http://www.pollyanna.com Pollyanna News en-uk Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:00:00 GMT Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:00:00 GMT DeepSense RSS Generator 60 Can I Help You?

Spending their entire salary in store, sending postcards to favoured customers, even giving up their own boots to them  today's retail assistants are the antithesis of the bored shop girl, as their diaries reveal. Interviews by Sonia Juttla.

POLLYANNA, BARNSELY

Fred Fan, 32, is a buyer at Pollyanna, a fashion boutique in Barnsley,South Yorkshire, founded in 1967 by Rita Britton.

MONDAY
9amTake the train to Barnsley. I live in a converted cutlery factory in Sheffield. The journey takes about an hour.

4.30pmA client arrives at the store. I left her a message last week about some Dries Van Noten pieces  a black 'boyfriend' jacket and an easy-fitting pair of trousers. She's a lawyer and often goes straight to dinner from meetings, so I pick an antique-finish stole for her to throw over the suit. She loves it.


TUESDAY
10amChristmas has come early: the Lanvin delivery has arrived!

12pm Call one of my customers to alert her to the new Lanvin but she's away on a cruise. I leave her a message describing a dress and royal-blue pumps, and put both on hold for when she returns.

3pmWrite postcards to all my customers who I think will be interested in the new collections. It's far nicer to receive a handwritten card than a generic email.


WEDNESDAY
1pmMeet with a bride-to-be. I found a beautiful Nina Ricci dress with hand embroidery for her in Paris and took a photo. When she arrives we go off to a private area for coffee. I show her the photo and it's love at first sight...


THURSDAY
12pm Order the Nina Ricci dress. I'm hoping the cut will be right for her. Even after 10 years working in retail I still worry.

2pm A customer comes who recently bought a toffee-coloured Yves Saint Laurent jacket. She wants the matching skirt. We don't have her size and YSL has sold out,too, so I look for alternatives. I suggest a Lanvin black jersey skirt and a YSL enlarged-python-print skirt. Our customers aren't so much into trends; they just want to look good.


FRIDAY
11amPhone Italy for a New York customer and find him three pairs of handmade jeans and two white shirts. He also needs something special for an America Vogue party. The guys at Label Under Construction find a pair of limited-edition trousers constructed from the fabric used by the Italian military to make mattresses. Very unusual.

3pmFresh from the cruise, the customer I spoke to earlier in the week comes in,tries on the Lanvin dress and pumps and buys both.

8pmSelect stock to put on the van, ready for a trip to London tomorrow. We're having a special event with the jewellery designer Jessica McCormack at her atelier in  Clerkenwell.


SATURDAY
9amSet off for London with Rita Britton and her son Mark. We've prepared lunch boxes so we don't have to suffer motorway service-station food.

12pmArrive at the studio. It couldn't look better; the walls are covered in taxidermy and the odd Damien Hurst.

4pmMeet a client I've dealt with on the phone for more than two years. It's like meeting an old friend. He immediately notices my MA+ boots, which are sold out everywhere. He asks to try on mine and I can't get them off him! Eventually, I give in and tell him I'll try to order myself a new pair. I spend the rest of the day consulting and advising, in my socks.

8pmHead out to Chinatown with my friends. Fortunately, one of them brings me a pair of shoes.



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]]> Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2047 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2047
]]> Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2046 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2046 Overweight, uncompromising, plagued by self-doubt, Alber Elbaz is an unlikely fashion icon. But when he took over as head designer of Paris fashion house Lanvin, sales soared (and so did his anxiety levels ...)

