A New Look

Prada did it for A/W09. John Galliano for Dior followed suit in S/S10. From Land Girls to Film Noir, 1940s style never seems to go out of fashion – which is why you don’t need the excuse of a Blitz Party to set your hair in rollers or paint your lips pillar-box red. Although it doesn’t do any harm… 

Ahead of this weekend’s monthly East End Blitz Party, UKTV threw a Blitz Party to launch their Yesterday channel’s ‘Spirit of 1940’ season. The dresses. The diamonds. The coiffure. The pork pies. It’s not very often that fashion and TV collide, and when you spy an enormous hog roast being carved into a white bun with lashings of stuffing and apple sauce for a long line of hungry journos (with platters of ‘wartime’ doorstop sandwiches and scotch eggs if you’re still hungry) you can kind of see why. Rationing? We’ll leave that to the catwalk.   

In the foyer of the Shoreditch studios there was a dressing box full of pearls and costume jewellery, an assortment of hats, dainty gloves, military jackets, scarves and erm, novelty moustaches.

The crowd was a real mixture of people who had turned up kitted out and those who created an outfit on arrival... Lucy (top left) fished her five-year-old Primark skirt out of the bin for the occasion, having recently chucked it. You'd never believe Sarah (above right) was wearing jeans and a t-shirt minutes before this picture was taken. Or maybe you would.

I gambled on wearing my navy dress, t-bars and fur coat that could easily pass for 1940s but picking up the first hat I could find when I got there. As more than one person observed through the evening, ‘but you’re just wearing what you always do!’

But that was before I realised that UKTV had employed The Powderpuff Girls for the evening, at which I hastily threw off the hat, as hastily as I had put it on...

Et voila. 

The End. 

Mad Hatters

Topshop Unique aren't the only ones who predict we'll be walking around in head gear inspired by the wildest of the animals in the wood come autumn.

Not excited by the antlers, or the sheepskin that's prevailed over London Fashion Week? Allow me to introduce Miss Kiki Salon Presents... a fashion collective who've just launched a range of silk scarves inspired by up and coming artists and designers. The print above is the work of Yiannis Katsaris and Ghoulia Peculiar and here's how it could look:

Fifty silk panels have been created for the project, which is an echo as well as a fitting ode to the work of Zika Ascher in post-war London. He and his wife Lida persuaded artists like Matisse and Henry Moore to lend their designs to silk panels and these were taken up by couture houses like Dior and YSL. I've just interviewed Miss Kiki about the scarves for Queens of Vintage, so more pictures and link to follow.