Category Archives: Columns

Columns

Highfliers – AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW

cn_image.size.qantas-airlines-miranda-kerr-new-uniforms

AFR | April 2013

by Marion Hume

It was the best runway show held on a runway. Well, to be accurate, it ties as my joint favourite of only two fashion shows ever shown on a runway. I’m using the Australian sense of that word (a long straight strip on which planes land) as opposed to the American, where it also means the thin strip catwalk models swank down.

The first runway show I saw was some twenty years ago when the brainiac of fashion, Hussein Chalayan, revealed a conceptual collection called “Beyond False Equator” illuminated by aircraft landing lights. Great shows stick.

The other is likely to remain front-of-mind to Australians for years to come, given it began with the roar of jet engines and then out came the new Qantas uniforms. We all know Qantas is NOT the national airline (the people don’t own it) but when it comes to distilling the modern spirit of chic, sophisticated, multifaceted Australia, frankly, Qantas nailed it.

You don’t need me to describe the trench coat, the slender dress, the shorts for the baggage handlers – by now, the images are everywhere. After decades being unknown except to the tight, top-tier of the fashion world, Melbournian, Martin Grant (a long time resident of Paris) who Qantas hired as the designer, at last needs no introduction – although he is hardly what you would call an overnight success.

I grabbed an aisle seat a few rows back (always my preference), in amongst flight attendants who were seeing what they will wear to work for the next decade for the first time. “Loving the Qantas red with the hot pink!” the woman next to me exclaimed, not to me but to herself, in affirmation that she felt her pride in her job sweeping back back. Clothes can, you see, be powerful. The best uniforms can unite a workforce in a common goal.

You get it that my verdict on the Qantas uniforms is excellent when it comes to style but top marks to in terms of the politics of business, which can be very turbulent.  Habitually, when corporations collide with fashion, the results end up ugly. Corporations have what I call an “Auntie Mame” view; they come to those funny people in fashion for glamour, yet want it for a buck in cheap synthetics. Surprisingly perhaps, fashion designers tend to tone things down yet they want beautiful fabrics and everything in a tiny size. Then it goes to committee where there’s an uneasy compromise, especially when the resulting designs are scaled for the climates of 5 continents and in sizes 2 to 22.

In addition, when corporates call the fashion world, usually, they are after a star, a personality who can be rolled out like a camp court jester. Martin Grant is no performer. He is quietly spoken, determined, diligent and has built his business one client at time. As a result, he knows where the bumps are and how to plan for them.

There are bumps ahead for the global aviation industry in the sky and on the ground. Yet Qantas can certainly tick one box; for motivating its far flung global battalions in a modern way. The era of the trolley dolly is over. It’s not about marrying the pilot or the guy in seat 1Aand the new Qantas uniforms signal pride in one’s career.

Martin Grant told me it was pressure from the flight attendants that persuaded him to add the gloves, the hat. “Too right,” say my friend Suze, who flies domestic for Qantas. “I’m in my 50s. You don’t get much attention. But in that outfit, I can’t wait to see the heads turn as we march through the terminal”

Call this lift off to a new and stylish corporate dawn.

Columns

It’s In The Bag – Australian Financial Review

AFR | January 2013

by Marion Hume

The day after any televised royal event, I know just what my mum is going to say. “Did you see the way the Queen walked down those stairs? Not holding a handrail and she never looks down!” HRH’s agility fascinates my not particularly Royalist mother. I was wondering what both she and her Maj might have made of the scene at a recent fashion party. The exit was via a vast marble staircase, so I hurried down the centre then waited and waited as everyone else teetered to ground level, clinging to the rails as if this were the sinking of the Titanic. Isn’t the purpose of a shoe that you can walk in it, including down a stair? But what’s on­trend now are styles so unbalanced that the fastest speed is a hobble. HRH would be amused by that!

Yet fashion decrees that when one must ­have reaches the realms of the ridiculous, another becomes sensible to compensate. Handbags, once so weighed down with hardware you could hardly lift them empty, have become more practical. What is chic now is unadorned and calm. (Imagine here, please, handbags by Celine. So simple. So lovely. So expensive.) HRH knows all about practical bags – she’s had the same style swinging off a regal forearm for the past half century. Indeed, maybe not just the same style, perhaps the same actual bag? I suspect she owns but three: one cream, one black and one which they re­cover to match whatever primrose ensemble she is wearing. Those of us who can’t avail ourselves of such a service do need a few more choices.

