Rescu. is keeping an eagle eye on the red carpets at Cannes – and the trends might surprise you.
The recession has found its way to Cannes. The gowns are splendid, the feathers frothy and the drama immense, but accessories are decidedly out of fashion.
A small clutch or inconspicuous bracelet is all that’s being worn by the ladies on the red carpet.
Even Jessica Chastain, who’s made a name for herself as the woman with the hottest jewel-tone earrings in town, has radically pared back to inconspicuous pearls.
It’s not all bad news, though – it’s because the gowns are doing the talking. Salma Hayek, Freida Pinto, judge Diane Kruger and Chinese fashion star Fan Bingbing have shown up in gowns so excessive, dripping and gorgeous that any embellishment is over the top.
Fan Bingbing is RESCU’s star to watch. The couture heavyweight brought out Valentino, Christopher Wu and a custom-made Chopard necklace for the Chopard party, and that was in the first three days alone.
If this trend continues, expect shoes and ears to be nearly bare on red carpets around the world – as crystals, embroidery, beading, feathers and sculptural palettes adorn full-length gowns.
Are you for or against the big-dress, no-accessories trend?
Image: Jessica Chastain on the Cannes red carpet.
Rescu. loves green and eco-conscious fashion – and the world’s biggest eco-fashion campaign is about to put everybody else on the same page, too.
The origin of the campaign? Denmark – famously one of the greenest countries on earth.
The initiative was founded by green fashion campaigner Eva Kruse, the biggest mover and shaker in eco-style right now. Want proof? She just organised a worldwide conference on ecologically sustainable clothes, the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, and Australia’s own Princess Mary opened the proceedings. Now that’s some star power – but Kruse isn’t stopping there.
Fresh from the conference, she’s launching NICE – Nordic Initiative Clean & Ethical – which is a social media campaign to make people think about how they buy their clothes and where they come from.
Kruse told reporters that she worries that the fashion industry is one of the world’s biggest pollutants. Production of materials pollutes water and many garment workers are exploited unhealthily.
However, green is the new ‘in’ colour – it’s no longer a niche area of fashion only embraced by hippie-chic Stella McCartney and Natalie Portman’s vegan shoe line.
Many chains are opting for eco-conscious lines or even entire collections, and new sustainable materials are being made all over the world, from unexpected sources like milk fibres.
The leading green fashion chain is Danish too, unsurprisingly. Trash Couture, which has a close relationship with Kruse, takes previously owned items and recycles them into high fashion – and celebrities have it on speed dial.
Are you ready to go green? Go to NICE’s website for more details.
Image: Eva Kruse.
She’s the woman with the wardrobe we’d all love to own, and now elderly fashionista Iris Apfel has finally bequeathed her considerable treasure trove – to a museum.
Apfel, who’s 90, has enjoyed a surge in popularity thanks to her appearance on fashion blogs, but she’s long been one of the most stylish women in America, with distinctive bug-eyed shades and huge lashings of jewellery.
And her couture collection is apparently unparalleled. She’s shaping up to donate 600 items to the Peabody Essex museum in Boston, including couture from the world’s biggest labels collected all through her life.
Alongside the usual suspects like McQueen and Dior, there are whispers of Charles Worth gowns, 19th century gowns and one-off treasures – true museum exhibits which Apfel has collected all her life.
She says she always bought what she could from sample-size designer collections, back before fashion shows were the enormous rigmarole they were now – and so amassed a gigantic collection of world-class pieces. She’s also designed a line of shoes to be launched this year.
Apfel shows no signs whatsoever of slowing down. Apparently the Peabody Essex has hired a textiles and fashion curator purely to sort out and catalogue the insane decadence of Apfel’s closet – most of which she recognises she will never wear again.
“I bought these things not because they had a certain name or a certain value, but because I liked them,” Apfel told reporters. The collection may travel the world after a certain time in the Peabody’s main building.
Image: Iris Apfel.