Ariel Levy Sunday 17 May 2009

People still have money. Some people, that is, have some money. And if they are female people they probably want to look sophisticated and attractive, but not flashy or aggressively sexy - although they may well have wanted to look that way a decade ago. "Hot" was what we called it then, if you recall. But now is not the time to be assertive about your cleavage or (what remains of) your wealth. It isn't the moment for consuming conspicuously, and that is a terrible problem for retailers. Yet as long as women believe it is their duty to be beautiful - which, we can safely assume, will be until the end of time - there will still be a fashion industry. And women will continue to spend four figures on a dress if they think it will make them look just right, right now.
Alber Elbaz, the designer of the Paris fashion house Lanvin, often describes his work as "classic with a twist". This is precisely what looks fashionable now: an elegance that reassuringly summons the past but with some funkiness around the edges that acknowledges our weird present. At the Golden Globes this year, Maggie Gyllenhaal wore a version of one gown, a single-shouldered sheath with a great festive pouf at its peak. She looked lovely and refined - as women tend to in Lanvin - though the garment was made of bright-turquoise fabric with pink-and-black leopard spots.
In the eight years that Elbaz has been designing for Lanvin, the oldest surviving French fashion house, he has transformed it from a dusty artefact into something influential and prominent. Tilda Swinton won an Oscar last year wearing a black velvet creation by Elbaz. (Elbaz went over the dress with a steamer, giving it what Swinton calls "that dappled, molten-oil look". It "was so exactly what I wanted to wear ... sincerely comfortable, modest, super-chic, profoundly modern." She looked like an extremely elegant bat.) In 2007, Lanvin posted revenues of $148.9m, 60% higher than two years earlier, and Elbaz's vision has started to trickle down to the mass market.
There are many designers whose work can make women look thinner or prettier. Elbaz seems to have the power to make women appear more interesting. Several years ago, Barneys' creative director, Simon Doonan, hosted an event for Elbaz in Los Angeles. Elbaz wanted twinkling chandeliers and a runway. Barneys obliged, but expended its budget and was reduced to using "local talent" for the models . Doonan assumed that Elbaz would be horrified. But when the show began, Doonan recalls, "not only do the local girls look beautiful and stylish, they actually look like fascinating people. Alber is an alchemist: he turned them into Left Bank existentialists."
"The highest compliment a woman can receive is 'My God, she looks smart!' not 'She's sexy,'" Elbaz wrote in a foreword to Lanvin, a lavish coffee-table book. The ladies at Barneys seemed to concur. One afternoon last winter Elbaz was bounding around Barneys on Madison Avenue, where dozens of women had come for the chance to meet him and place orders for his spring collection. Outside the dressing room there was frenzy. People were not quite ripping the samples out of one another's hands, but it felt as if they were on the verge. "Every Lanvin trunk show we do is like a scene from The Day of the Locust," Doonan said. "Alber's clothes are like crack for women."
Looking over the menu one morning at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, Elbaz said: "Should we be good today or bad? Maybe we start good and get bad later." He ordered the fruit salad. He wanted the pancakes.
Elbaz thinks it's a very big deal that he is overweight. Asked what he imagines life would be like if he were thin, he replied: "Amazing," with real conviction. But he isn't very big, just round, with the kind of face you want to squish in your hands. His jowls are soft, his eyes are blue and framed by long lashes and large, rectangular glasses, and his sartorial choices - too-short trousers, cap-toed shoes with no socks, and always a bow tie fashioned from silk or velvet or a length of grosgrain ribbon - give him the appearance of a dreamy, somewhat forlorn French schoolboy. (He is, in fact, 47.) Elbaz worries constantly and openly, and there seems to be something fundamental about him in need of comforting.
Elbaz believes that his creations are a kind of positive to his negative. If he is melancholy and heavy, his clothes are joyful and weightless. It is his job, as he's configured it, to make women feel special, something he does not quite feel entitled to himself. "I do believe a designer has a job that is extremely similar to a concierge's in a good hotel in Manhattan," he said. "At the end of the day, you have to go back to Brooklyn. And I know Brooklyn is very fancy now, but I mean home. You have to go back to reality. You have to go back to nothing in order to maintain the dream. The moment the dream becomes reality and you start to mingle too much with all these people ..." He wrinkled his nose to indicate that it was a bad idea.
Elbaz was born in Morocco. When he was eight months old, his family, like so many other Sephardic Jews at the time, moved to Israel. They settled in Holon, on the Mediterranean coast. Elbaz's father was a hairdresser, and his mother was a painter. She became a cashier to support their four children after her husband died, when Alber (then Albert) was 15. She encouraged her son - who started drawing dresses at the age of seven - and gave him $800 when he left home, in 1985, to come to New York City and pursue a career in fashion.
"I was working in the garment district, making horrible mother-of-the-bride dresses," he said, moving a strawberry around his plate with his fork. "I think: for this I leave my home and my family?" He was rescued by Geoffrey Beene, who hired Elbaz as an assistant designer and served as his mentor for seven years. In 1997, Elbaz moved to Paris to become the head designer at Guy Laroche. He did four seasons there and garnered adoring attention from the fashion press, establishing himself as a star in Paris fashion. Then Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Berg, recruited him to be the head of ready-to-wear for YSL. Elbaz was in line to be Saint Laurent's successor upon the Maestro's imminent retirement.
But in November 1999, the Gucci Group, headed by Domenico De Sole and Tom Ford, bought Yves Saint Laurent. Two months later, after Elbaz had shown just three collections there, he was dismissed, and Ford was installed as head designer. Ford could not have been a more overt and maddening foil. Where Elbaz was pudgy and Jewish and self-doubting, Ford was toned and tanned and Texan. Ford both reflected and shaped the culture of the 90s. But little by little, as the money and the grandiose self-assurance of that era fell away, Ford's sensibility came to seem less stylish. Ford retired from women's fashion in 2004, largely because of business disputes with the Gucci Group's parent company, PPR. He was going to direct movies, he declared. He also opened a high-end men's store on Madison Avenue, a citadel of materialism with suede-quilted walls and eyeglasses made of 18ct gold. Not long ago I asked a salesman there about a pair of cufflinks. "Thirty-four," he said. He meant that they cost $34,000.
In our current moment, Ford - with his tan and his cufflinks that cost as much as a car and his naked-men-on-bearskin-rugs aesthetic - seems distant and comical. Elbaz has gradually won. This is not to say that Elbaz's work is more moderately priced than Ford's. No, the difference is that Elbaz's brand of luxury is more sedate, less ferociously hip than Ford's was. Elbaz detests the idea of an It bag; he thinks that "there is nothing scarier than being 'the designer of the moment', because the moment ends".
When Elbaz designs a collection, or even an individual item, he starts with a "story". For example, a recent collection featured ribbons and was, for him, "like the story of the ties between people, between generations". A new necklace made of resin and faux gems is, in Elbaz's imagination, "a collage of a broken brooch from your grandmother, a pearl from your husband, and something your daughter brought home from kindergarten". It is important to him that everything he makes has this kind of imaginary history, a Genesis myth.
"I do things without dcollet; nothing is transparent," Elbaz said. "I am overweight, so I am very, very aware of what to show and what not to show, and I am sure there is a huge link with being an overweight designer and the work I do. My fantasy is to be skinny, you see? I bring that fantasy into the lightness - I take off the corset and bring comfort and all these things I don't have. What I bring is everything that I don't have. This is the fantasy. This is the concierge that goes home."
Elbaz assumed his post after Shaw-Lan Wang, a Chinese publishing magnate who bought a controlling interest in Lanvin in 2001, requested that he "please wake the sleeping beauty". She wanted him to take up the mantle of Jeanne Lanvin and make the company a player in the luxury market - as it had been at the beginning of the last century. "When I met Alber, I felt he is talented," Wang told me. "In 10 minutes, we decided to work together."
Jeanne Lanvin, the oldest of 11 children, was born in 1867, 16 years before Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, who came to be seen as the iconic New Woman of the 20th century. Set next to Coco Chanel, "Lanvin represents an equally compelling, if less lurid, example of the self-made professional, a woman creative and entrepreneurial in equal measure," Harold Koda, the curator-in-charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written.
Both Lanvin and Chanel began their careers as milliners in Paris. In 1883, Lanvin went to work at the august Maison Flix. She left for a five-year apprenticeship in Barcelona, with a dressmaker who made clothing for children as well as adults. With the money she made in Spain, Lanvin started her own millinery in 1895, when she returned home to Paris. In 1896, she married and, a year later, she had a daughter, Marguerite Marie-Blanche, who became her muse.
Like Elbaz, Lanvin sought to design fashion that could be worn by women throughout their lives. "The intention of these calculated creations was to assist in blurring the line between generations as waistlines, hemlines and necklines rose and fell from season to season," Dean L Merceron writes in the book Lanvin. The company's logo is a picture of a mother and child, based on a 1907 photograph of Lanvin with her daughter. At first, Elbaz was put off by this image because he felt "there was something religious about it", a vague insinuation of a Madonna and Child. But it grew on him. And it seems an appropriate emblem for Elbaz's work, too - the tenderness of it, the historicity and the modesty. Elbaz is fond of saying that he is not interested in designing the dress that will make a man fall in love with the woman who wears it. He is interested in designing the dress that a woman wears when she falls in love herself.
In the midst of the January couture shows in Paris, Elbaz invited three small groups of editors and journalists to a Lanvin "pre-collection" presentation, at the Htel de Crillon, for a first look at what he would show for autumn. "I like these little presentations, because in a room with couches people feel special," Elbaz told me. "They stop being journalists and they are just women."
The setting was indeed intimate: a room with grand windows, an arrangement of white roses, and waiters in vests serving espresso. "Alber, what is that fabric?" a British fashion editor called out from her spot on a grey velvet couch under a chandelier. Elbaz stood in front of the group, with a model clad in a phenomenal coat. It was grosgrain, Elbaz explained, interspersed with mink, so the coat appeared striped. If a woman wished, she could wear the garment inside out and then she would find herself walking down the street in a gorgeous but inconspicuous coat of overlapping deep-purple ribbons, while inside she was discreetly swaddled in fur.
The models stood, one by one, in front of an unrolled trompe-l'oeil scroll picturing a dressing room tilted askew. "Turbulent," Elbaz said. "The world, shaking." Alternating between English and French, he spoke of a recent trip to New York, where he was having a sushi lunch at a restaurant with a friend. "It was empty. I ask my friend: why is it? Is it because it's Monday? Is it the restaurant? Then we realise the hotel was empty. The plane was empty. There was a war feeling ... and I come from the Middle East, not exactly the Switzerland of the world, so I know. I felt the togetherness you feel but also the fear. I think about women in war, and how come they are so beautiful. Maybe it is the feminine instinct for survival."
It was a loopy soliloquy. But when you are in the presence of Elbaz's extraordinary creations, you begin to adjust and acquire a vivid sense of the fervent and poetic way he experiences the world around him. And what he says, although it does not always technically make sense, does start to possess a consistent and comprehensible rhythm.
After everyone had departed, Elbaz stood on a balcony overlooking the Place de la Concorde, eating a sandwich in the cold mist and frowning. "I wish I knew how to enjoy it more," he said. "My psychologist says dissatisfaction, it's the engine that keeps me going."
That evening, Elbaz and his boyfriend for the past 16 years, Alex Koo, ate a dinner of crpes and smoked salmon with cold vodka at a Russian restaurant called Caviar Kaspia. Koo, a handsome Korean-American, has been director of merchandising at Lanvin for the past three years. He wore a knee-length, dove-grey Lanvin cashmere sweater belted at the waist and round spectacles, and he had a ribbon loosely knotted into a necktie. "What do you think people were looking for at the Crillon?" Koo asked.
"To be touched," Elbaz replied.
Koo used to work for Prada. "I realised when I came here that Alber doesn't do marketing," Koo said. "He doesn't believe in commercial collections. He just wants the most beautiful piece."
Elbaz bristles, for example, at the fashion concept of "groups", as in a group of dresses in several colours, which is generally an expectation among buyers. "If I do a dress in red, it needs to be different proportions than if it's in yellow," he said, a little petulantly. His refusal to adhere to certain mores of the trade seems not so much a matter of principle as a gut-level horror that fills Elbaz if things do not accord with his vision.
Very little is painless or undramatic for Elbaz. That January evening, he was worried about a meeting the next day with his architects, who were working on the London boutique which opened in March. He was worried about the location of his next show. He was worried about this article. He was worried about where he and Koo would go for their vacation. (They decided on Morocco, but then Elbaz got kidney stones.) "If I had a kid, I'd have to live in a penthouse of the hospital," Elbaz said. "Every time he sneezed I'd want him checked." On the bright side, then he'd get to live in a hospital - an oasis of care. "I like everything about hospitals," Elbaz said. "Even the food."
Though he's been at it for a while, Elbaz's job does not seem to get easier for him. "I was walking with Yves Saint Laurent one night before a show with his dogs," Elbaz said. "I said: 'How are you?' And he said: 'Scared.' I said: 'Even after all these years?' He said: 'Because of all the years.'"
There is no question that Elbaz is deeply anxious. But while worrying about everything is his nature, to a certain extent it is also his job. Lanvin is a smaller operation than its prominence would suggest, and Elbaz is ultimately responsible for almost every detail of the enterprise. The next day he went to try to energise his merchandisers - the middlemen whose job it is to sell Lanvin to the buyers at department stores.
About a hundred people sat listening to Elbaz in a room with a view of the Eiffel Tower, in the Muse de l'Homme. Next door, cavemen wandered in their dioramas. "What do men want? How do men shop today?" Elbaz asked. "Does a man want just a classic suit? Do they want maybe a pink jacket? Or maybe they want to have a pyjama because they have no job?" Everyone laughed at this. "I do believe that in times like today, when fashion is where it is because of economic crisis, the role of fashion is changing, and it's no longer just to make sure that we look right and professional and comfortable, but it's maybe about giving the dream and making people feel good again - making a man or a woman think: should I go to a psychiatrist or should I go to buy a Lanvin suit?"
"This guy talks a lot about the economy," an American merchandiser in the audience whispered to the person next to him. "Some of them act like nothing's even happened!" his friend replied. "It's insane!"
"I think that in times like this, fashion is more important than ever," Elbaz asserted.
Elbaz's office is small, and the walls are covered with his drawings, along with miniature versions of his garments. People have made Elbaz fabric dolls to wear some of these small clothes, and they hang along one wall. A blonde doll wears a yellow gown. Elbaz pulled up her skirt to reveal blue bloomers. In the middle of these little ladies is, unmistakably, an Alber Elbaz doll - shorter than the rest, with bow tie and glasses.
In a room behind Elbaz's office, eight people, all of whom looked to be in their 20s or 30s, were working. It felt like the art room at summer camp. One young woman, Mathilde, was pinning gold lace on a mannequin. She showed Elbaz how she was trying to create petals of gold tulle to layer with black lace, to make a kind of shadowy tutu. "I love the texture going all the way up," he said, moving a row so that everything became very different. "Do you?"
"Yes," she said, smiling. "Now I feel free." He held her face in his hand for a second and then walked on to the next person.
The clothes for Lanvin's runway shows are produced on the floor below. The people there were all a decade or two older than the designers on the top floor, and everyone was French. It was extremely quiet - the laboratory, the scientists at work. Elbaz greeted each one by name and kissed them on both cheeks. One seamstress cried, because her father had just died, and Elbaz hugged her. His mother passed away last year, and Elbaz remains haunted by the loss. "It was the worst," he told me. "Oh! And I was, like, so close to her. She was the one person who could make me really crazy in a split second, and make me relax in a split second. It was a very difficult time."
Next to the seamstress's workstation was a pink tulle frock lined in chiffon with hot-pink sequined trim which would fit a very chic, very lucky elf.
Even in France, architects wear funny glasses. At the dreaded meeting with them, Elbaz was becoming agitated. "It looks ... stocky," he said, drawing on top of their drawing with a coloured pencil. For the London boutique, they had designed a room to be wallpapered with the Lanvin logo. It was Elbaz's idea, but it wasn't turning out as he had imagined. "You see, in here I need some place clean to rest my eyes," he said in French, motioning around the design space somewhat desperately.
"But this space has a particular use," one of the architects, a serious, silver-haired man, replied in French. "It is for working, not shopping."
This did not go down well. "C'est la mme!" Elbaz yelped. He jumped up and grabbed a mannequin wearing a half-completed Art Deco-inspired gold lam dress. "Regardez!" he said, and moved the mannequin forcefully to another spot in the room, where it suddenly appeared sloppy and less appealing. Then he marched it to the back of the room, and placed it in front of the blue-grey velvet curtains.
"C'est diffrent," the architect conceded.
"Where is the dress the most beautiful?" Elbaz demanded passionately.
"There," they all agreed.
"If a woman comes in and it doesn't smell right or the light isn't right, she will think the dress doesn't look good!" Elbaz said. He brought a bowl of fruit and put it on the table in front of the architects. "The stress starts and we start to eat." Elbaz sat down, put his head in his hand, and moaned. "I'm depressed," he said, and started peeling a clementine. But as he ate the fruit and stared at the architectural plan, something came into his mind. His demeanour brightened. He picked up his coloured pencil again and adjusted the drawing, moving a wall slightly. "So it's not so precisely parallel!" he exclaimed.
"Less symmetrical?" one of the architects said eagerly.
"Yes! Before, it's choking," Elbaz said, "un petit peu ick!" They decided that there would be a platform, like a small stage, where women could look at themselves in the mirror under chandeliers - but, crucially, only two chandeliers. "You know, if you eat caviar, you don't eat the whole plate," Elbaz said. "Just a taste. Just a touch." He was suddenly very pleased. "It's so beautiful! So feminine! J'adore a," Elbaz exclaimed, and a wave of relief washed over the room.
"Maybe we should have the show here," Elbaz said later that evening as he walked into the Casino de Paris, a theatre that seats about 1,300 people and is draped with lots of red velvet.
"Who do you want to put in the front row?" Hania Destelle, his director of communications, said, motioning at the balcony, which had a scalloped edge lined in round lights, the kind clowns use to put on make-up.
They had come to see the chanteuse Patricia Kaas, a Lanvin client. "I told Hania I didn't want to go out," Elbaz said, sitting down at a little table. "I want to go home, I told her today."
"Today, tomorrow, yesterday," Destelle replied. "Always." She was wearing a velvet Lanvin jacket that was such a dark green it appeared almost black, with a rhinestone choker around her neck which looked like a family heirloom but was in fact a recent Elbaz design.
"You see my day? How many hats I wear?" Elbaz said. "After, what do you want to do at the end?"
"Pyjamas," Destelle answered, and ordered champagne.
The lights went down and the red velvet curtain rose, and Kaas took the stage wearing Lanvin: silver pumps with ankle straps, leggings and a black satin peplum jacket. She was holding a cane. Her band wore Venetian carnival masks. She sang "Send in the Clowns" in French, and from the other end of the stage, a female mime approached her with a red balloon, which Kaas accepted and then released. On a screen behind her, the red balloon's fictional path through cities and villages, forests and skyscrapers was depicted in animation.
The show seemed a bit like a Saturday Night Live parody of French entertainment, but the audience loved it and gave Kaas three standing ovations. After the last of her curtain calls, Elbaz and Destelle were led backstage and up a flight of steps to offer their congratulations.
Elbaz was the first person admitted into Kaas's dressing room. She was sweating profusely and looked traumatised, crushed. "The audience was so cold!" she said.
"No, no," Elbaz said, touching her. "You were superb. They love you! And the dancing!"
"In high heels!" Kaas said. A cluster of people in the doorway laughed encouragingly. She shrugged. "No," she said.
"I don't think so. Calamit."
"I know how you feel," Elbaz replied, patting her shoulder. "After every show, I say to Hania: 'They hated it.'"

