Fashion revs up - Biker jackets

The leather jacket stands the test of time as a style perennial. But it’s also a bit of a minefield. After all, “leather jacket” encompasses a multitude of styles and sins. Considering spending your hard-earned cash on a leather trench? Remember The Matrix and back away. Brightly coloured padded leather catching your eye? Watch Thriller and realise the error of your ways. What was questionable on Michael Jackson in 1983 has in no way been rehabilitated for 2013. Clearly, not all leather jackets are created equal.

Perhaps, then, on the surface at least, the jacket that’s the most appealing is the most classic: the black leather biker or motorcycle combo. Google it, and be enticed by the constellation of cinematic stars past and present sporting the louche look with rakish aplomb. Probably the most famous image of all is Marlon Brando astride a Harley, sporting a beyond-classic Schott Perfecto in 1953’s The Wild One. When his character, Johnny Strabler, was asked what he was actually rebelling against, his disdainful reply of “whadda you got?” instantly confirmed both attire and actor as talismans of youthful dissent.

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There’s a catch. Marlon makes it all look all-too easy. Both he and the Schott are a hard act to follow, regrettably leading many a man down the biker jacket route for all the wrong reasons. Remember this; for mere mortals like ourselves, no amount of revving around on a motorcycle looking mean, moody and sweaty in a black leather cap is going to turn you into a modern-day Marlon. Real life just doesn’t work like that.

Instead, look to labels such as Belstaff or Matchless for a more grown-up take on the leather motorcycle jacket; incredibly versatile, these 21st-century bikers can be dressed up with a shirt and tie, or down with a simple T-shirt and jeans. Still not impressed? Eschew leather entirely and opt for the waxed version from Barbour – think Steve McQueen astride a Triumph bike – which is actually a damn sight easier to pull off.

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Amazing Makeup Tips to Hide Flu Symptoms

Although flu can make your body weaker, there are great makeup tips that will help you hide it and make you restore your complexion's natural glow. Are you curious to find them out?

Makeup for Flu Face: Concealer

Concealer is essential when it comes to makeup for flu face. Just apply a bit on your red nose and no one will notice you've spent all night dealing with flu. Pick a makeup for flu face product that perfectly matches your type of skin and skin tone, and add it to your shopping list.

Makeup Tips for Flu Face: Lip Exfoliation

Sometimes, cold temperatures can also lead to chapped lips, due to constant wind and rain exposure. So, here's one of the best makeup tips for flu face: lip exfoliation. You should take a washcloth and wet it with lukewarm water, and then gently rub your lips to remove dead skin cells. Now you should use another makeup tip for flu face item: chapstick. Apply a coat of this relieving flu product and then add a bit of light color.

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Makeup Tip to Cover Cold Symptoms: Glossy Blush

Here's another great makeup tip to cover cold symptoms. After you gently wash your dehydrated complexion with an exfoliating cleanser, add a tinted moisturizer and define your makeup with a glossy blush. This lovely product will add a touch of natural color to your cheekbones and will make you glow.

Makeup Tip to Hide Flu Symptoms: Waterproof Mascara

If you want to find out another great makeup tip to hide flu symptoms , you should definitely wear a waterproof mascara. Unlike eyeshadows that can easily wash out, this beauty product will make your eyes look bigger and brighter. Plus, its water resistance makes it a great makeup for flu face product that you can wear both during the day and evening.

Ann Demeulemeester Leaves Her Label

There’s a generation of women who will feel like rising to salute a heroine of fashion integrity today. Ann Demeulemeester, the woman responsible for defining slouchy Belgian cool in the nineties, has written to her friends—in her own beautiful handwriting—to say she’s moving on from the company she founded in 1985. Her very personal sign off says it all about the integrity and human values her fans have admired in Demeulemeester over nearly 30 years. She’s leaving the industry, she writes, as “a happy and fulfilled person.”

As a member of the vastly talented Antwerp Six, who graduated from the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1986 (she was a classmate of Dries Van Noten), Demeulemeester created a highly recognizable fashion uniform for a clan of working women who constitutionally objected to power suits. Her deconstructed suiting, trailing long skirts, and drapey white shirts were functionally elegant and subtly suffused with the indie attitude she continually tested against the principles and poetry of her own muse, Patti Smith.

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Demeulemeester’s growing band of appreciators became a kind of tribe who saw themselves reflected season after season in the family of models who roamed her Paris runways. Her ever-evolving deconstructed-minimalist wardrobe strode on in its own path, strong enough to transcend and withstand trends—even when fashion veered toward cocktail dresses and bling, Demeulemeester showed her grateful faithful exactly how to ignore it.

That won her an emotional connection with the public, which went further than the aesthetics. As she built her company in her own way, Demeulemeester also became a symbolic leader for her peers in refusing to sacrifice motherhood for her career—at a time when fashion industry employers openly doubted whether women designers could do both. When Demeulemeester and her husband, Patrick Robyn, had their son, Victor, she simply had a connecting corridor built between her home and her workspace so she could see her baby any time he needed her and got on with it. Her son now grown, her fashion career completed, Demeulemeester now leads another rare group of pioneers—fashion designers who have done it on their own terms, and are managing to walk away to a private and happy future. Bravo.

