Italian luxury fashion house Prada has announced the appointment of Raf Simons as co-creative director of the brand. Simons will be working in partnership with Miuccia Prada with equal responsibilities for creative input and decision-making.Officially starting on April 2nd of this year, the first Prada collection designed by both Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons will be the Spring/Summer 2021...

The complexity of today's women is what excited Paul Andrew, Creative Director at Salvatore Ferragamo. This season, the brand showed a woman born from a blend of modern archetypes – a theme that the Swiss psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Carl Jung identified and deeply inspired the designer. In short, the queen, the mother, the lover, the sage, the maiden, huntress and the mystic were...

Walking into the Gabriele Colangelo show, the first thing that came to mind as one looked at the interwoven separè that divided the runway, was the fact that the designer must have been inspired by Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers or American textile artist Lenore Tawney. Yet, he revealed that the starting point of the collection didn’t actually come from an artistic viewpoint. “I experimented with...

After the Emporio Armani show, Mr Giorgio opened up and talked about today's state of fashion and, generally, style. “Trends don't exist anymore,” stated the designer backstage after the show. “Our job as designers is to make the women beautiful. we need to make them feel confident but also guide them to be aware of their age and body. Often we see types of women that are out of reality and...

On the third day of Milan Fashion Week, designers played with differing aesthetics and harder juxtaposing flavours with softer materials.“I would go out tonight, but I haven't got a stitch to wear,” lamented Morrissey in ‘This Charming Man’, one of the songs patched up in the soundtrack of Antonio Marras’ fall-winter 2020-21 show. Unlike Morrissey, Marras’ show had a lot to offer (the designer...

With a collection that unfolded among the dusty manuscripts of Milan’s Biblioteca Braidense, Giada’s fall-winter 2020/21 woman was more forward-looking than ever. Giada's creative director Gabriele Colangelo unfurled innovative, polished ensembles crafted with pleated innovative leather and plissé silk chiffon, which was meant to reflect a sense of natural movement and ripples of streams and...

The onset of a new decade is always an exciting time, as it often means a cycle is ending and a new one is ready to begin. And this year, in particular, should exceptionally be lauded as a time to celebrate, as many brands and designers are and will be commemorating their 50th anniversaries. While London was all about Sir Paul Smith and Margaret Howell, Milan will be honouring Sportmax, the...

Women can be both feminine and feminists at the same time, Prada's statement is clear. “When frivolity is intelligent it’s the best way to express women’s power,” said Miuccia Prada before the show. “I now consider the word glamour, which I rarely use, as an expression of strength. We don’t need anymore the 80s power suiting to affirm our toughness, on...

With the advent of streetwear and its increasing popularity, more and more designers have been abandoning the once much-lauded dream of couture-like creations for more practical and functional garment production methods. Surprisingly enough, the second day of Milan Fashion Week was all about romance and finding ways to celebrate femininity, favouring charming silhouettes over bulky forms.At...

Today, a company's success is based on how much it has its finger on the pulse of people's needs and desires. Fashion brands are among the ones that perhaps need to know even more than that, including people's habits, before the collection itself. Today, this expertise is called engagement and you can only get it by being as close to the audience as possible. This is the secret of Alessandro...

The Milanese have always been lauded for their effortless elegance - having a way with materials and the layering of silhouettes, that is still timelessly chic. However, when it comes to innovating, they are lagging behind Londoners, New Yorkers and the Parisians.Still, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel: it is the designers who have been focusing on their heritage and delving...

“Right foot, left foot,” said Dean and Dan Caten when asked about the future plans of Dsquared2, the brand they founded in 1995 that celebrates a quarter of a century this year. Talking with the two designers it’s surprising how, despite the global success of their work, they still manage to live life day by day. “Expectations always lead to delusions...

The idea of 'the woman' was once one of the most prevalent themes in fashion – along the lines of she’s a dreamer, a thinker; she’s someone that goes to Ibiza over summer and skies in winter; she’s someone who speaks her own mind and doesn’t conform to stereotypes etc. You get the picture. Of late, it’s something that has disappeared in favour of conceptual trends or industry fads, such as See...

Next month, London’s National Portrait Gallery will open an exhibition called ‘Bright Young Things’, devoted to Cecil Beaton’s photographs of the colourful, rebellious, extravagantly stylish citizens of London’s social scene in the 1920s. It was a reference picked up explicitly at Erdem, where the designer collaborated with exhibition curator Robin...

It’s a given that every designer, whether they are based in New York, London or Paris, strives for a unique aesthetic that sets them apart from the international crowd. Yet, no designer jettisons their aesthetic quicker than those from London. Caught between a crossfire of commerciality and the desire by the capital to fulfil a characteristically “creative” quota, they often leave behind the...