]]> Tue, 19 May 2009 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2045 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2045
]]> Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2044 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2044 Modern women have enough on their plates without having to worry about what they are going to wear to dinner. Nomad is designed to take some of the hassle out of busy lives. Whether you are flying in from New York for a breakfast appointment, arriving home from holiday in Marrakesh or just rushing back from work in the city, Nomad is designed to be comfortable and chic, but what makes it unique is the fact that it is also designed so that all you have to do is add your lippy and earrings to turn your work and travel clothes into elegant eveningwear.



Brighton-

"Brighton" is made to the pattern of the 1950s American GI parker, adopted by the "Mods" of the early 60s, "Brighton" is made of washed silk and lined in silk georgette. Whether you wear it with jeans and our layered silk georgette vests for lunch with friends, or over your Lanvin evening dress, to the opera "Brighton" is the epitome of cool chic.

Paris-

"Paris", our silk georgette skirt can be matched with the Nomad, slash neck, "Essential" T-shirt and worn with trainers for an evening walk on the beach. Then simply swap the trainers for your YSL heals, put on your Jessica McCormack diamond earrings, apply the lipstick and you are ready to dine.


New York-

The "New York" washed silk jogging pant is ideal for the car or a workout, and they even have a special zip pocket for your diamond earrings when you go straight to the gym after a night on the tiles.


Casablanca-

"Casablanca", classic elegant, chic, what more is there to say, apart from; our new washed silk trench coat, can be machines washed at 30 degree and even tumble dried (cool).
]]> Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2043 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2043 The criteria for judging diamonds are being challenged. Now brilliance and clarity are giving way to a new poetic, organic beauty.

While cuts and colours of diamonds are changing, a new breed of designer-jeweller is subverting the design traditions governing diamond jewellery. Jessica McCormack, for example, works with unusual tones, including what she calls the "chameleon" diamond, in glittering lemon green, but her mission - aimed at young or young at heart clientele - is to change perceptions of diamond jewellery and how it is worn. The daughter of an antiques dealer, she did a stint at Sothebys and is known for setting diamonds in antique watch keys (a single key tipped with a diamond, from 150 GBP, is perfect for a first diamond jewel, she says) and for her compositions of diamonds and antique watch cogs and movements - her "Wind Up Archive", which imitates antique jewellery in her settings of mixed oxidised silver and gold (from 150 GBP). One convert to McCormack's subversive style is Rita Britton, owner of the famed fashion store Pollyanna in Barnsley. Conventional diamonds do not excite her, but she was won over by McCormacks fashion-focussed, rebellious, diamond-tipped bird bones and crossed axes (from 125 GBP). Now she wears McCormacks earrings all the time and has even designed a pair of silk Nomad jogger pants (295 GBP) with a back pocket for slipping in the earrings when you go to the gym. It's a soft touch for rebel rocks.

]]> Sat, 22 Nov 2008 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2042 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2042 Jil Sander and Bottega Veneta have made the fashion press take notice. Its hard to pull off, but suffice to say, the days of boho and piling on clutter are numbered  for a while.
Trousers. Theyll be everywhere  and not just the old fall-backs of jeans, straightlegs and drainpipes. The tailored trouser is back. The most modish are high-waisted, short-legged (they stop at the ankle  its a must) and need to be worn with heels and neat, tucked-in tops. YSLs are the template.

by Lisa Armstrong
]]> Sat, 02 Aug 2008 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2041 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2041 The things we do for readers - like pounding the pavements to bring you this, our definitive shopping guide. Though every entry here is very different, they all have two qualities in common: old-fashioned service mixed with thoroughly up-to-the-minute style

Pollyanna Barnsley
For the past 40 years Rita Britton's shop has been blazing a fashion trail for the North. Lanvin, Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garons and YSL all sit together in a slick but friendly environment. 14-16 Market Hill (pollyanna.com ; 01226 291665)



]]> Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2040 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2040 Really, fashion watchers should have seen it coming. After the resurgence of 1970s maxi-dresses and flares, the return of polyester was written in the stars. But just as today's knife-sharp, wide-at-the-ankle trousers are not your mother's bell-bottoms, so, too, has today's polyester been reinvented. It is not the same fabric that starred in the film title of John Waters' 1981 study of suburban American living.
"Talk to my mum about polyester and it would conjure up a very different image to the one it has now," says Gino Da Prato of Stone Island, the only company able to garment dye polyester for use in shirting and lightweight summer jackets. "Now it's simply a fabric that handles and performs very well." Think of it as luxury polyester.
And imagine a microfibre with a sheen reminiscent of washed silk rather than plastic, and the substance of a thickly woven quality cloth rather than the stratchiness of its rough forebears, without any unnecessary weight. No wonder Japanese avant-garde fashion houses such as Comme Des Garons and Issey Miyake, which have used polyester in designs for the last two or more decades, are now being followed not by high-street chains (with which the old polyester is more readily associated) but by high fashion names such as Nina Ricci and Narciso Rodriguez. Meanwhile at Louis Vuitton, designer Marc Jacobs created polyester skirts and knitwear, and at Lanvinalmost half of the new women's wear collection was made from the material. "We all assumed it was the most expensive washed silk because, after all, this was Lanvin. With their beautiful drapes and great handle, these dresses are selling like hot cakes and no one has thought twice about the fabric."
And as with women's wear so, too, men's wear: last spring Reliance Industries, India's largest private sector company and the world's largest manufacturer of polyester fabrics, also re-launched its own Vimal men's wear brand, focusing on tailoring blending wools with one of its superfine polyesters. Indeed, demand for polyester is now so high that Toray Industries, Japan's biggest manufacturer of high-tech fabrics, has seen sales quadruple over the two years to 2007.
"Japanese mills especially have developed the fabric to such an extent that it's completely different to that which was available in the 1970s and which we commonly think of as polyester," says Ivan Benbanaste, designer for Pal Zileri, which will use high-grade polyester for coats and bomber jackets in its autumn/winter '08 collection. "In fact, it's very hard to find the properties of today's polyester in other natural fabrics. Attitudes to understanding polyester may need to evolve, but today luxury is as much about convenience as refinement and the fashion consumer is more used to mixing 'classical' with 'advanced' fabrics."
If the old polyester was one of the cheapest fabrics available, the new variety is woven with very thin fibres - finer than a human hair - requiring a slow and complex manufacturing process and making it, at up to 20 euros per metre, one of the most expensive fabrics on the market. The difficulties involved in working and stitching the fabric add to any retail price. In return, the fabric travels well, can hold bright colours - which at one point added to its impression of artificiality but is now regarded by designers as a boon - and be used to create surface effects in texture.
Elements of high fashion have embraced polyester before, of course. In the 1960s it symbolised the future for Pierre Cardin and Andr Courrges, as the many brand names of the fabric suggested: "Fortrel", "Trevira" and "Dacron" could well double as names for characters from Lost in Space.
Indeed, when polyester was invented - in 1950, by DuPont chemists JT Dickson and JR Whinfield - it was thought it might herald the end of cotton clothing. The counter-culture's embrace of the natural in the 1970s, however, put an end to all that. Natural and artificial fabrics have see-sawed in and out of fashion ever since.
What makes it interesting is that, despite these eco-conscious days, polyester is still having a renaissance. "Polyester uses oil at the start of its production so might be considered bad, but over its lifetime a garment works out as being good," explains Graham Burden, fabric technologist for Marks and Spencer, which offers "eco" polyester (essentially made from recycled PET plastic bottles) gilets and trousers in its latest men's wear collection.
"Add in the fact that there is a much broader selection of polyester than in its 1970s heyday, and the fact that some clothes are just better made, and the creative possibilities today are that much greater," continues Burden. "Some finishes just aren't possible with natural fibres. Put polyester products in front of people and their perception of it changes..."
Still, polyester is held in contempt by some environmentalists due to its lack of biodegradability and petrochemical origins. But while polyester may be less energy-efficient to make than, say, cotton, it also requires less hot water to wash (and is less easily soiled in the first place), air dries quickly (no need for tumble drying), needs less energy to iron and lasts longer (so, technically at least, it will not need replacing as quickly).
Indeed, polyester is just the front-runner of a spectrum of synthetics undergoing reappraisal, among them nylon and Lycra. According to one study by the American Chemistry Council, approximately 28 per cent of the value of fabric used in the global clothing market can be attributed to synthetics.
"That's because the likes of polyester can be used to reinterpret the structural qualities of any fabric and make it new again," says Neil Barrett, who pioneered the use of modern polyester in high fashion when he used it in Prada's tailoring 14 years ago, and who continues to use it in his eponymous collections for sweat pants and super-light deconstructed jackets.
"Polyester gives a technical, clean feel to a garment, with the same modern appeal of a laminated surface. I'm a total fan."