I made one a month ago. As I walked to the office, I decided to buy a rucksack, a style I have not owned since I gave up backpacking in my early 20s. Mine, though, is black canvas, with a leather base and a pocket for phone and keys. It is not at all something you would take on a scout camp. That the label, Ally Capellino, is not better known in Australia is something I am trying to change, one convert at a time. The label sells online, at the Tate galleries in London and in just two little London stores.

If your tastes are snazzier, may I draw your attention to the bags of Baraboux. Reema Bandar Al Saud of Riyadh was looking for a solution to the organisational needs of a globe trotting lifestyle and decided to do something about it. These are not schlepp­-it-­through-­the-sand bags, although they’d be perfect if you were, say, flying Emirates and doing a few days stopover in Dubai. I swooped in on the Marie, a day bag with detachable pocket­ purses on the outside, for when I’m travelling and a rucksack won’t cut it. Usually you put purses inside a handbag, but this way, you can go: “Can leave that one in the hotel. Need that one. Don’t need that one until later.” Amazingly, the bag looks equally attractive with any combination of pockets attached.

Every women knows the prettiest evening bags are the most useless. It’s a fantasy to think all we need to carry is a lipstick and a hanky. The Reema bag has a neat trick: a metal mesh cuff which looks like a decorative detail to a black satin clutch, yet slides around the barrel revealing two compartments – one for things you don’t mind people catching a glimpse of, one for those necessities you do. Phone, business cards, keys and other items a girl needs close at hand. I dumped them from one bag to the Reema. Call that a sale.

Columns

The Auld Country – Australian Financial Review

AFR | January 2013

by Marion Hume

For once, I look more like Chanel than any other woman present and me a big boned six footer while Coco was a little bird. I’m in Scotland, land of my heart, a nation with which Mademoiselle Chanel fell in love while being wooed by the Duke of Westminster, familiarly known as Bendor and the richest man in England, (which, in turn, meant he owned half of Scotland). In the end, Chanel would ditch the multimillionaire but would keep her love for “the auld country” forever.

While they were dating, Coco and Bendor would enjoy long walks through the bonnie purple heather, which inspired a devotion for the rough weaves and the colours of tweed which remain central to the Chanel DNA. It was “North of the Border” that the jaunty French mistress of a naughty rich gent fell for the majesty of tartan, the softness of Scottish wool, the patterns of Fair Isle. And it was up here, in the land of lochs and crags, that Chanel really took to mannish dressing. She’d dabbled before, decking herself in the jersey undergarments of a former boyfriend, but she really crossed over in Scotland.

For salmon fishing at Lochmore, Chanel wore an oversized chunky sweater, warm “trews”, big socks, jack boots and, in a snapshot taken in 1928, a radiant smile. She looked entirely different from the hard, little Parisian of other photographs with the gimlet eye of ambition, the jaw fixed in grim determination, the armholes of her jacket cut high and tight.

It is Chanel’s joyful Lochmore look I have gone for tonight because we are instructed to wrap up warm. I’ve added a huge broach, which looks as if it was hammered and forged by the Pictish men of the dark hills; in truth, it was dug up with delight, at Christine Barro’s treasure trove in Melbourne.

Snow falls on the location, a roofless, ruined castle. Karl Lagerfeld has invited us to witness a fashion show inspired not just by the brand’s long history of Scottish production but also by its life-saving purchase, last August, of Barrie Knitwear, which makes Chanel’s cashmere twinsets. A pension fund crisis in the conglomerate by which it was owned had bought Barrie to the brink. Chanel added it into its charm bracelet of specialist companies, the Metiers d’Art, acquired in order to preserve the savoir faire of glove makers, feather makers, milliners, goldsmiths. “It’s a dream,” says managing director, Jim Carrie, who feared he was headed for the block.

