Alexander McQueen started with skulls and this Autumn Dsquared2 have taken to the back issue or spine(less).  You decide on these shoes for Autumn 2010, one of a whole series for this Winter.  Perhaps this is the backbone we all need to show for the coming Winter? Alternatively teetering on a spinal cord looks more and more likely!

In the last year older women, once invisible in the fashion industry have become increasingly visible.  It seems that the days of the nymphets and size “0″ obsession may finally be over.  Next season sees Madonna (51) starring in Dolce and Gabbana’s advertising campaign.  Stella Tennant (39) centre stage in Balenciaga and Elle  Macpherson and Christy Turlington (41) featuring for Louis Vuitton.

Of course this new age of austerity may be responsible. The collections have taken a new twist offering grown up sensible yet beautiful clothes.  And so the age of the 16 year old skinny model gracing the covers and the catwalk may be coming to an end (for now at least) and if so,I for one am going to enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

Dublin born Simone, daughter of Designer John Rocha, did a four year degree at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and completed her masters at Central Saint Martins in London last February.  Simone has a modern and strongly sophisticated approach to woman’s wear and an eclectic eye for accessories. Her Dad’s studio in Dublin is where she develops her collections and it certainly helps  to have her designs on sale in his shop on London’s Dover Street.

I for one am wishing her lots of Irish luck but looking at the images of her designs, her talent  alone should insure success.

Simone Rocha Central Saint Martins Show 2010

Also from Chanel this week ( with the notable absence of even one L B D) is the Haute Couture Show for Autumn Winter 2010/11.  Note the interesting jacket lengths and the calf length skirts which we will see a lot of this Winter.

Facebook is  starting to show it’s age  with the latest report showing that teenagers are losing interest.  What’s news in that you may ask?  Teenagers have always been a fickle bunch and perhaps the fact that most of their parents, aunts and uncles and every other relation is now on it means they really want to be as far away as possible.

45% have lost interest
- 16% are leaving because their parents have joined
- 14% think “too many adults/older people” now use the social network
- 13% are concerned about their personal privacy.

Naomi Campbell is in the news again,  this  time  over the ‘blood diamond’ claim.   Below getting tetchy  on  ABC News

Carole White, Campbell’s agent at the time, says that she witnessed the event. “I was there,” she says, speaking from the London headquarters of Premier Model Management, the company that she founded and that represented Campbell for 17 years. “He did give it to her. It was a small, uncut diamond. I am totally surprised that Naomi hasn’t admitted it.”

But Campbell has consistently refused to volunteer her own testimony to the tribunal, furiously walking out of a recent television interview withABC News when the reporter had the temerity to ask about the allegations. It seemed a strange reaction for a woman who, having turned 40 earlier this year, has tried to distance herself from a youth-obsessed modelling industry and reinvent herself as a charity campaigner.

Sales are in full swing here and the debate in the industry is one of whether there should be legislation to prevent sales starting before July.   There is a good argument for this because once the stores go into sale the smaller shops have no choice but to follow suit.  Large stores in many cases have special arrangements with suppliers to minimise their risk and so have the advantage.  As the season is so short it makes sense that retailers would have at least an adequate time frame in which to sell at full price.

The Irish Derby is on today so I’ll be taking my camera and hopefully getting a few photographs before I hit the champagne!  Every year I enter every competition I can to win tickets and this year   I won two  entry tickets from stylebible.ie so big thanks to them!

I have never been to Royal Ascot or Royal Hatstop as I like to call it,  I’m reprinting a post from Tanya Gold taken from The Guardian because I love it’s irreverence, highlighting the oddity which is the essence of  English eccentricity which seems to converge on a race course for five days each Summer.

• 
• • Tanya Gold
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 June 2010 21.00 BST
  • 
    

Spectators at Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot. Photograph: Martin GodwinWhen you imagine Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot you may visualise a hat – the largest, most absurd hat you can imagine, a hat that looks like a suicide-bomber chicken after its glorious auto-martyrdom. And this is true. I am standing at the entrance to the Royal Enclosure, interviewing a woman with a Lego Palace of Westminster on her head. The photographers snap away, gasping, “Lego hat!” Her hat is indeed made of Lego and, to labour it, the Lego press office will later email me a document entitled Lego – Ascot hats. But Ascot is more than that.