]]> Sat, 10 May 2008 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2039 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2039 There are dresses, and there are Lanvin sequined goddess dresses. Susannah Frankel asks Alber Elbaz, the label's brilliant designer, how he does it
Monday, 14 April 2008
The dress pictured here is certainly a beautiful thing to behold. A mere slip of a thing, it has a fine tulle base and is covered with small but perfectly formed silver sequins. If it looks simple, it is, in fact, far from it. A body-conscious sequined dress is one thing, as Shirley Bassey, Tina Turner and any number of cabaret artists  female or, indeed, male  all know only too well. A draped, sequined goddess dress, though, is quite another. The 5,000-plus price tag may, then, be at least partly explained by the dedication and sophisticated technique that went into the garment's execution. And while there are few who would ever be able to justify such an expense  they are out there, however, and they know who they are  there are many more who can and do spend a good percentage of their monthly salary on similarly lovely designs courtesy of this quietly influential label.
"For lightness, technical brilliance, and sheer heart-racing excitement, Alber Elbaz's spring collection was one of the most uplifting shows of the entire season," writes Sarah Mower on the all-powerful US Vogue website, style.com. "On a breeze ... he captured fluidity, colour, practicality, and a soaring kind of simplicity that caused a visceral response in every woman watching. When he came out to take his bow, there was a roar of applause from the audience  recognition that this triumph was Elbaz's best Lanvin collection to date, and a celebration that, at long last, someone had come up with the insight to make a collection that is about enhancing the quality of women's lives today."
Mower is by no means the only fashion follower to bow at the altar of Lanvin, the label over which Elbaz has presided since 2001, and which is today a favourite with the fashion insider alongside more obviously grand European houses, from Balenciaga to Yves Saint Laurent.
"I remember a woman telling me that every time she wore a Lanvin dress, men wanted to sleep with her," Elbaz said when we first met. "Later, I thought that I'd rather she fell in love."
Founded in 1889 by the Brittany-born Jeanne Lanvin, the French couture house was bought in 2001 by Mesdames Wong, Yong and Mrieux, who had the temerity to employ Elbaz following his infamously short-but-sweet two-season tenure at Yves Saint Laurent prior to Tom Ford's arrival at the creative helm of the brand. That was in 1999 and it caused a critical stir that was almost too subtle for such loud, proud and designer superstar-driven times.
In retrospect, it is all too easy to see that the designer was ahead of his time. Like Ford, Elbaz had trained in New York, where women's needs are the focus of clothing, over and above any designer histrionics. Unlike Ford, Elbaz, who is Moroccan by origin and was brought up and studied fashion in Tel Aviv, chose to apprentice himself to one designer only, and for no less than seven years. In a world that prides itself on constant renewal, this is an inordinately long time, but then, that is not quite so surprising given that the designer in question was Geoffrey Beene.
Elbaz was introduced to Beene by the retail specialist Dawn Mello (who, coincidentally, is best known today for putting Ford in touch with Gucci). Elbaz says: "That had always been my dream." It did make perfect sense. Beene was a famously modest man, never proclaiming his status, of fashion-deity to stylish American socialites, from the rooftops. Nonetheless, he was one of the most respected fashion designers of the 20th century, an unparalleled creator of women's fashion that was the height of understated luxury and elegance. A much-anticipated retrospective of Beene's work opens in New York later this year.
"It was an amazing place to work, the best school," Elbaz says. "I stayed there because I was happy working a little bit outside the circuit, because he had his vision about fashion, because he had the best style, because he was all about design, and because he was a wonderful man."
More than a decade on, this would not seem an inaccurate description of Elbaz himself. The designer made his mark at Lanvin right from the start with an outstanding debut collection of tweedy designs shot through with antique-gold thread, which were as dignified as they were beautiful, and as feminine as they were bold. There followed little black dresses with crystal necklaces trapped in double-layered silk-tulle bodices; taffeta trench coats trimmed with diamant-studded ribbon; black-silk cocktail dresses that transformed into floor-length gowns at the mere loosening of a tie; and more.
While other designers were almost deliberately impenetrable, meanwhile, Elbaz made a point of attending trunk- shows the world over to find out what his customer was looking for, meeting and talking to her in person. He has always said that he loves women and that his vocation is dressing them to perfection. Small wonder, then, that women love him in return.
For the current season, Elbaz says: "I was thinking of birds of paradise. I wanted the dresses, but also the trousers and coats, to enable flight. I wanted simplicity and fluidity, and to make women beautiful. Nothing else."
Goddess dresses, lightweight trench coats (a Lanvin signature by now), and ruffled gowns in tropical colours are totally desirable, not to mention suited to a less narrow view of age, shape and size than much of today's designer fashion. Most importantly, this was a collection that celebrated Elbaz's love affair with technique. "We are working with ateliers all over the world that, in five years, will no longer exist because all the people working in them will retire," he says. "So now is the time to focus on technology and technique."
It is not a pyrotechnic viewpoint. Neither is it trend-led, although Elbaz is always in tune with the prevailing mood. These are clothes created with thought and emotion, and designed to provoke a thoughtful and emotional response. They are precious but never ostentatiously so, and far more than one-season wonders.
"The whole idea of instant fashion that you wear for one day and then throw out the next is no longer relevant," Elbaz says. "When I work, I always think about the women that I know, the women that I want to know, and the people that I love. I'm very romantic and, if we open a dictionary, romanticism is a desire to go back to the past.
"Why do we want to go back to the past? Because it's a bit more protective. At the same time, the result is more twisted than that, more nervous. It's about missing perfection, in a way."

]]> Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2038 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2038 Please contact with us if you have any enquiries about the collection.
]]> Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2037 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2037 Sipping tea in a Knightsbridge gentlemen's club, Rita Britton cuts an incongruous figure. Small and striking, swathed in severe Yohji Yamamoto black, the 65-year-old draws curious glances from the elderly patrons. But when she opens her mouth, they turn and openly stare. Hailing from the mining town of Barnsley, Rita looks like the style-maker she is - and sounds like the Yorkshire factory girl she once was.
After 40 years in the business, Rita Britton has built her empire from a tiny back-street shop stocked with 250 worth of Mary Quant and Ossie Clark to an architect-designed emporium with its own restaurant and four storeys of international designers including Yves Saint Laurent, Jil Sander and Comme des Garons. Despite its out-of-the-way location, Pollyanna is one of the most respected boutiques in Britain. 'Mind you, my next-door neighbour still has an outside toilet, so I don't think I'm in danger of getting above myself,' she says. 'You've got to keep your feet on the ground. It was tough in the old days. If you had a northern accent, you were thick. That was the consensus.'
Britton's career has been based on confounding expectations. 'It wasn't about being brave. In those days, if you'd failed your 11-plus, which I did, you went into a factory or shop. It was the paper-mill for me because all my relatives worked there. The atmosphere was great, though. We were incredibly interested in clothes. We couldn't wait to buy Vogue, then we'd get the fabric at Barnsley market and take it to a dressmaker to copy a Dior dress.'
In 1967, aged just 23, Britton took her savings to London. 'I had a sudden realisation that a new culture based on youth was out there. Before that, everyone dressed the same - in Barnsley you'd dress like your mother. Then it all changed. But the big boys weren't into it, so small independents sprang up, people like me. Eventually every town had its own boutique, run by absolute amateurs.'
Britton went to see Mary Quant and Ossie Clark, who were shaping fashion's brave new world: 'I remember thinking Mary Quant must be very hard up because she gave me cucumber sandwiches. Ossie was the first gay man I'd ever met.' When she bought their work to stock her first shop, designer fashion came to the north. 'Pollyanna is almost a history of the social change in our area,' Britton reflects.
Nowadays that means a clientele predominantly from outside Barnsley happy to travel from as far as London for a careful selection of what could be called left-field designers. 'The big stores round here do what I call tits and glitz. It's all very predictable, easy to sell. We do something different.' What really distinguishes Pollyanna, however, is how it reflects Britton herself: adventurous, inspired and, above all, friendly. 'The actress Julia Ormond once said that going to Pollyanna was like rifling through your mate's wardrobe. We work at making it like that. People say they bend over backwards for customers - at Pollyanna we do backflips.'
Despite this dedication to her clients, there's more than fashion in Britton's life. Married with three sons - a chef, a website designer and a photographer - she is a positive force in her hometown, acting as a governor at Northern College, helping people who missed out on education. 'Fashion is a serious business - but you'll be incredibly shallow if that's all you live for. You've got to put something else out there as well.'
www.pollyanna.com
Rita Britton's 5 best buys for Spring
-Zagliani medium puffy python bag
-YSL star jersey dress
-Lanvin rose-pink shirt dress
-Lanvin printed t-shirt (from 22 faubourg collection)
-Comme des Garcons white steel sandals

]]> Sun, 30 Mar 2008 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2036 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2036 Pollyanna is giving you the first look of the new shoes and bags collections from Lanvin and Yves Saint Laurent.

Please contact us for more details.
]]> Thu, 13 Dec 2007 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2035 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2035 Pollyanna will be holding it's annual Yuletide party on Sunday the 25th November.

There will be mulled wine, mountains of mince pies and live music to ease you into the festive celebrations. Amongst all this, Space NK will be instore to prepare your beauty regime for the winter chill.

Please see the invite for further details

We hope to see you there!



