Paris Haute Couture Spring 2013: Couture for...

Couture for the Modern Girl:

Valentino haute couture spring 2013

Couture for the garden path:

Christian Dior haute couture Spring 2013

Couture for the girl definitely not looking for a princess gown:

Maison Martin Margiela haute couture Spring 2013

Couture for the girl who dreams of " elegance and melancholia"

Chanel haute couture Spring 2013

Couture for the girl inspired by the episode of I Love Lucy when Lucy meets Bill Holden (have you seen the episode? It is hysterical!) :

Giambattista Vali haute couture Spring 2013

Couture for hiding your four children on a date:

Jean paul Gaultier haute couture Spring 2013 

and Couture for the couture milk maid:

Ulyana Sergeenko haute couture Spring 2013

The Couture is in the Details: The Making of Spring 2013 Chanel haute couture

I always find it a little frustrating that there aren't more detail shots from the haute couture shows available.  The couture is in the details and those details are so often not easily appreciated in photos.

But here is a fascinating look at the making of the beautiful floral dresses from the Chanel haute couture Spring 2013 show.

and can I just say that if I was a fairy princess, this is what I would wear:

RARE vintage's Weekend Style and Inspiration: Beauty is my Creed: Backstage at Alexander McQueen Spring 2013

For all of you out there for which beauty is your creed too.  Backstage with beauty.  Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2013. 

RARE vintage Weekend Style and Inspiration: If It's Not Vintage, It's Not In Fashion

From Harper's Bazaar 1966 

Or is it Alexander McQueen Fall 2012

Or Louis Vuitton Spring 2013

If it's not vintage, it's not in fashion!

My Heart Goes Boom Boom Boom. Paris Fashion Week. Part IV. The Intelligent Ruffle. Balenciaga

"A ruffle must be intelligent." Cristobal Balenciaga

Combining intelligence and sexiness, Nicholas Ghesquiere gave us a ruffle with brains and a bod for sin for Spring 2013.

The ruffles were based on a detail from an original Cristobal Balenciaga dress.

1960s Balenciaga gown

Ghesquiere's ruffles were lined in pink

and lined in white

There were ruffles worn with a cropped sort of ecclesiastical looking top for that sexy, flamenco nun look.  You know, I have been waiting forever for someone to do a sexy flamenco nun look : )

 

There were also these super gorgeous, metal bands sprouting branches worn at the back of the head.  Very beautiful.

My Heart Goes Boom, Boom, Boom. Paris Fashion Week. Part Three. Grunge is...Dries Van Noten.

Grunge is... being 19 and waking up in the morning, grabbing your boyfriend's soft, worn plaid shirt, and wearing it with an anonymous 1940s  sheer floral chiffon dress you picked up in some five and dime vintage rummage bin and maybe pulling on your own long sleeve striped tee to layer if it is chilly.

Grunge is... Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis 1992.  Grunge is infamous and inflammatory.  Grunge is expensive and beautifully made.  Grunge gets you fired from designing for the house of Perry Ellis.

Grunge is... resurrected by Dries van Noten for Spring 2013.  I personally think every wardrobe should include a little Dries each season.  It is always so wearable, so well made, so somehow personal. The Dries girl/woman is smart, sexy and creative.  And the Dries girl/woman is a little grunge this coming Spring 2013. 

Girl meet Woman meet Dries meet Grunge...  happiness ensues...

coming Spring 2013

My Heart Goes Boom Boom Boom. Paris Fashion Week. Part Two. Alexander McQueen.

I think there is no doubt that one of the strongest shows for Spring 2013, was Sarah Burton's collection for Alexander McQueen.  It was brilliant, beautiful and bold.  Maybe Sarah Burton had nesting on the mind as she is pregnant with twins, but her nest of bees collection really solidified her position as the right person to take over and carry the mantle of Alexander McQueen and do it with grace, creativity, beauty and with a wild and unfettered imagination.  I think McQueen would be proud.

Clothing is really about falling in love.  A mad, passionate affair that makes you want to whip about your credit card and go shopping - or at least dream about going shopping.  And this collection was full of dreams...

Did you know that you would desperately desire a wasp-waist jacket in a small gold honeycomb pattern?  No?  Nor did I. But there it is.  Sarah Burton has given us what we did not even know that we wanted.  But want it we do!

Worn with dark amber belts with jeweled bumble bees

Wouldn't you love to find the perfect place to wear this entire outfit??!

Beautiful.  So many things here you could take apart and wear many different ways.

Victorian, panniered sexiness.

Dark amber resin corset with a honeycombed textured dress. 

Shoes with heels filled with rattling, gold crystals

Do you see how crazy gorgeous the details are?!  How astounding the craftsmanship is?!

And a baroque Marie Antoinette busy as a bee in her gilded and caged garden...

Golden honey colored fabric

The show closed with The Archies Sugar, Sugar.  Sarah Burton is our candy girl and has gotten us wanting her!

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My Heart Goes Boom Boom Boom: Paris Fashion Week Spring 2013. Part One.

My heart was all aflutter at a particularly outstanding fashion week in Paris.  This is part one in a series I will be doing on PFW Spring 2013. 

There were so many strong shows in Paris for the spring and then there was Hedi Slimane for Saint Laurent Paris.  Hear ye, hear ye, that is the way to say it people.  If you are referring to the house of YSL, it is Yves Saint Laurent.  Do not speak about or write about Saint Laurent Paris.  Got it?  Got questions?  Please refer to the PR team at Yves Saint Laurent or is it the PR team for Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane?  Whoa!  Did I forget a Paris in there?!  Who knows!  

I thought the show was a huge disappointment.  I heard good things about the unseen resort collection by Slimane but I thought this looked like a watered down version of Saint Larent's greatest hits for H & M.  Perhaps for a storied house like YSL, it needs to look forward, not backward.  Reference the vocabulary of YSL but make it new, make it fresh, invent a new language.  And one that we all want to speak.  

And speaking of, I thought it was all very sad about the Cathy Horyn/ Hedi Slimane kerfluffle.  A big design house like Yves Saint Laurent which voraciously needs six collections a year, bags, accessories - it is a lot.  A designer will not only need to be enormously talented but also to have a big backbone.  It is not name calling (as Mr. Slimane resorted to on his Twitter account about Ms. Horyn) but criticism and you have to be able to take it.  Maybe you won't agree with it, maybe you can learn something from it but take it like a gentleman.   Everyone has a job to do.

Look at Mr. Saint Laurent's enormously renowned - and scandalous - Forties Collection in the spring/summer of 1971.  People were furious, outraged, scandalized.  But who had the last laugh?!

"I did my collection as a kind of humorous protest (against the gypsy look), only everyone took it seriously.  Then I became more sure of myself when I returned to my true style."  Yves Saint Laurent

Spring 1971 haute couture "Forties" collection by Yves Saint Laurent at the Denver Art Museum

Phoebe Fetches My Dream Slippers

I have never been a marabou slipper kind of girl (although now that I think about it, I do have a pair of high heeled Louis Vuitton feathered mules in my closet...  Hmmm.  What is up with that?  Think I have worn them once.)  I like my slippers soft and comfy. And now Phoebo Philo for Celine has done my dream slipper that I can wear when I am wide wake during the day.  I can just hear my husband...  "oh those are sexy"...  It's kind of a glam Birkenstock.  Must be worn with bright red toe nail polish.  Husband must be ignored.  You go comfy girl!

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