A quick dip into fashion

It's Paris Fashion Week - you don't need me to tell you that. Our eye is caught by a line in Wonderland Magazine:

Acne Studio’s Creative Director, Jonny Johansson, pays the ultimate homage to the world of music. A binding of everything he has known and loved about music in the present and past, the collection works a reoccurring motif of coloured CD prints in green, purple, blue and red. Dominating Perspex guitar badges are attached to the backs and fronts of tops and the classic 80’s shoulder padded blazer.

Let's just stop there. If you're having trouble imagining what that's like... well, it's like this:

If there were trousers with that, it would exactly like something David Cameron would wear to a UK Music sponsored event:
- "maybe I need slightly larger lapel badges to show that I really like music like Smiths and The Sam Smith, right?"
- "good idea, Prime Minister; it'll also cover up this stain on the pocket. Is that bacon fat you've got on there?"

Thing is, the rest of the collection isn't bad - in fact, there's a couple of really nice pieces in it - but this is like someone who loves fashion and music trying to bring them together, and having as much success as someone saying "I don't get it, I love my Nan and I love cage fighting, why isn't Nan enjoying her first cage fight? Didn't she train hard enough?"

Kanye West wants us to be gentle

Kanye West revealed his ladies wear collection at Paris Fashion Week a couple of days ago, to snorts of derision. They were fair enough snorts, to be honest: some of the designs would have shamed a contestant on the first week of Project Runway.

What's amusing, though, is Kanye's apparent awareness that he was pushing substandard clobber:

"Thank you for anybody that didn't believe, because they motivated us to break our boundaries... We don't know what the reviews will be, we don't know what they will say... I gave you everything that I had.

"This is my first collection. Please be easy. Please give me a chance to grow. This is not some celebrity s**t. I don't f**k with celebrities... The amount of people that tried to get me a celebrity f**king deal. They said, 'You need to do boot-cut jeans, or you won't sell.' Shut the f**k up!...

"I thank anybody who came to this party, everybody who supported, everybody who believed, because people thought it was a joke, and maybe people still do, but I can only grow from this point."

Not some celebrity shit, Kanye? Really? How many other designers have their first fashion show at Paris Fashion Week? And if you know it's so bad you have to issue a plea to be "given a chance", maybe you should be doing what everyone else has to do, and take the "chance to grow" while at fashion school, showing your early work in the more gentle climate of a term-end show.

If you're going to shove actual designers out the way, waving your famous face as the shortcut pass, at least have the decency to take the bad reviews on the chin. Being to be given a chance because it's not something you've got experience of doing is really a roundabout admission that you shouldn't be there.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Gordon in the morning: Fashion logistics

If I've followed Gordon's coverage of Paris fashion week correctly, he's reporting Lily Allen and Katy Perry not meeting in Paris as the result of some sort of superhuman effort:

But organisers had been forced to work diplomatic magic behind the scenes to ensure that I Kissed A Girl singer Katy was not there.

Because they - apparently - don't get on, which means Katy was forced to not go. Although if they don't go on, it's difficult to see why Katy would have gone in the first place to add more lets-call-it-glamour to Allen's show.

'Woman doesn't go to watch woman she doesn't like'? Hold the front page.

Darkness at 3AM: Postcard from France

The 3AM Girls report from Paris fashion week. Lily Allen turns up in high heels. They do, I'm afraid:

Lily Allen wears her own stiletto eyeful towers

Let's be generous and assume they abandoned a carefully constructed Notre Dame pun after seven hours work, shall we?

Why media managers love Hello!

The happy, smiley world of Hello! recreates something a bit like the relationship between the media and celebrities in the 1950s - closet doors firmly shuttered, skeletons unremarked. Take, for example, the report on Amy Winehouse's appearance at Paris Fashion Week. Possibly the only thing written about her in the last six months NOT to mention drugs, crack or unsuitable husbands in chokey.

[Edited to add in the all-important "not" - thanks, Robin]

Meanwhile, in the Mail...

Liz Jones is spluttering with outrage at the thought of Amy Winehouse launching a clothes and cosmetics range - even although there's been no real suggestion it's going to happen.

But it's not just that which has angered Liz. A vague suggestion that fashion magazines might like to carry photos of Winehouse, and she's off again:

Winehouse is, according to the editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, the star that all the hip photographers most want to place in front of their grubby lenses, as she has an "exotic" look and is instantly recognisable.

Shulman didn't mention whether or not she, along with every other glossy magazine editor worth her clothing allowance, was pursuing the 24-year-old multi-Grammy Award winner to appear on Vogue's cover.

But I can only guess that if she were offered Winehouse's services, she would leap at the chance to boost circulation.

Yes, the level of conclusion-jumping and speculation in an average Jones piece can be seen from the Moon.

But just imagine: a publication putting a photo of Amy Winehouse on the front to boost sales. Thank god the Mail would never stoop so low, eh?

Jones then lays into the fashion industry:

The fact is that people in the fashion industry are not in the business of protecting the young people who buy their products.

Instead, the industry feeds on the disposable, the young, the tragic and the new.

Liz shares some heart-rending letters from young women, desperate to break into fashion, before snorting:

I really wish these girls, who bewail the state of their bodies and wonder why they are not pretty enough or thin enough, could sit alongside me in the front row here at Paris Fashion Week.

They would see for themselves that the models, while young and beautiful and tall and slim, are not remotely perfect.

Yes, Jones is attacking the cruel and twisted fashion industry from the front row of the biggest fashion jolly of them all.

Will no one stand up and say "enough is enough"?

We're wondering that ourselves, Liz.