The following associated files are also available for download:

The Pollyanna Yuletide Party

]]> Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2034 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2034 Pre-ordered to Pollyanna for our Spring/Summer 2008 collection is Lanvin's stunning new must have accessory, The Padova bag. The beautifully stitched creamy tan bag is genuine crocodile skin. It is as oversized as they come and with a contrasting turquoise croc strap in keeping with the theme of the rest of Lanvin's collection for next season, and giant links, it certainly makes a statement. The soft luxurious crocodile skin creates a casual slouch look to this piece and makes it perfect for almost all occasions.
]]> Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2033 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2033 The Japanese hold on avant garde fashion has existed since the 1980s. But 20 years on, it cannot be reiterated too often that there is no such thing as 'Japanese Design' - rather a group of exceptionally creative individuals.
After  a beautiful and graceful show from Yohji Yamamoto, using liquid silver to re-articulate all he loves about women.
In many ways, the designers who work in the studio complex of Comme Des Garcons are Rei Kawakubo's fashion children. But instead of reigning their creativity to her own remarkable talent , she lets them free when she thinks they are ready.
Junya Watanabe was the first of her proteges to take flight. And his show Tuesday proved why his mentor should have confidence in him. After a couple of hesitant seasons of pleasently wearable clothes laced with rock 'n' roll, Watanabe took a new departure. Toga-like drapes in bright colours came out in models in straw trilbies perched on broken shards, as though Julian Schnabel had taken a hammer to mirrored glass and dropped the results in their hair. Later, the same drapes and bunches of fabric appeared in Liberty florals, hinting at the references to ancient Rome and Art Nouveau seen on other runways.
So what was Watanabe's inspiration for the show? "African roots," he announced.
The creative mind has its own rhythms and meanderings. And with the Japanese designer's pronouncement, it suddenly became clear that Watanabe was working lengths of fabrics shaped and draped in a way indigenous to folklore, but hard to achieve in Western clothing. This collection was both a departure for Watanabe from his rock 'n' rollinclinations and also a step nearer to his mentor's.
Yet Watanabe has his own spirit and it was beautifully expressed in this show. To add a twist to the graceful folds, there were other themes - a riff on a Chanel jacket but in a puckered sports-look fabric with guilded braiding and worn with loose shorts. There were even a few examples of elegent tailoring in tightly fitted jackets.
Was all that "Out of Africa"? Who cares? It was a strong, lively show celebrating a creative spirit.
Yohji Yamamoto is a seasoned fashion player and in his spring/summer show he visited familiar territory, but the dark sweetness of his collection was still full of grace, as hooped crinoline frills ripples over simple black pants and overalls turned to reveal silver chains suspended at the back.
There are moments when you feel that a designer is expressing the soul of a fashion conciousness. "This is what I believe in," Yamamoto seemed to say: a womanly take on a man's world, the erotic power of the half-bared back, black used with different textures as a colour and highlighted by silver, like the moon on dark water.
The show, with its elongated silhouettes and sculpted reinterpretations of crinolines, was Yamamoto at his romantic best. And if he has worked this territory many times before, it was done with pure conviction.

By Suzy Menkes
International Herald Tribune


]]> Sat, 13 Oct 2007 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2031 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2031 Taddei Harmarnee is the fusion of Alessandra Taddei and Sarah Harmarnee.
Alessandra's background is steeped in the tradition, luxury and style of one
of Italy's most prestigious leather goods companies. As the daughter of
Bottega Veneta's founder, luxury leather goods are her heritage.  As a child
she spent her holidays learning the magic behind the family business, until
she came of age and progressed to the design studio. Here she worked for
many years prior to its sale to Gucci, learning much about leather,
structure, design and the elegance of a luxury product.

Sarah's career began by studying sculpture and quickly diverting to the
world of Haute Couture catwalk showpieces, jewellery and accessories.
Having created many inspiring and dramatic pieces for a number of prestige
clients, she is perhaps best known for her collaborations with Alexander
McQueen and Alexander McQueen for Givenchy Haute Couture and Prt-a-Porter.

Drawing inspiration from her obsessions with horses, fast cars and
streamlined aerodynamics she has always worked in mixed mediums, favouring
leather and metal above all - the ultimate combination of traditional
craftsmanship with modernity.
]]> Thu, 09 Aug 2007 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2030 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2030
]]> Sat, 05 May 2007 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2029 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2029 Having recieved rave reviews for his Jil Sander debut Belgian designer Raf Simons claims, that "growing up in darkness" gave him a similar outlook to the German master of minimalism.

"Jil Sander has always had a natural attraction for me. The brand has cleanliness, a sobriety, a seriousness. it is connected with a certin intellectualism and culture awareness, and link myself with that. Maybe it is a northen european thing. Jil is German. I am Belgian. We grew up in darkness you know."

It is true that Jil Sander, now as ever, is at first glance about as understated as it is possible to imagine high-end fashion to be. Particularly shown as it is in the Italian Fashion Captial - a stage more familiar with ormantation and the flashing of flesh than most- Jil Sander appears positively monastic by comparison.

Jil Sander once said to me " I like to see women to not be over-decorated. That's old-fashioned. i like to see a womens intulect, her strength of personality. I'm not interested in the 'madame' look- it's over designed and like an old man's fantasy."

Strong words indeed, and such wilfulness makes it perhaps unsuprising tht once the women born Heidimarie Jiline Sander, who opened her first boutique in Hamburg in 1968, entered into partnership with the Prada group in 1999, she, and indeed her label, ran into troubled times. Reported disagreements between Sander and notoriously volatile Prada CEO Partizio Bertelli led her to her first resignation only months after the deal was annonced. There followed a largely unsuccessful stint by former Colette buyer Milan Vukmirovic as Jil Sander designed until, in 2003, Bertelli persuaded Sander to go back to the fold. She left a second time a year later, however, only fuelling any acrimony that surrounded the name.
Simons joined the company six months later to find that, only days after his first womens collection was shown, Prada was selling Jil Sander to Change Captial Partners, a London-based investment firm.


Dazed and Confused.
March 2007.  


]]> Wed, 25 Apr 2007 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2028 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2028 A few weeks after his fall runway presentation, Christophe Mollet is in a Paris showroom, holding his eight-month-old daughter in one arm while flipping through a rack of clothing with the other. He pulls out some favorite pieces from the second collection by Running Dogs, a new menswear company based in Amsterdam. The name is a reference to the modern 40-year-old male. "It's an age when a man's right in the thick of it," says Mollet. "Trying to balance family, career, and scrambling in several directions."
Running Dogs is a collective formed by Mollet, who previously worked with Yohji Yamamoto and Martin Margiela; Dutchman Alexander van Slobbe, who designed for Puma; Rafael Jimenez, who recently launched a MySpace-type fashion site (www.iqons.com), and painter Jean-Pierre Wati. Each season the group invites a few outside collaborators, such as American jeweler Josh Hickey, who made necklaces with beer bottle shards like talismans for next fall. "I love the creativity that comes from many talents," says Mollet.
Their client is a man who cares how he looks yet never tries too hard, combining a discreet brand of chic with a dose of rock 'n' roll attitude. And the clothing naturally reflects this contrast with simple but strong pieces such as a casual T-shirt worn with a tailored jacket.
Yet, there's nothing effortless about the technical expertise that goes into each item. Details include hidden buttons on jacket cuffs, reinforced underarms, shirt collars that can be flipped over for a stand-up look. A gray wool sweater with off-center buttons has been hand-knit in Belgium in a heavy gauge, a density that Mollet says, "you can't get with a machine." The silk lining of a wool jacket is printed with an apparently abstract pattern, but look closely and you'll see a dog's eyes. Jeans are dyed in Japan with persimmon fruit and air-dried for two weeks for a subdued coppery shade. A khaki army coat based on a vintage model is crafted from a high-tech Swiss fabric that breathes when the weather's warm and retains heat in the cold. It's just the kind of piece that could quickly become a man's best friend.

]]> Wed, 21 Mar 2007 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2027 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2027 Jil Sander

The show opened with a new, almost monastic, close-cut cape with a rounded shoulder, after which Simons reiterated the silhouette of narrow body-line coats and jackets with attenuated skinny pants, ballasting them, as before, with heavy black platforms. The variation among the plain blues and grays came in a few futuristic shot metallics, which broke out more delicately in a silver accordion-pleated dress for evening.The effect of all this was to make the eye search for the new points. Simons has added some terrific ribbed knits with little turned-down collars, including a maroon sweater dress. Most of the innovation, however, was concentrated in the intelligent minutiae. For example, he made the simple combination of a green skirt and a matching skinny, high-neck sweater look interesting by adding a wrapped-band waistline.


Lanvin

Technical construction details sound dull on paper, and too often designerly innovation ends up beyond the realm of the sanely wearable. But in pushing his broad-shouldered look, Elbaz applied both scissors and his sensitivity to most women's morbid fears about its last go-round, viz., the Sue Ellen eighties. His solution is an aerated shoulder volume without pads, something akin to a leg-of-mutton, but actually without historical precedent. It came on washed duchesse-satin shifts, belted jackets, techno-nylon coats, and a delicious ivory charmeuse blouse.That striking silhouette formed the core of the collection, but Elbaz didn't leave it there. His other contribution to the growing desire for concise but luxurious design (we have to think of something to call it other than minimalism) was in dresses that were sexily wrapped from single lengths of fabric. Often deceptively sober in front, they draped through the hip and got caught up in back with an asymmetric frill running the length of the spine, or turned to show a little upthrust scroll of peplum in the small of the back.


Comme des Garcons

Im tired of mundane, everyday fashion, declared Rei Kawakubo. Im curious. I want something that takes us to another world. She didnt mean another world as in futuristic sci-fi, but rather something that seemed to start with an exploration of the tender parts of the developing female psychewhich these days are usually stamped out before a girl is 10 years old. That, at least, was one reading of the Minnie Mouse hats and the tiny baby frocks sewn to the front of the violet and pink dresses that opened the show. They were sweet and playfully imaginative without being saccharine, and led to more tropes of childlike ingenuity: padded, appliqud bows and flowers implanted on stretch dresses and, later, like an adolescents dream of a virtual boyfriend, a pair of 3-D hands grasping the hips of a skirt.Still, Comme des Garons is the Rorschach test of fashion, so that may be just so much subjective speculation. In any case, just when you think youve spotted a reference, Kawakubo reliably skews away from it.

]]> Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2025 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2025 Junya Watanabe

After a season of dressed-up eighteenth-century dandy formality, Junya Watanabe took it down again for Fall, returning to rework a different classic registerbiker, instead of Beethoven. (He called it "Romantic in Black.") Essentially, it was a show of little riffs up and down the scale of fabric and construction/deconstruction, the sort of riffs that have become familiar at the house of Comme des Garons over the yearsi.e., stiff leather (real and fake), overdyed viscose, school-uniform knits, polka dots, asymmetry, and the hybridization of garments.It wasn't one of Watanabe's confrontational punk war criesmore of a teen-rebel look with a softer side. This is for a girl who will pull on a flower-print dress (albeit one she's boil-washed with several loads of black) with her leather jacket, a shrunken cardigan, and a pair of pointy biker-cum-Western boots. In many dresses, the cardigan was fused in and wrapped at the back, sending the frock's pretty lines of tucks and minute ruffles off-kilter. Overall, there was plenty to appreciate, such as the way Watanabe manipulated those unbending leathers: here, to make a zipper ripple down the front of a jacket to echo a frill-front shirt; there, to pick out a fitted fishtail of Alaa-like seaming in the back of a waisted coat.