Ascot, as far as I can see with my middle-class eyes, is the British Class System in a grandstand. It is a world of barricades and badges and net veils and is thus the most terrifying place I have encountered since I last went to South Kensington by mistake. But that is for later. For now, the hats.

Ah, hats! It is only when you watch British women dress up en masse that you realise we cannot dress at all; we dress like cats trying to learn algebra. I love us for this, because we look, to a woman, vulnerable and terrible. I have sunburn and a hole in my stocking. The woman beside me is wearing a 3ft-wide papier-mache teapot on her head and is already planning her Phantom of the Opera-themed hat for next year. But we are in denial; Jeff Banks is on the loudspeaker, praising the hats. “The hat,” he is saying, “is an exclamation mark.”

In the tiers of things that matter at Ascot, after the hats come the enclosures or, as I prefer to call them, the pens. There is a strict apartheid system here. If you do not have a badge to a particular pen, you cannot go in and you probably cannot vote either. And, to enforce it, there is an army of Group 4 security guards, all in grey. And they keep us in our respective pens.

On the far side is the Silver Ring. It is cheap and packed and it has women holding babies and eating sausage rolls. People have brought their own furniture and it is full of bins. The bins, it seems, are the focal point. Then, slightly nearer the action, is the main grandstand, which, from the inside, looks like Peter Jones. It has giant internal escalators and repulsive carpets. It houses the Middle Classes and Jeff Banks. Then, further over, and bang in front of the finishing line, is the Royal Enclosure, the pen of the toffs.

I do not have a ticket but I walk in anyway. I am carrying a large cheese roll. This is my plan. If I do not succeed in getting in, it will be the fault of the cheese roll. The security guard waves me in – victory! I am now in the Royal Enclosure. But, because it is still early it is empty apart from a woman wearing a washing machine on her head. So, although I have arrived at the apex of British Society, everyone else has left. I now have an important contribution to make to Marxist theory. If you want to demolish the British aristocracy, admit me to its pen. I also have a cheese roll.

The Royal Enclosure has benches instead of bins because everyone knows that posh people do not drop litter and, even when they do, it’s not litter, it’s the free market. “Do not bring a gazebo into the enclosure,” says a sign. (Nor hot tubs.) I sit and nibble my cheese roll, wondering whether to call g2. “I’m in the Royal Enclosure illegally,” I plan to say, “But everyone else has left. And, if I am caught, will you send a Social Democratic Swat Team?” But the cheese roll that screams “Outsider!” is, as I have always suspected, a time bomb. A man in a bowler pounces. “Madam,” he coughs discreetly, “DO YOU HAVE A BADGE?”

I wave my press pass at him like a crucifix. “I am sorry, madam,” he replies, “but you will have to move.” But I am a friend of Ronnie Corbett, I say. He is on the front of the Official Royal Ascot Magazine and I am with him. He is in the toilet with Cilla Black. But they will be back soon and then – then – I can guarantee you will be on the eastern front by Christmas! The man gives a gently fluttering gesture away from the benches and towards the bins. I think briefly of the Exorcist and Max von Sydow roaring, “I CAST THEE OUT!”

I am, in the end, glad I am thrown out, not because I am an egalitarian but because I get to see The Arrival of Joan Collins. The photographers, who have grown tired of photographing hats disguised as zebras, are restless. So, when Joan Collins appears dressed, as ever, as a transvestite outreach programme, they lunge like a confused centipede. Er, Joan, I say, hoping she will not remember all the times I have called her a transvestite outreach programme in print, what do you like about Ascot? “Not this,” she says, regarding me, as ever, as if I am a badly accessorised Matalan dress. Then comes Charlie Watts in a grey suit, thin and ghostlike. He tries to smile, fails and walks away. The photographers hurl themselves on Louise Redknapp and someone from Strictly Come Dancing instead. I leave. But the apartheid follows me.

