Christian Cota on Aldo Shoe Collection

As much as a fashion girl loves her stilettos, it’s no secret that the back of her closet is filled with ballet flats, Chuck Taylors, and combat boots.

So, it’s music to our feet (er, ears) that Christian Cota’s new collaboration with shoe giant Aldo offers our arches a break.

Cota’s collection consists of solely flat boots—tough, chunky, strappy styles, complete with red pony hair, buckled leather covers, and other decidedly non-girlie details, which debuted on the designer’s Fall 2011 runway in February.

“I also made stilettos for the show, but I ended up showing much more of the flats because I liked what the models would become,” Cota told FashionEtc at the Soho, NYC, event celebrating the collaboration.

“They would try on the stilettos, and they’d walk, but with the boots they took on this attitude—it was amazing. They were super cool, confident, and it changed their whole postures. And that was the look I was going for, so it was perfect.”

The Barbito boot from the Christian Cota for Aldo collection

The boots are a far cry from the super-pretty fare worn by his celebrity fans like Blake Lively and Jessica Biel—but the model-off-duty edge of the collection will certainly make them popular among real girls.

And with prices that range from $200 to $250, those real girls won’t have to break the bank, either.

“What’s great about this collaboration is I’ve been able to work for a different audience,” Cota said. “It’s great to have that access to a different customer.”

Christian Cota for Aldo will be available October 6 in select Aldo stores.

The Laremont boot from the Christian Cota for Aldo collection

Fashion Week Daily Download: Paris day 8

Jourdan Dunn-in by a dodgy Donalds?
Supermodel Jourdan Dunn has divulged to the world that she has been struck down by a terrible stomach bug at Paris Fashion Week. This afternoon, the runway regular, who has walked for designers including Emanuel Ungaro, Giambattista Valli and John Galliano while in Paris, Tweeted that she was "Suffering from food poisoning : ( not the one during fashion week! Mehhh".
However, we at the Telegraph are not ones to rest on our laurels so we've turned Columbo to help the blighted model find out whatever it was that didn't agree with her. A quick glance at her Twitter feed provides a possible smoking gun. On Saturday Dunn Tweeted that she hates "it when vex looking ppl serve me #Mac'Donalds".
Case closed your honour.

Chanel in a nutshell? Florence in a seashell

 

Flame-haired Florence Welch is certainly turning out to be the go-to girl for major event live performances. This year she has already clocked-up PA's at the Oscars and Grammys, but topping both of those was this morning's star turn at the Chanel show where she took to the catwalk to serenade the supermodels. Karl Lagerfeld is a man who knows how to look after his guests, bedecking Welch in a to-die-for Chanel couture gown and building her a giant white clam-shell to perform in à la Botticelli's Venus. Seriously, what more could a girl ask for?

Kanye addresses his haters

 

'Kanye does not want to sell this collection': your wish is our command, Mr West...
The brilliant hip-hop artist Kanye West turned out to be a bad fashion designer in Paris this week. Lisa Armstrong's review, gently described it as rap with a capital-C. Yet West, who has spent the last few seasons turning up to proper fashion shows, is clearly serious about becoming a designer. He may not yet actually be able to make anything yet, but he's certainly grand enough for the job. When a senior British department store buyer asked for a ticket to the show this week she was told: "Kanye does not want to sell this collection." Lucky for him. Then, after the show, our backstage mole said West "looked very close to tears". And at his after-show party West said: "I took out motherf***ing loans to get the best models, to get the best designers, to get the best venue. I gave you everything that I had. This is my first collection. Please be easy. Please give me a chance to grow." We're already looking forward to next season.

The couple that plays together, stays together

 

You've got to love Sean Lennon and his girlfriend Kemp Muhl. The The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger band-mates just love an excuse to play dress-up, making their regular appearances in Chanel's front row a treat for fun-starved fashion editors. Their look for spring/summer 2012? A dandy Artful Dodger meets a super-chic Nancy. There could be an under-the-radar trend emerging here. Only the other night in London we spotted lovers Anna Friel and Rhys Ifans in a similar get up. Minimalism? Pah.

Kristen Stewart Covers Glamour, Talks Relationships with Stephenie Meyer

Bad news, RPattz: Kristen Stewart is Team Jacob.

At least when it comes to watching Twilight, which the actress tells author Stephenie Meyer in the November issue of Glamour is something best enjoyed with our favorite Teen Wolf.

“It’s fun to watch with him [Taylor Lautner] because we actually sit and watch it," the actress says. "Me and Taylor are actual Twilight fans, so we can sit there and be totally into it! Whereas I sit there with Rob … he likes it, but he has just such a different energy."