Yohji Yamamoto

The first look sent a ripple through the stunned audience. Out came the model in a leather coat and matching rolling suitcase printed and embossed with a double-Y logo that seemed to be poking rather obvious fun at the Louis Vuitton monogramand taking a swipe at the corporatization of fashion in general. (Whatever Yamamoto's intention, it struck a wrong note.) More logo-leather tail coats followed, along with intarsia sweater dresses and biker vests, all layered over skinny pants and topped off with printed head scarves wrapped, knotted, and braided into the models hair.Next came an interlude of black-and-white polka-dot hoop skirts that at the touch of a switch revolved, the tiers of the most complicated one turning in different directions. Despite the inevitable comparisons that will be made to Hussein Chalayan (who sent out his own motorized showpieces last season), you could feel the audience breathe a sigh of happy relief. This was more familiar territory.After a bride in a camel-on-white version of the logo pattern, Yamamoto returned to his signatures again in the show-closing series of strapless dresses variously tucked, pleated, and gathered, and worn over an array of pants, some cropped below the knee, others zipping narrowly at the models Dr. Martensclad feet. The beginning of the show was offYamamotos too sublime a talent to indulge in such unsubtle lampooningbut by the finale he was back at his best.


Yves Saint Laurent

For the first time, Stefano Pilati came close to nailing the essence of that bold philosophy, centering his collection on the mission to reshape form and give it a contemporary bite. That clarity of intent produced a fresh silhouette and a new proportion, designed around a precisely engineered upper-body volumebut that's just the technical side. Volume can be overwhelming, fattening, and fashion-victim-y, but here Pilati concentrated on offering chic womenand not just young womena dashing, long-legged wardrobe eminently cut out for urban living.The news was in the rounded, raglan-sleeved coats and menswear-derived jacketsand a multiplicity of textures scored, stamped, and bubbling up from concrete-gray and black surfaces (who else could make a gray "fur" out of knotted chiffon?). Before now, Pilati's enthusiasm for fabric innovation has run away with him, but he controlled it in the service of elegant shapes that stood away from the body. His jackets, starting with a gray, mannish blazer, captured the idea of "oversized," but tailored it to form a bell-like volume in frontan idea that ended in a couple of sublime tuxedo jackets for evening (put on one of those, add a pair of black opaques, and you can forget the skirt).



]]> Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2026 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2026 High protection: Big knits and techno sheen
Let's call it the "Davos factor" - and not just because Alpine sweaters, worthy of a Swiss resort, filled the French menswear shows.
High protection was also on the fashion agenda for the Paris winter season, as designers found techno and traditional ways to shield the body. And those who care about the planet seem to envisage a world where central heating is replaced by sweaters as thick and ribbed as armor.
The weekend shows were dominated by three themes: knits, high-tech fabrics and tailoring, often in a fusion with other genres. Add a hat or helmet and hefty Doc Martens boots.
The dominant designers were John Galliano, whose dramatic collection embraced Japanese male icons from the samurai to the ninja and savage Peruvian tribal wools, and Raf Simons, who remains the absolute menswear leader with his vision of modernity.
The Belgian designer's invitation said everything about his cultural reach and intricate understanding of man's anatomy. It was a technical drawing, in the manner of Leonardo Da Vinci's anatomical sketches, of the ribbed and padded armorial gloves that climbed the sleeves of straight-cut coats or torso-hugging sweaters.
"I was thinking about hands - Leonardo's hands and what handwork can achieve," said Simons, who installed as a centrepiece a kinetic light sculpture called "Binary Star," by the contemporary British artist Conrad Shawcross. And this was a "binary" collection, with precise pieces containing contrasting elements: a woollen jacket with a shimmering , technically treated surface on its lower half or a tailored coat with vertical zippers opening to reveal nylon inserts.
The effect, especially with the padded gauntlets, was of a classsic modern uniform, with the inventive plasticated fabrics worn so lightly that there were at the same time streamlined, wearable and tactile. The show put Simons in fashion's master class.
Protection was the message from Junya Watanabe, who also played with the duality of opposites. His inspiration was biking, and from the opening outfits, when motorcycle helmets topped tough and bulky leather jackets above narrow pants, the silhouette was set. Then zippers slashed through velvet pants in a hard/soft mix; or the multiple zippers served as heavy metal decoration on punk plaid and plain pants. It was another riff on Watanabe's stylish rock 'n roll done with successful collaborations with traditonal labels such as Barbour and Vanson leather.
The Doc Martens boots that stomped out at Yohji Yamamoto below cropped pants were symbolic of a tough stance, tempered with tactile fabrics. Knitted inserts (a seasonal trend) brought Alpine sweater effects into coats and ribbing at jacket hems. While this seemed merely tinkering with Yohji's square tailoring, he made a splashy statement when the drawings of Shotaro Ishinomori created a sinuous, sensual woman's body on the back of a coat.
At Comme des Garcons, the sly glance back at "Swinging London" was fun - and thought-provoking. By using as her icons four fashion originals - Duggie Fields, Andrew Logan, Sebstian Horsely and Michael Costiff - and having them walk the runway, the designer Rei Kawakubo proves that individual style, as opposed to transient fashion, can be eternal.
Out came the real life figures in clothes that were hippie casual, Indian Bohemian, mod sharp or sartorial smart - followed by Kawakubo's versions. They focused on tailoring, deftly changing proportions of snug or elongated jackets and making some ironic references to her own oeuvres when a pattern of circles like holes appeared on felted wool. The wiity British homage endorsed an overwhelming trend: the formal or bowler hat for the cool modern guy.
Knitting is a key to winter, with Dries Van Noten using oversize sweaters and filmy mohair mesh to create waht he called "a very strange elegance." Since his icons were the paintings of Egon Schiele and black musicians, it sounded like a weird mix - and it was. To the designer's easy meld of sport and tailoring were added vast proportions, bold baroque scarf prints and shiny shoes. Their clashing effects and 1980s echoes detracted from the fine fabric research, such as mesh knits and ultra-light padding or felted effects, to give warmth without weight.

By Suzy Menkes-- Fashion Editor of the International Herald Tribune


]]> Thu, 08 Feb 2007 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2024 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2024 When Yves Saint Laurent creates a new accesory, the fashion contingent flocks to place an order while the high street works out how best to imitate the look. Following on from the mighty success of it's "rocking platform" sandals is the lovely "Downtown" tote bag. The roomy hexagonal shape and subtle gold fastenings are what make it special, while the perfect length handles mean you can throw it over your shoulder as well as carry it as a handbag.


- Guardian Unlimited
]]> Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=2023 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=2023 Yohji Yamamoto built his reputation in monochrome. And the latest collection from the Prince of Darkness is bolder- and blacker- than ever, says Susannah Frankel

In explanation of his current collection- the darkest, most voluminous and uncompromising for some time- the designer Yohji Yamamoto claims he is bored with "pretty,pretty" fashion. Taking things one step further, he goes on to announce, with considerable pride, that he knows that not many people will like this particular mind-set but that he, for one, simply doesn't care.
This latest offering commemorates a quarter of a century showing on an international stage, after all- Yamamoto first arrived in the French fashion capital in 1981 and, though still based in Tokyo, has been unveiling his twice-yearly women's wear in Paris ever since. It is perhaps only apposite that the designer, something of an elder statesman, has gone back to his roots.
Larger-than-life-size trouser suits in bleached panne velvets; equally roomy jackets layered one over the other; coats, the arms of which are pinned to the sides; and acres of black gaberdine - Mr Yamamoto's love affair with gabardine is well-known -is all about as far from obviously ingratiating as it is possible to imagine big-name designer fashion to be. It serves as nothing if not a reminder that when the designer first made a name for himself, those who wore his clothes were labelled "the crows"- and that even in his native Japan.
With Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons, Yohji reinvented black as the colour to be see and be seen wearing for the intelligent fashion-follower throughout the 1980's. It is far from body-conscious -the point where this designer is concerned has always been to envelop the femnale form in large expanses of fabric, creating an intimate dialogue bteween clothing and wearer; as opposed to exposing it for all to see.
Equally typical is the fact there is more going on at the back of the garment than at the front. It is part of the mythology that by now surrounds Yamamoto both that overt displays of female sexuality frighten him - he is "scared", he says, for example, by short skirts and red lipstick - and that the woman of his dreams is one he is endlessly searching for and never quite catching up with. She is seen, thereofre, more often than not, from behind. In this case, a pannier is created in gabardine (what else?), exaggerating the girth of the hips and highlighting the narrowness of the torso.
It almost goes without saying that this is not a silhouette that is commonly embraced on the catwalk, not leats because the preoccupation with slenderness decrees that narrowness is aimed for at all costs. These trousers, conversely, are enormous - hugely comfortable, wide-legged and so long that they form puddles on the floor.
They would, of course, in more mainsteam hands, be teamed with a pair of leg-lengthening high heels. Heaven forbid! Yamamoto's footwear is almost invariably flat (high heels are also scary) and masculine. Barbie and her ilk have no place in this world. This designer has worked with the masculine wardrobe since he started out, adapting it the better to suit his vision of femininity, and he is now doing so once again. Finally, the trousers are teamed with a black shirt with its roots similarly in the menswear tradition. it is entirely simple but impeccably proportioned. Nobody does these better.
For the past few years, Yamamoto's designs have perhaps seemed less radical than they had done in the eraly part of his career, more gentle and unashamedly feminine. Overblown bridal gowns, floor-length silk velvet coats with fur-lined hoods and circle skirts have all found their way into an oeuvre that was previously more austere. Not so this time round. It is nothing if not testimony to the impact Yamamoto has by now had on the world that this collection, though intended as aggressively anti-establishment, in fact chimes perfectly with the prevailing mood.
This decrees that every "it" label from Chloe to Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton is offering up high-waisted trousers so wide that an entire size-zero celebrity, complete with hardware-laden oversized bag, could happily reside in one leg for a week. Masculine footwear, also, has never seemed  so fashionable: Prada, Miu Miu, the Comme des Garcons protege Junya Watanabe and more have come up wih this in place of anything more high-heeled and strappy by nature.
Yamamoto's take on an oversized, masculine-inspired asthetic is always the most poetic, however, and even meaningful. Perhaps that is because he is doing it to please nobody other than himself.