That was the grim fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, born here at Linlithgow Palace and whose every living heartbeat brought her closer to her cousin, Elizabeth I, sending horseman North with orders for her execution. The models in the show wear their red hair plaited upwards, tight to their scalps, keeping their necks clean for the axe. Scotland changed Chanel. Its haunting highland spell softens Karl Lagerfeld, who modernises the traditional in his most beautiful show in 30 years with the brand. Models hurry past, their chiffon gowns held by kilt fastenings, wrapped up against the weather in vast tartan scarves and bonnets. Never, in all my years of singing Auld Lang Syne to see in the New Year did I expect that the Chanel bag du jour would be a sporran rendered in golden chain mail or that Hogmanay vocabulary like tam o’shanter, ghillies and sgian dubh (men’s bonnet, brogues and the knife you stick on your kilt socks) would become a useful part of my lexicon in the high speed frenzy of the front row.

The “Auld Alliance” between France and Scotland was forged way back in 1295. The show’s title is Paris Edimbourg, to me, thrilling proof that the age-old pairing between the land of my work and the land of my blood stays strong.

Columns

Heart Of Glass – Australian Financial review

AFR | December 2012

by Marion Hume

Sometimes an adventure beckons and you have to follow the lead. When an interview was relocated from New York to Prague, I was thrilled, given I haven’t been to the Czech Republic since it was Czechoslovakia. I looked forward to going again to the mighty Prague castle, to walking the span of the historic Charles Bridge.

But then a half-lost nugget of something began to niggle. When, recently, had there been mention of something Czech? I realized it was a few weeks before, in Kenya, when I was watching Maasai women working their magic on a range of bags for Myer, including designs by Karen Walker, Fleur Wood and Jayson Brunsdon.

Maasai beading is every bit as good as in the ateliers of the Paris haute couture. (How lucky am I, to have witnessed both, and often). This is due to a mix of traditional skill and sheer bloody-mindedness. The Maasai won’t even touch beads from India or China (whisper it, but the French will). Only the Czech ones are perfect.

Today, glass seed beads are still traded through second, third, fourth parties, so it has taken a degree of investigative skill to trace the source to where I am standing now, inside an old glass foundry, up a mountain, near a village I will never learn how to pronounce. Getting all the way here from Prague has taken guts and the navigational skills of a girl scout (Ok, that’s not true, but it has required the essential fashion skill of knowing how to hire a cheap driver with a GPS).

Inside, it is roasting hot, as you’d expect when five furnaces hit over 1,000 degrees. What looks like needle-thin vermicelli is being extruded (protuded? Who to ask for vocab when I can’t speak Czech?) along thin, raised contraptions that stretch as far as the eye can see. The secrets of glass reached Bohemia from the Venetian isle of Murano. But they will get no further today. How does this clear vermicelli become tiny beads of more colours than I can describe? Before I work that out, I am ushered outside into the icy cold. With every step I take there’s the crunch of glittering fragments of glass, sparkling under my feet.

Where I am welcomed, warmly and officially, is at the offices of Preciosa Ornela from whence all top-end traditional seed beads, known as rocailles, hail. (Preciosa Ornela, best know for glass figurines, bought out an ailing company called Jablonex which pioneered rocailles). These beads range from so teeny, they are given the measure 13/0 – a percentage of a millimetre – to 4/0, which is just about big enough for me to see without glasses.

Over eggs, ham and pickles, my hosts explain the reason Preciosa Ornela, and previously Jablonex and originally, the way more famous Swarovski, (a Czech company before moving to Austria) all hail from a cluster of tiny mountain villages. While glass is hard work, it doesn’t need many people. What it did need, traditionally, was wood, sand and water a-plenty. Given the Venetians soon ran out of wood, that this landlocked region of icy streams and forests always had to import sand (today a complex mix of chemicals) soon made the competition about even. But while the venetians lent more towards chandeliers, here it was beads and buttons. Thence, from the top of this mountain, traders ventured around the world, all the way to Mexico, China, India and East Africa.

“But the world we have never conquered is fashion,” my hosts lament, comparing to the spectacular style success of Swarovski. That’s when I reveal that Vivienne Westwood evening clutch bags and Sass & Bide tote bags are beaded by the Maasai through the United Nations Ethical Fashion Initiative in Kenya. My hosts are utterly delighted – although not as delighted as my Maasai mates will be when I hand over the new season’s disco beads in shimmering gold, bronze and silver.