Um, yeah, we bet. After channeling a '60s glamazon for W, Stewart goes California-cool for the Glamour cover in an orange striped Bottega Veneta bandeau top paired with rolled-up Current/Elliott jeans. Her jewelry is by Martin Katz and Jordan Alexander at Fragments.  

Inside, things take a more glamorous turn as the brunette beauty, photographed by Matthias Vriens-McGrath, slips into a white Sosume tee tucked into Peter Som's lace shorts, while a white lace Stella McCartney dress paired with ultra-tough Ash boots offers a daring flash of thigh.

Speaking of bombshells, there's plenty of other hot gossip revealed in Stewarts's interview with Meyer—including her opinionated take on love.

"Good relationship advice for me tends to be being honest and knowing yourself," she says. "Don’t be an a--hole. That’s my advice. Don’t be mean. Don’t take sh-t. Don’t settle.”

Pretty easy to say when your boyfriend is Robert Pattinson!

For more Kristen Stewart, visit Glamour online and pick up the November issue, on sale October 11.

Stewart turns up the heat in revealing lace looks from Peter Som (shorts) and Stella McCartney (dress).

Fashion Week Daily Download: Paris Day 7

Every girl knows you have to suffer for fashion, but it's good to know that it's not just us normal folk who are blighted by its demands. After teenage supermodel Lindsey Wixson twisted her ankle when she took a tumble at last week's Versace show in Milan, it looked like her fashion week was over. Luckily for Lindsey, flat shoes are making a comeback next spring so she was able to walk in the Jean Paul Gaultier and Sonia Rykiel shows in Paris without succumbing to sky-high heels, which are normally de rigueur. And it looks like ankle injuries are this season's must-have after we spotted Hollywood actress, Salma Hayek, sporting an ankle support bandage front row at Stella McCartney. No flats for Salma though, as the wife of Francois-Henri Pinault, Gucci Group's chief executive officer, fashion expects! Salma strapped-up and strode out in four inch studded column heeled courts. Sturdy? Yes. Sensible? No. Fabulous? Always.

Chloé lets off steam
Chloé opens the roof at their runway show in the Tuileries in Paris PHOTO: @BoF

With the October weather in Paris hitting a scorching 28˚C, many of the fashion crowd were beginning to lose their rag. Although it was the perfect excuse to whip out their much sought after Prada 'Baroque' sunnies, the heat was beginning to get to some. While at Lanvin, Alber Elbaz took the initiative to supply guests with illustrated fans, Chloé has gone one further by removing the roof on the tent in the Jardin des Tuileries. And by Tweeter's reactions from Clare Waight Keller's first show for the French fashion house, it seems as the catwalk presentation raised the roof too.

Stella McMatchy-Matchy
Stella McCartney spring/summer 2012 Photo: Getty

If, like us, you love it when an outfit comes together, then this morning's Stella McCartney collection will be right up your street. Who doesn't want a handbag that matches their outfit, especially when the outfits's as cute as this pyjama-print onesie?

Ungaro not such a team effort after all?
Photos: Reuters/AFP

When Emanuel Ungaro's chief executive officer, Jeffry Aronsson, told Wall Street Journal last week that the beleaguered Parisian fashion house would not be recruiting a "name" after the departure of Giles Deacon, and would instead rely on its 35-man design team, we were expecting a scene reminiscent of last season's Dior show (at which the whole atelier came onto the catwalk to take a bow) at the end of today's Paris Fashion Week presentation.
Not so fast! When it came to taking credit, design team member Jeanne Labib-Lamour (previously at Balenciaga and Giambattista Valli), was flying solo, stepping out onto the runway to take the bow.
Perhaps Ungaro are planning a shift system, in which case it will only be a mere 17 more years before every designer gets a turn in the limelight…
Ungaro to continue without a head designer

It's an award-winning family affair for Yohji Yamamoto
Left-right: Keiko, Yohji, Fumi and Limi. Photo: AP

What do Michael Caine, Kylie Minogue, George Clooney and Yohji Yamamoto have in common? Anyone who's met the softly spoken Japanese fashion designer would likely answer - absolutely nothing. However, Yamamoto today joined the exclusive list of recipients of the 'Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres' - the award made to individuals who have contributed to furthering the arts in France. Yamamoto, whose business is based in Japan and Paris, showed his latest womenswear collection at Paris fashion Week on Friday. He collected his award today alongside his mother Fumi, his daughter, fashion designer Limi Feu, and his wife Keiko, before posing for photographs with multi-lingual British actress Charlotte Rampling.