]]> Mon, 11 Dec 2006 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=214 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=214
]]> Mon, 14 Feb 2005 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=1026 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=1026
]]> Thu, 13 Jan 2005 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=1025 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=1025
]]> Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=1024 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=1024 The retailer who has been synonymous with inimatable minimalist designer dressing of the 'any colour as long as it is black' variety since 1967, says 'I wear Comme des Garcons, Yamamoto and Miyake. I sell lots of other brands but these three form the core of my wardrobe. I'd look ridiculous in a pussy-bow blouse and bouffant hair and so would most other women. My shop is all about helping people find their own style not dictating what they should wear.

Britton's Pollyanna store, described as 'one of the most foremost shops in the world' by the Victoria and Albert Museum, is in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, the home of Arthur Scargill. Unsurprisingly she finds herself aesthetically and politically opposed to anything to do with the former PM. 'Thatcher is one of those people, like the Queen and The Royal Family, who've got their own style but anyone trying to copy it is destined to look ridiculous.'

She says; 'Nanny Maggie has such a hideously sexless look. I just can't imagine anyone in Scotland taking to it.'
]]> Fri, 03 Sep 2004 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=1023 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=1023 The Sunday Telegraph Magazine
]]> Sun, 27 Jun 2004 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=1021 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=1021 THE DYNAMIC Rita Britton, owner of the fashionicon Pollyanna, is moving into the art world with the opening next spring of the Portfolio Gallery within her world-renowned Barnsley headquarters.
  Known over 35 years la creme de la creme of the fashion world with designers such as Jil sander, Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, Aelxander Mcqueen and Ben de Lisi, to name but a few, this former Yorkshire Woaman of the year, with an honary degree from Sheffield University believes in the holistic approach to shopping.
  "Ninety seven percent of our customers have to travel to come here, or we send out boxes on approval out to them all over the world.
  "You can come in here, buy a speciality coffee, have a nice lunch, buy a book, something to wear and accessorise, all under one roof."
   Pollyanna is also developing its website so customers can select from the current season's collections as well as from stock-room clearence items.
  "It is the natural proggression, which we have always followed, which seems to work. I have always thought the worst thing you can do is stop wondering what to do next," she exclaims.
  In the 90's Pollyanna was in Glasgow too, on four floors of the Warehouse on Glassford Street. Nowdays Rita and her staff get on the road four time a year bringing with them the best of the collections and again at sales times for their Scottish followers. Each year it is a different venue. This year it is the CCa art Gallery on Sauchiehall Street.
  This is a service which extends to other cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, often driving the truck her-self.
  With both art-trained sons and her accountant husband involved in the business, her passion for the clothes she sells, for Barnsley itself and for art, Portfolio is set to take off next March, " targeting young un-known artists but going for quality and for one-man/ woman shows.
  " You can't be all things to all people - the space is beautiful, all perspex and white it looks the business!"
Artwork November-December 2003
]]> Sun, 16 Nov 2003 09:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=1010 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=1010 It promises to be the most dramatic New look since Cinderella went from grunge to glam. Elton john - he of the Versace-meets-Liberace glitz - is being made over by Yohji Yamamoto.
  It was love at first suit for the flamboyant rocker and the celebral Japanese designer, according to a source in Tokyo, who says Yamamoto has been secrety working on a public and private wardrobe that will be unveiled at john's upcoming world tour, which opens in Frensno, California on Nov 8.
  Will John embrace the more soulful side of Yamamoto's creative designs - such as the poetic men - in - skirts collection that was shown as a menswear collection in July? Or will he go for the designer's classic navy tailoring, white shrit and boxy suits?
  Yamamoto's office declined to comment, saying that they never discuss private clients. But apparently up to 20 custom made outfits have been created with personal fittings that have required a tailor to follow John around the globe.
  And maybe the outfits will not be so low key, for Yamamoto himself has a rocker side, having once created his own Tokyo band and produced costumes for Japanese gangster movies. Rich velvets and chunky silver jewelery have appeared on his runways and the designer often wears a jaunty burgundy fedora that could be just the headgear for his new client.
  John may have been encouraged to change his look by his stylish and fashion-aware partner David Furnish. But divesting himself of glitter-gulch suits could come from a similar instinct to make over his London home from sumptuous to simple. A sale of John's interior decor, including a birch and maple wood bedroom suite by royal carpenter David Linley, went under the hammer at Sotherby's in Lodon laast month, bringing in 1.4 million for John to put toward his new clothes.
By Suzy Menkes for the  International Herald Tribune 07.10.03
]]> Sun, 19 Oct 2003 08:00:00 GMT http://www.pollyanna.com/rssfeed.php?feed=News&articleid=1009 http://www.pollyanna.com/news.php?articleid=1009 In his Tokyo studio, Yohji Yamamoto has been redrawing the sportswear blueprint. Its name? Adidas Y-3.

Standing outside the Yohji Yamamoto flagship store in Omote-Sando, a Tokyo street-worker chats with his companion. Oblivious to the throngs of fashionistas flocking to where the citys trend trail ends, theyre looking effortlessly stylish, the coolest guys on the block. The fact that they are on the cities most elegant stretch of retail boutiques is irrelevant to them to them. They are here for work. The baggy overalls, clinched at the waist with a loose belt are just so. The trouser legs bunched up over scuffed worker boots, casually indifferent. The slightly disheveled appearance, suggesting physical toil, is alluringly masculine without evidence of trying too hard. Its enough to trigger a twitch on the most jaded of fashion radar. Male style at its best is, after all, about replicating that originating moment  be it in a Saville Row suit or as a motorbike mechanic. Behind the enormous sheets of glass that separate the street from the pared-down interior of Yohjis store, evidence of both structured tailoring and motorbike grunge have repeatedly caught the imagination of the worlds fashion press. As a designer, Yamamoto would certainly approve of these two men casually passing time outside his shop. His has never been the fashion of glamour and glitz. Elegance and sophistication, yes, but always with its focus grounded by relevance. This is the man who likes shooting pool, drinking whisky, gambling and emulating Bob Dylan on his acoustic guitar. German film-maker Wim Wenders offered us a penetrating insight into Yohjis personal lifestyle 12 years ago in his documentary style Notebook on Cities and Clothes. Since then, that lifestyles only got more, shall we say, idiosyncratic. True to form, the Arena Homme Plus photo shoot  a world exclusive session to mark the launch of the Yohji designed Adidas Sport Style clothing range  he shuffles virtually anonymously into his enormous showroom-atelier among the contorted dockland warehouses of Shinagawa. Yamamoto is diminutive and low-key; his shapeless pants reveal a key chain slung behind a faded burgundy long sleeve top under a black, non-descript waistcoat. It doesnt get more dressed down than this.

As with any legendary figurehead, rumours and unofficial reputations are rife among the citys creative community. He can often be found singing and strumming  the singing very bad, apparently  in an anonymous bar somewhere out of the way. Or that he is now completely addicted to gambling. Young men in Tokyo will tell you how they sometimes see him walking along the road at odd hours, dressed in shabby clothes, looking like one of the homeless. But they always talk of Yohji in tones of reverence.

Real men, the men of the streets and bars, are the ones he looks to for inspiration. And theres the often-repeated quote about his ideal of a sexy woman. As she walks away in the distance, she looks back briefly at Yohji and it is always his imagination, far more than his eye that she will capture. For him, she doesnt have the appeal of youth, but crucially, she has the allure of maturity.

So what makes a man sexy? For me sexy man is basically, Yamamoto smiles slowly to himself, a bad boy. In the sense of extreme violence means extreme love. So hes a little bit dangerous. At the time I was designing costumes for Kitano Takeshis gangster movie, Brother in 2000, I was beginning to resent the way young men were adopting certain feminine characteristics. I liked the aggressive energy those gangsters were carrying around. And I wanted to return to a certain masculinity. This fascination directly fed two Yamamoto menswear collections, first highlighting Tokyo juveniles in Spring 2000 and then suited gangsters based on another cult film, Pepe le Moko, for autumn 2001.

For Yamamoto, the obvious anti-authoritarian image of a guy in his leather jacket is not that straightforward. The point about iconic imagery is that if someone wants to wear a leather jacket, they should be wearing an original item. Not a designer piece, he insists. So my question is: how to create an image that isnt prepared? This man isnt really bothered about fashion. A very fashionable man isnt sexy to me. My theme is always, how to slip away from good sense, or classical elegance. Im always looking for a spirit of the kid in the man. Hes always dreaming; typical childish dreams: I want to be an airline pilot, a boxer, a movie star. Anything else but the norm. A sports star perhaps? While it is now well known that Yamamoto has been designing a shoe line with Adidas since last autumn, the big news for next spring is that the sportswear giant has now invited the designer to head up their new Sports Style division of the annual range. Not just a trendy new clothing line, but a whole new division of the German sportswear giant. This will make up a significant style triumvirate in a market already lapping up both Adidas existing Sports Performance and Sport Heritage lines. Yamamotos approach to sport is an engaging mixture of simple pragmatism and the typically abstract, and promises more than the typical designer tie-up.

My first approach to this new challenge was more personal. Recently, Ive begun to suffer from hip pain when flying the 12 hours from Tokyo to Paris. I started to think, I have to train my body. Then I looked around the stores for jogging clothes and there was nothing. Then, the colours of these sports stores were so bright and flashy. So simply, I wanted to make a sports line in monotones.
My generation  especially the Japanese  knew about baseball and martial arts. Thats it. As long as 20 years ago, I was surprised when I saw people in Tokyo jogging. I kept on asking myself, What does this mean? They had started caring about their bodies, their condition, a long life. I remember thinking that this is the age of the body. That people may be tired of discussing philosophy, the economy, world affairs. But that our physical potential is a mysterious area. Todays medical industry is devoted to body conditioning. It is so much more than just sports oriented.
So when I started working on this Adidas project, I kept on thinking, Where is sports? Where is the body? Where is our tendency? I wanted to simply touch this highly technological world of the sneaker.