Can a Love of Style and a Strong Voice Make Rapper Angel Haze a Star?

In her new single “Echelon (It’s My Way),” Angel Haze name-drops Helmut Lang along with a few other of her favorite designers, a kind of declaration of the arrival of her triumphant personal style: “Fashion Week I’m out here slaying / Dressed in all the latest.”

“Fashion came with success,” Haze says, now standing in the label’s Meatpacking District showroom. “But I’ve always known what I like—the colors and textures.” To gear up for her debut album Dirty Gold and the performances that will come along with it, Haze has linked up with Helmut Lang designers Michael and Nicole Colovos, who are taking her through the showroom and ask the ultimate Helmut Lang question: “Do you wear layers?”

“I love to wear, like, five layers,” Haze replies, pulling a black-netted shirt off the rack. “This is dope. It needs to be really breathable with all the fast talking I do.” She has a tendency toward ensembles in all-white or all-black, but then, there’s the question of a bright pink dress, an anomaly among the gray-scale clothes hanging around the perimeter of the room. “Do you wear dresses?”

A pause. “I only wear dresses when I don’t want people to recognize me.” A black dress with elongated armholes goes on. “It’s sexy, but tough,” Nicole says. “A little goth-ninja,” Haze agrees. After comparing tattoos and talking about a mutual love of “slouching around in leather,” Haze is hooked. “I’m, like, gushing over you guys!” she says, laughing.

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Haze was signed last year, and her debut album, Dirty Gold, is due out early 2014. In the meantime, she’s releasing a series of covers and freestyle tracks on SoundCloud, collectively titled 30 Gold. She’s tackled contemporaries’ hits like Jay-Z’s “Tom Ford” and Drake’s “Worst Behavior,” plus Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” and, most notably, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Same Love,” her rework of which delves into her own moving personal narrative, weaving in thought-provoking lines from poet Andrea Gibson. Haze’s emotional honesty cut with intelligent ferocity is what makes fans love her. Because I had to switch the narrative it now makes more sense for the Tweet to come in after she looks at the racks (it was in the midst): Just before she finishes looking at the collection in the showroom, her phone buzzes. “Someone just asked me to go to their homecoming dance on Twitter,” she says.

Onstage, it’s like Haze is ten feet tall in neon socks and Givenchy boots, her flow has such a tough energy. Fashionwise, she gravitates toward clothes she can move in. Correction: “Something I can jump around in! I jump on the speakers!”

Finding clothing that makes performance fluid is the priority: “I gain more of my fans from live performances,” Haze says. “Everything I build my tracks on—they see it come out live.” But before Haze goes on her own tour next year, Vogue has an exclusive first listen of her newest 30 Gold cover of One Republic’s “Counting Stars.” Will a love of style, unstoppable flow, and strong singing voice make her a star? Count on it.

Runway to Red Carpet: Fashion’s Award Shows and a Dressed-Up European Tour

This week was highlighted by a whirlwind European press tour for the cast of Hunger Games: Catching Fire, with photo calls and premieres in London, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, and Oslo. Leading lady Jennifer Lawrence donned a bevy of gorgeous gowns to promote the second film of the trilogy. And while she mostly stuck to her red-carpet favorite, Dior (she is the face of the brand, after all), the actress did throw in a sprinkling of Alexander McQueen, Louis Vuitton, and Proenza Schouler. At Tuesday’s Berlin premiere, Lawrence wore a pale blue double-breasted coat-dress with printed guipure panels from Dior’s Resort ’14 range, which was a perfectly chic way to battle dropping temperatures (remember Leelee Sobieski’s black version last week? We sense a trend coming on). Elizabeth Banks also shined on the red carpet, choosing two shimmering Elie Saab Fall ’13 Couture dresses for the Berlin and Oslo premieres.

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On Monday, the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Awards and Glamour‘s Women of the Year Awards brought out a stylish crowd. Lily Collins walked the red carpet at the WOTY Awards in a silk flesh-toned gown with a plunging neckline from the Julien Macdonald Spring ’14 runway, while Lady Gaga paired a pearl-adorned jacket with a cargo-pocketed pencil skirt and tall, pearl-encrusted platform shoes from Thom Browne’s asylum-themed Spring ’14 lineup. At the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Awards, Ciara wore her first Calvin Klein Collection ensemble, stepping out in a tweed wrap vest and cotton twill painter’s pants, with a jacket draped around her shoulders from the Spring ’14 runway. Considering the result, we have a feeling there’s more Calvin in the singer’s future.

The Victoria's Secret catwalk show has nothing to do with fashion

It is the most expensive catwalk show ever staged, but it has almost nothing to do with fashion. They're not really into irony at Victoria's Secret, so the joke gets a little lost in the dazzle of white teeth and diamond-encrusted bras and paparazzi cameras, but it's quite funny, when you think about it.