Paris Fashion Week: Chloe spring/summer 2012

Chloe's new creative director Clare Waight Keller - formerly of Pringle - was parachuted into Paris only a few months ago. Backstage just before her debut collection today, she said: "It's all been very fast, but it's been exciting. It's great to be in a French house, because you have the opportunity to work with an atelier. I just moved here, but already am feeling the energy of the city, and that has really influenced me."

Chloe is a unique house, synonymous with both luxury (as they all are) but with a casual, laid-back femininity too. The archetypal Chloe girl is a thick-coiffed, well-off twenty-something Parisienne bounding down the boulevards in chic, sleek, sexy ready-to-wear - probably in camel or beige.

Unfortunately Waight Keller's first collection did not fully connect with this spirit. The short explanation is that it was over-replete with pleats. It started well enough, with a couple of wide, long white contrast-coloured pleat dresses - a low-backed green pleat on white dress with dental-floss thin shoulder straps was casually lovely - and baggy, pleated-shoulder tops teamed with slouchy trousers. Pleat fatigue started to kick in with a green, thick-pleated skirt that looked to be a contrast-textured leather. Its odd movement made the model's backside look enormous - not a look that the Chloe girl aspires to.

Then came a series of drop-waisted pleat skirts, often with panels of rust, brown, or beige running horizontally across the pleats or vertically with them. They were unflattering too. Pleat pique was rapidly peaking, and thankfully Waight Keller started to introduce some other ideas, including widely punched-hole details on arms and old-lady floral prints (sweet) on trousers. Unfortunately they were rarely entirely pleat-free. And these pleats were not the delicate little zig-zags that crinkled so sensitively to movement like those used at Etro in Milan, or Erdem in London earlier this season: they were three-inch-ish wide numbers that gullumphed as they moved like the slatted leather skirt of a Roman legionnaire.

One skirt, just before the end, was a longish brown leather with red and white piping - an adaptation of the little 1970's-style racing-hemmed shorts that have been everywhere for the last few weeks, and were clever. Yet if Waight Keller had presented a variation of this theme - as she did with her pleats - over and over again, it would have stalled too.

There was little applause at the end. Yet Chloe should give Waight Keller, who is smart, more time to interpret around Chloe girl. She might eventually come up trumps. Although, like a Brutalist architect, she is perhaps sometimes too enchanted with articulating the ideas behind her work at the expense of the desires of those who might inhabit it. And one of those desires will always be to not have a big behind.

Balmain: Then & Now

When Christophe Decarnin was appointed creative director of Balmain in 2005 the house wasn’t known for rock and roll silhouettes. Pierre Balmain, the house’s founder and French couturier, was known for his elegant lines, strict sheath dresses and tailored suits, but Decarnin carved a new niche for himself—and the brand—as the master of all things cool.

Within one season fashion’s most influential women were wearing shoulder pads and ripped jeans, accessorized with spiky stilettos and safety pinned t-shirts.  Jackets suddenly cost five figures and ripped cotton tees were three—Balmain fever was making people crazy.  Eventually, trends turned toward ladylike and Balmain lost some of its it-factor, but Decarnin didn’t stray from his aesthetic.  Finally, last season, the designer either suffered from exhaustion or had a mental breakdown (depending on whom you ask) and the house was handed to Olivier Rousteing, a handsome young Parisian who’d been working with Decarnin since 2009.

But after seeing Rousteing’s debut collection in Paris yesterday, “working with” might not cover it.  Not much has changed between Decarnin’s last collection and Rousteing’s first.  The colors—black, white, gold—and the skinny silhouettes are strikingly similar.  But the consistency should keep customers happy; Bergdorf Goodman’s Linda Fargo told the WSJ, ““I think he did great!”

David Beckham Covers WSJ. Magazine

A moment of silence, please: David Beckham is going gray.

"Got my first gray a few years ago, and a couple more since we've had the little girl," the budding silver fox tells WSJ. Magazine, which features him sporting a dramatic (not-gray) pompadour and a dapper Ralph Lauren suit on its October cover, shot by Paul Wetherell.

Inside, the sexy soccer star/fashion entrepreneur gives Don Draper a run for his money in a retro Dolce & Gabbana jacket, Prada shirt, and Boss Selection pants, complete with slicked-back hair. (Pause for swoon.)

He also opens up about feeling "physically sick" over the recent London riots, being determined to play in the 2012 Olympics, and why he takes his fashion and beauty projects seriously.

"I'm totally involved in everything that goes out there in stores," the soda-shilling star says. "I don't just sign with a company and give my name to do whatever they want. Everything that goes out there is something I would wear."

Excellent. With his bodywear line being released soon, that's just the sort of thing we're dying to hear.

For more David Beckham, visit WSJ. online and pick up the October issue, out now.

Meanwhile, Victoria Beckham has landed a big style honor.