I approach one of the escalators. But a Group 4 employee plants herself in front of me. Think Rosa Klebb. “You cannot go down there because you are not wearing a hat,” she says. I long to say that this is the stupidest thing anyone has ever said to me. That I am wearing a microscopic nanorobotic hat designed and sponsored by the China Nanchang Aircraft Manufacturing Corporation and, just because she cannot see it, it does not mean it isn’t there. But of course I do not because I am British. I know my place. I long for Trotsky and walk away.

Eventually, the Ascot PR rings to say I can sit in the Royal Enclosure grandstand to watch the racing. (I complained earlier that all I can see in the press room is the back of the Sun reporter’s neck.) So I slink back to the Royal Enclosure and sit down. I smile and murmur at the people around me but I am blanked with thin smiles. Reader, they know. They know about the cheese roll. Why am I not by the bins, where I belong? We applaud the Queen as she comes past in her carriage. (I do this unwillingly but I am outnumbered.)

The Queen looks, as ever, like an angry sweet sitting on her rage. She waddles to her box to watch the show. There’s not much left to do but sit down, eat the cheese roll and wait for it all to die.

The Retail Group Debenhams who earlier in the year used plus sized models in it’s stores has now gone another step along the road for realistic images and has issued instructions not to photoshop it’s latest bikini adverts.

A sign in the Debenhams window will read: ‘We’ve not messed with natural beauty; this image is unairbrushed. ‘ It will also show customers an example of just how much the image could have been altered.

“We’ve wanted to do this for years but never felt it was the right time,” said Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-porter and its executive chairman. “This idea did not come from a bunch of people sitting in a boardroom looking at a spreadsheet. It was our customers, our target market, that was asking for this.”

As Men generally hate clothes shopping and the only thing they won’t be selling is fragrance I’m saying the time is right for this move.

Anyone who doesn’t know that the World Cup has started is not on this Planet.  Every Man I know has turned into a remote control and that is one thing it’s impossible to compete with.   I’m a great believer in the old but true motto ‘If you can’t bet them, join them’ and there is nothing like getting into the mood than having a little bet.  I put  five euro on Ghana to reach the semi-finals and am backing Argentina to win outright.  It’s time to wear the shirt so if you fancy backing a team and want to go the whole hog then UK Soccer Shop may have what you’re looking for…?

Go Argentina G

The Chanel Cruise collection by Karl Lagerfeld  goes right to the very core of Gabrielle Chanel’s original Breton influences.  It takes place on the beach and is worthy of the name.

Sydney Morning Herald

Following on from that theme we have the Bare faced facts during the French Open and Venus Williams in particular who had the cheek to wave her racquet  with barely there underwear and a lacy basque type top.  The debate has been robust, nothing about the tennis though and more about the possibility of the lacy top chaffing Venus’s skin!   Do you think this is appropriate dressing for the serious business of   tennis? , make your own mind up.

Venus Williams baring all in the name of Tennis?

Audrey Hepburns iconic Givenchy cocktail dress as worn in the film ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ has been named the worlds best Dress in Film.

And finally one of the funniest sites I came across this week is   Regretsy.  Want to see craft projects gone wrong?  then check it out and have a giggle too.

Have a fashionable week ahead…..

So to follow a trivial trend I spotted a fun piece in the Guardian (read the article by clicking on the link here) which discusses the theory… Wait for it…. That short Swimming trunks worn by men has some bearing (excuse the pun) on economic recovery.  I think I will lodge that one under  counting and saluting magpies, weeping  and moving statues and other strange goings on.

Amazing how often Miliner Philip Treacy is referred to as from the UK or ‘London based’.  He is IRISH,  born in Ahascragh, Co Galway in the West of Ireland and as far as I am aware very much proud of it.  An exhibition of his most famous hats which he has re-created specially is now on at the Museum of London.  It’s open from 10-6 daily and entrance is free.

Philip Treacy Hat for Ascot 2008