A Life, Well Considered

Milan arrived this September with a schedule to match its ambitions: roughly 218 shows, presentations and events, a record for the city, and about 141,000 visitors expected, half from abroad. A crowd that size can produce noise. What stayed with me was how much of the week remained attached to the clothes. <Read more>

The week closed on the sixth of October, and what stays with me is less an image than a temperament: optimism, held carefully, like something carried across a crowded room. Paris had every reason to be anxious. The economy is uncertain, luxury demand uneven, the retail mood fragile. Yet the city arrived at its shows with an unmistakable current of energy, and I felt it from the first morning. <Read more>

Why the Most Dismissed Shoe in Fashion History Is Having Its Most Deserved Moment
On Being Wrong About a Shoe for Thirty Years.
In the autumn of 1962, I was eleven years old and standing in a shop in Milan — my mother had brought me along on one of her seasonal buying trips, which I attended with the specific combination of boredom and fascination that characterises a child who does not yet know she will spend her life in this industry — and I watched a woman try on a pair of kitten heels in the most precise shade of cognac leather I have ever seen. <Read More>

It struck me, somewhere in the middle of the week, that London had stopped apologising for itself. Between 17 and 21 September, the British Fashion Council presented forty-seven catwalk shows and twenty-three presentations, with a further fifty-three evening events. The word one heard most often was return. Alexander McQueen came home after years in Paris, Christopher Kane made his debut at Mulberry, and Marks & Spencer, in its centenary year, walked a London catwalk for the first time. <Read more>

The week opened slightly ahead of its own schedule. Ralph Lauren showed on September 9, before the official calendar began, at Jack Shainman Gallery downtown. The setting was marble and spare architecture, and the clothes were anything but spare: Gilded Age waistcoats, corsetry, safari references. Yet the room kept them quiet. What I carried out was a romantic, relaxed idea of American elegance, delivered without raising its voice. With a few of the usual drawcards missing from the official calendar, that early show, along with Marc Jacobs, gave the city its first real momentum. <Read more>

You don’t have to choose between pushing through and giving up. Here’s the question that actually helps. Health & Healthy Aging. <Read more>