Working night and day in his studio, Yamamoto noticed his staff were always in jeans and trainers. Believing that real style takes place in the workplace, where people need to feel comfortable, he set to work designing the shoes. It started off innocently enough. For his womens mainline, Yohji had contacted Adidas at the beginning of last year to request some shoes for the Paris catwalk show. Actually, it was just one style, remembers Michael Michalsky, Adidas Global Creative Director. Adidas set to work, pulling together all the styles that would be relevant, and made a presentation using Yamamotos collection fabrics  the kimono print, silk and felt.
Yohjis response was a real surprise. He called back saying, Ill use them all, and suddenly, we were talking several styles. At the show, you could almost hear the jaws drop as the models came on. The American store buyers were on their phones before the show was over. Just three days before the show, Adidas were drawn in further. A call came from Yohjis studio, and they explained, Were using stripes on the clothes. Can we use three? The sportswear giant, notoriously protective over intellectual property rights, had already expressed their doubts over a fashion collaboration, but now Michalsky and Global Business Developer, Hermann Deininger were about to put their jobs on the line. Fuck it, we said. Were in enough trouble already with this Yohji Yamamoto tie-up. If we have to go, then at least lets do it in style.

With the show attracting fresh acclaim for Yamamoto, and placing Adidas on a vital new fashion platform, Deininger and Michalskys efforts never attracted the feared grief from their superiors. Rather, the tie-up quickly proved a masterstroke, and for all concerned too. But Adidas havent simply rested on their laurels with this one. Within a large corporate structure that wasnt really designed to accommodate the odd creative blip, Michalsky and Deininger are obviously risk takers prepared to rationalise their beliefs. Deininger explains that, after three seasons of successfully producing the Yohji Yamamoto Adidas shoe line, it was time to see if the partnership could now extend further. Into a full sports line perhaps.

Wed been collaborating for two years, says Deininger, So he was either going to say straight-out yes or no. Yohji said yes in a big way.
Since the initial agreement in March this year, Michalsky and Deininger have been flying to Tokyo the way others take the bus to work, fleshing out the ideas of this new collaboration. From early on, both parties agreed that a full sports collection designed by Yohji Yamamoto would take on its own identity separate from both Adidas and Yamamotos existing collections. We basically started from scratch, points out Michalsky. Were doing something that no-one has ever done before. You have one of the most feted avant garde fashion designers in the world, someone who the others follow because he sticks to his own thing. And then you have the company who started sportswear.
It started out as an unlikely partnership, he continues, But look below the surface and you find a lot in common. Adi Dassler was a craftsman, dedicated to producing the finest quality sportswear he could. Yohji is the same. His ready-to-wear represents the one of the highest standards of the market. So theres been no blueprint for this. Weve combined all our competencies into the pot and come up with a totally new twist.
So what are those all-important twists? For starters, a new level of democracy comes into play here. For those who have previously lusted after Yamamotos main Ys line or the more traditional Homme collections, this new offer promises accessibility in both price and design ethos. For the time being, were seeing this as a mid to long term collaboration, suggests Deininger. There will be an interpretation of certain aspects of the Yamamoto collections and we will be using exclusive new fabrics made for us, which will be made up in our factories.

Both Yohjis people and Adidas emphasise how this entire project has been built from the bottom up; design, fabric, niche retail distribution, even to common logo, to be titled Y-3 have all involved a radical rethink. The smart part is that this isnt a diffusion range but rather an independent sports line with a designers signature. The clothes are neither too Yohji or overtly Adidas in execution. Rather, they are both, yet neither.

This is an extensive range for a first collection. Almost 70 styles each for men and women, plus a selection of accessories. Looking at early samples at Adidas world headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany, Homme Plus got a sneak preview of how the range divides into four constituent parts for the clothing. Working mainly with a simple palette of black, navy, olive, grey and white, the fabrics range from the basic to the specialized. Essentials makes up 10% of the collection, and focuses on basic pieces such as t-shirts, sweat-shirts, long shorts and military pants. The Image and Statement groups together represent the bulk of the range. Image plays heavily with the familiar Adidas stripe on primary shapes and styles. Statement works with fabrics, shifting the emphasis away from sport by incorporating materials closer to Yamamotos existing lines. Zip-up sleeveless gilets and hooded parkas, matched with three-quarter length trousers set a seriously covetable look for next spring. The final selection, Exclusive, will satisfy the fashion purists. There will be the more directional pieces, manufactured in limited qualities by Japanese factories. Accessories have an urban feel, covering everything from Messenger bags, backpacks, laptop carriers and waistbags in ripstop nylon or heavy duty canvas, Yohjis personal favourite is an aluminium water bottle container.

The shoe range has shifted its identity markedly from previous seasons on which Yamamoto simply designed an Adidas line to complement his main collection. Working from three core Adidas styles  Running, Tennis and Football  Yamamoto has conjured up a series of styles that accommodate an original flavor while playing with conventions. Strongest of all though, though, are some techno boots that would make the costume department of any Blade Runner remake. Price-wise, footwear ranges from about $200 to $250; tops from $60 to $120 and pants from $150 to $350, which fits Deiningers intentions that the range will be accessible without any design compromise.

It may be too premature to predict how far-reaching this collaboration will be. But there can be no doubts as to how serious as to how serious a precedent Adidas have initiated with the union. The last 5 years have seen the sportswear giant reclaim its position as prime heritage leisure label. So much that readers of The Face recently had no hesitation in voting Adidas their current favourite brand. Michael Michalskys role is to assess the ever-shifting trends globally and plug Adidas into those impulses. His task was to convince the German giant that the time was right for Yohji and Adidas to get into bed together properly. When you look at the market, theres really been nothing new for a while. Everyones been waiting for something to shake things up a bit, he believes. All those people who came in at the end of the 1990s have established themselves now. And many of them that introduced their sports lines got the style right, but lost out on authenticity. If nothing else, this will at least show some of those companies how to utilise technical fabrics properly and make them relevant. Hermann Deininger points out: This hasnt been a case of Oh, lets find a name designer who will give us serious market penetration. It never started as just a business proposition. Yohji would never have gone for that, anyway. But this collection is more than just a fun gimmick. The idea has substance and we feel it will influence the main ranges we do.

Before the groundbreaking womens collection incorporating Adidas last year, the closest Japanese design has come to sport had centred on nostalgic interpretations of American baseball jackets. Yohjis own, from this summers recent mens line featured a series of Vegas inspired pin-up girls, or Geishas, silk screened between transparent layers of silk and polyester. But then, typically, just before Yohji announced the launch of this official sports line, he shifted the emphasis of his main line to herald a return to classic tailoring and conventional structure. This is the man whose loftier collaborations have involved costumes for film and opera  coincidentally, Wagners Tristan and Isolde', composed near Adi Dasslers birthplace, where the Adidas headquarters are now based. Alliances with other creative institutions form the basis for cross collaborations on the fashion world. Armani, Versace, Miyake, Yves Saint Laurent have all been asked to design costumes in the past. Such projects offer a temporary respite from the fixed scheduling of the fashion calendar, again something Yamamoto has openly ignored by choosing to present his womens collection three months earlier than everyone else, next tot the couture shows. This might suggest his reasoning belies a closer affinity with the grandee dame of fashion design  haute couture. His eyes twinkle as you ask him if this has caused any friction with the governing body, the Chambre Syndicale? We have a kind of love affair, he smiles. Yet, he has his valid reasons for flouting convention. With the decision to show his main Ys collection on the Paris schedule next month, there was no room for both collections in the same fashion week. I have been showing the signature collection during prt-a-porter for 20 years, he reasons. It was getting too big, with too many people. I wanted to go back to how it was in the beginning, in which those that are supposed to be there can see the clothes. Can hear them move. To be able to almost smell them as the models walk past.

Borrowing the BMW business plan, Yamamoto has his original mainstream line  Ys, the up-market designer collection, and now a new independent collaboration. All of which can feed into each other. Yohjis interest, then, is to offer something more accessible with Adidas. More relevant for The Face reader who doesnt want high fashion, but doesnt want basic sports apparel either.

At home away, from the glare of the fashion world, Yamamoto is a man who likes to lead his life as normally as the rest of us. Something of a Kerouac figure that appreciates isolation as much as he feeds on the creative accolades. As he sips on iced tea and stubs out a series of half-smoked cigarettes, he slowly considers my final area of questioning. Having emphasised the point that an original leather jacket has all the inherent style that a designer jacket can only hope to aspire to, how does he intend to reconcile that with a designer sports line? Its not a simple paradox. It is dangerous ground, he agrees. But if I had to work in the centre of the fashion world, I think Id have to stop my career. Because Ive always worked at the margins. Thats my challenge. I love the dynamic and upbeat nature of fashion. Its exciting to me. And proving that this collection has my full approval is a big part of that.

For those that are familiar with the Japanese aesthetic, everything about that opening scenario in Omoto-Sando is as it should be. In addressing the Orients contribution to a predominantly western ideal, the longstanding leaders of Tokyos fashion arena  Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake  have created their own establishment. Taking workwear as its starting point, Japanese fashion has eschewed the fantasy element of the European tradition and a marked return to basics. While the press eventually came round to their concept of deconstruction  something the Belgians have been since successfully championed  the Japanese prioritise utility wear over fashionability every time. If this continues to work, then its because their clothes are deeply infused with relevance and integrity. Nothing is superfluous, but it succeeds in getting you noticed. To deviate this denies the essential purpose of Japanese fashion. This manifesto.

Take a good look at Yamamotos design legacy and it begins to really hit home how cleverly he  as well as his Japanese peers  have played the concepts of fundamental avant garde against each other to keep within the fashion framework and continually push at its boundaries. Surely now Yohji is just switching his attention to sportswear as a new area of utility clothing worth his consideration. Success looks guaranteed. One final thought, though. What would Adi Dassler say have to say about this new Yohji-ed line were he alive today? Thats something I ask myself everyday, admits Michaelsky. There are enough people here who worked with him to keep this in mind. But he was always conventional. He would have definitely gone for it. As for our stylish workers on the streets of Tokyo? Who knows. But I like to think he will soon be prompted into kitting himself out in some monotone Adidas sportswear for the first time in his life. Thats certainly a design challenge Yohji Yamamoto would welcome.                                

Article originally appears in the Autumn/Winter '03 edition of Arena Homme Plus. Words by Paul Davies, original photography by Toby McFarlane Pond.
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Her shop is the toast of Europes top designers, attracting women of all ages, sizes and social groups. Pollyanna stocks designers such as McQueen, Jil Sander, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Commes Des Garcons...you get the idea!

Rita remains committed to the local community, supporting the work of Barnsley Council on job creation, economic regeneration and lifelong learning. She also recently received an honorary doctorate by Sheffield Hallam University.

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