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Hollywood stars close London shows with Marc Jacobs
2007-02-18
Hollywood glamour brought the curtain down on London Fashion Week on Friday as Sofia Coppola and Selma Blair jetted in to town for a one-off show by designer-to-starlets Marc Jacobs. In an exclusive London turn to mark the opening of his first British store, U.S. fashion star Jacobs filled his catwalk in Claridge's hotel with wearable smocks, overcoats, breeches and berets. The clothes, from his younger "Marc" line, met with whoops and applause and recalled a rose-tinted movie vision of Russian peasantry with a polished American twist. "Marc gave a name and feeling to American design especially for adolescents and young women. He finally gave us something to wear," a newly blonde Blair, star of "Hellboy" and "Legally Blonde," told Reuters Television. According to Jacobs, routinely described by the fashion press as the most influential U.S. designer today, fashion fans next autumn and winter will be wearing muted greys, blacks and brown with pops of blues, purples and greens. Cozy cashmere also defined the daywear while sequins starred for night time -- a theme carried through the London shows and in New York last week. Not content with his catwalk show proving the hottest ticket in town, Jacobs' after-party saw Blair and "Lost in Translation" director Coppola joined by "Fight Club" star Edward Norton, supermodel Naomi Campbell and designer Vivienne Westwood. However, Jacobs one-off transatlantic shift was not without controversy. Since Italian designer Giorgio Armani staged a fashion and music extravaganza in London last year that made the homegrown shows pale by comparison, some critics have argued international designers only show up how scruffy and lightweight London is against glamorous fashion cities Paris, Milan and New York. While Jacobs dazzled at Claridge's, London's other shows during the five day catwalk fest ran the gamut from a pitched tent outside the Natural History Museum to a grimy East End pub and a transvestite strip club. Brushing criticism aside, British Vogue Editor Alexandra Shulman said talks were underway for another -- still secret -- international fashion star to show in London in the autumn. "The idea that only home grown designers show in each city is really an old fashioned notion," Shulman said in an interview. "Having international designers here does nothing but good."
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