain a Versace figurehead as chief brand ambassador. She inspires fierce loyalty in her glamorous circle, and will continue to leverage the A-list names she has on speed dial in the name of Versace. In 2017, when she reunited Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Claudia Schiffer on her runway, she revealed that the moment in 1991 when the supermodels lip-synced to Freedom in a Versace show, re-enacting their roles in the video to George Michael's song, had been a suggestion made by her, to her brother. 'The combination of fashion and personality was magic,' she recalled of that show. A very Donatella kind of magic.
