"Stella McCartney has had a lot on her plate this past year. New baby, a smash-hit gig for H&M, and a line of attention-grabbing activewear for Adidas. Well done for all that—but has she had enough in reserve to concentrate on her own brand? Her collection didn't really look like it. What she showed—big cocoon cardigans with sloppy collars, skimpy printed jersey dresses, mixed with A-line smocks and swing coats—lacked the stylistic grip and polish expected from a player in the premier league of Parisian fashion. Granted, something in their sixties/eighties spirit glanced in the right direction, but the focus seemed fuzzy.
The presentation took place in the pompous surroundings of the gilded salon of the
Grand Hotel, a habitat perennially associated with the rarefied métier of haute couture showings. Maybe that was a policy choice intended to separate her top line from other things she's doing, but you can't help thinking there are bolder strategies, beyond selection of venue, that could be used to leverage the equity behind brand McCartney. In a season when menswear tailoring is so much on the agenda, she could, for instance, have upped the luxe content by celebrating her signature Savile Row pantsuits, whose cut can't be achieved at mass level. Then again, perhaps a better way to go about it would be to turn her collection into a microcosm of the high-low fashion reality that McCartney embodies. What would excite both critics and her fan base alike would be to see her jeans, sporty pieces, and accessible young-girl ideas cut together with edited standouts from her posher top line. The makings are all there in her personality. Perhaps she just needs the time and space to figure it out."
– Sarah Mower, Style.com
Check out her RAD sports gear...

"There is a new mood in the land. If, in the last year or so, you have found yourself fastening a snug coat with grosgrain ribbon, or layering strands of tulle-caged fake pearls around your neck, or wearing the tiniest cropped jacket of black lace, then you have partaken of the dramatic romanticism that characterizes what is best and most directional in fashion today. That direction points, appropriately enough, toward the moody and introspective and away from the prosaic promptings of the external world. (Gone, or going, are streetwear, logos, and random assertions of fabulousness and power.) Design is no longer about responding to "what's out there." Rather, it is about exploring feelings and aesthetic ideas, poetically: Fashion, to paraphrase Wordsworth, is now emotion recollected in tranquillity (or, if you prefer, in washed gazar).
If one were to look for the Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley of the new movement, a good place to start would be the seven designers who assembled for Steven Meisel's camera on the morning of the 2005 Costume Institute Ball."
"The Magnificent Seven" by Sally Singer and Mark Holgate
The complete story appears in the September 2005 issue of Vogue.
Balenciaga
Marc Jacobs
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