All the signifiers of a fashion show are in place when Victoria's Secret stages its annual extravaganza. The model line-up always includes high-end Paris fashion week names (Cara Delevingne and Jourdan Dunn have featured in recent years) and the show is styled by Sophia Neophitou, who as stylist and collaborator to Roland Mouret and Antonio Berardi and British Fashion Council ambassador is an undisputed powerhouse of high fashion taste. The 6in high heels are designed for the occasion by Nicholas Kirkwood, the talented young shoe designer who was just snapped up by LVMH.

But there's something missing. Call me old-fashioned, but I sort of think the absence of clothes is a dealbreaker as far as fashion goes. At the Victoria's Secret show, instead of clothes, the models wear underwear and massive fluffy angel wings. I've been a fashion editor for 15 years, I've seen all kinds of crazy accessories anointed a fashion must-have, but massive fluffy angel wings? Nope. Not a catwalk trend. Never.

I know what you're thinking: it's about sex, stupid. Well, here's the thing: I don't see that Victoria's Secret is really about sex, either. The presentation of the Victoria's Secret Angels, to give the catwalk models their faintly creepy official title is look-but-don't-touch in the extreme. Like a very grand ballgown, or a bridal dress with a train, the wings form a kind of exclusion zone, making it physically difficult to get close. Also, even if you did find a woman dressed in an oversized Angel Gabriel costume sexy, which seems a little dubious, you'd have difficulty getting intimately acquainted. The wings Alessandra Ambrosia wore in the 2011 show were gold-plated antique copper decorated with 105,000 Swarovski crystals. They weighed almost 10kg. There is as much neon, crystal, and metallic on the VS runway as there is satin and maribou. The VS catwalk cipher might be look-at-me, but it's hard to argue that it is come-and-get-me. The name Victoria's Secret was chosen, in 1977, to set a mood-music of sobriety and respectability, and that wholesomeness is still there, despite the acres of flesh on show.

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When you visit the store, you notice how little of the product is sexy in the sense of being designed for sex. Much of the shopfloor is dominated by bras bulked up by gel or foam padding. In these, a woman may send a sexual signal when dressed, but she will need to undress alone. The vast "Pink" sub-brand of pyjamas, sweatshirts and logoed vests sells an aesthetic of the tween sleepover, not booty call. But there is no doubt it works: last year, sales at Victoria's Secret totalled almost £4bn.

The VS brand has very little to do with actual sex, and everything to do with sexiness as a status symbol. The brand has as much to do with women looking at other women, as it does with men looking at women: for every 17-year-old boy ogling the model's arses, there is a 16-year-old girl staring at their abs. VS deliberately emphasises the intense competition amongst models to appear on the catwalk; among the most "liked" posts of the endless Instagram photos of Angels-in-training are those which feature the models in boxing gloves, punching their way to a catwalk turn that could earn them a seven figure paycheque.

The Victoria's Secret show takes the cheerleader tradition, and removes the boring old football game. Sportsmanship is old hat; the 21st century is all about being hot. This is the Superbowl, for those gifted with lovely hair, beautiful bottoms and superhuman endurance for juice fasting. These days you can be a champion – an Angel, a higher being – just by being sexy. That's a trend, for sure. But it's got nothing to do with fashion, so don't blame us.

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Fall Fashion: Cutest Organic Leggings for Fall

Looking for some ethical fall fashion that’s cute to boot? Check out these sweet handmade leggings!

Leggings are everywhere this fall. Ev-ery-where. And I kind of love it, because leggings are like pajamas that you can wear out of the house!

The trouble with leggings from the big box store is that you don’t know much about where they were made. Who produced them? Under what conditions? It can be tough to track down cute leggings that meet your requirements for ethical fall fashion.

That’s where handmade goodness comes in! When you buy handmade, you know exactly who produced the fall fashion finds in your closet. And when you buy handmade products that are also made with organic fabric, you’re doing an ethical double-whammy.

I’ve searched Etsy high and low and found the cutest organic leggings I’ve ever seen. These are my faves, and I’d love to hear about which crafters are making organic leggings that are rocking your socks!

1. Colorful Tribal Leggings - These sweet leggings by Shovava would be the centerpiece to any outfit. Pair them up with your favorite little black dress for a pop of color that you can feel good about.

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2. Space Themed Leggings – Eleven44′s bleach-splattered leggings remind me of the solar system, and I love the ruching on the side. They’d be great with just an oversized sweater or your favorite dress over them.

3. Stones Print Leggings - Don’t you love this bold pattern from Komana? I could see these black and white leggings becoming a staple in my wardrobe for sure.

Of course, these are just a few of the awesome organic handmade leggings options on Etsy. Search the site for “organic leggings,” and you’ll find tons of other sweet fall fashion options. One tip: after you do your search, narrow down the category to just “women.” There are a lot of organic leggings on there for kids, and this will help weed those out.