Gucci joins the UN

Fashion house Gucci will stage its fundraising fashion week party at the United Nations' (UN) headquarters in New York.

This will be the first time the grounds of the building on the edge of the East River have played host to a fashion event.

Due to take place on February 6th, the fundraising gala will celebrate the launch of Gucci's new flagship store on Fifth Avenue and, with help from Madonna, will generate support for Malawi.

Already set to be one of the key events of New York Fashion Week, the party will be staged on the North Lawn of the UN building and will include live performances from Alicia Keyes, Timbaland and Rihanna.

Madonna's involvement in the Gucci party was announced last month. The star, who adopted a son from Malawi earlier this year, will host the event alongside Gucci's creative director Frida Giannini and a series of other celebrity UNICEF sponsors.

Giannini recently announced that she has designed a limited edition range of eight exclusive accessories which will be launched on August 8th next year to coincide with the opening of the Beijing Olympics.

We think the fashion world was a bit off-kilter in 2007, but don't take our word for it. Sitting down to lunch with the Financial Times earlier this year, François-Henri Pinault got out his crystal ball. "We are entering what I think is an age of irrationality and return to fantasy—and luxury is a part of that," said the chief executive of PPR, whose holdings include the Gucci Group. "We are at the beginning of a social trend, change in values that could go on for years—the age of rationalisation, after all, lasted for more than a century." Monsieur Pinault knows from fantasy. This year he achieved a quintessential male one, becoming engaged to one of the world's most beautiful movie stars, Salma Hayek. The couple welcomed their first child, Valentina Paloma, in September.

The Coming of the X-Frocks

THE fashion shows have ended, editors are returning to life without room service and you’re wondering what you’re going to wear today. Hydrangea prints the size of, well, a hydrangea are very far from your thoughts. You have to start basting the Thanksgiving turkey — now. You have no time to consider a Richard Prince joke bag. Isn’t he at the Guggenheim? Who is Alber Elbaz? Who is Dries van Noten? You have exactly 68 shopping days until Christmas.

Faced with the task of selling billions of dollars’ worth of clothing and accessories, the fashion industry has to work very hard to get your attention. You might decide to buy a flat-screen television instead of a $7,000 Alexander McQueen sequined dress that shows a portrait by Steven Meisel beaded in gold or a pair of Marc Jacobs shoes that are supposed to look a size too small. A wired populace demands wild ideas.

In a sense, the front-rank designers, stars like Karl Lagerfeld and Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga, have to row for the rest of the industry. Mr. Lagerfeld may not be the first designer to think of turning an epaulet down on a jacket sleeve, but that he did it for Chanel, and in denim, is enough for the copy kings. Mr. Ghesquiere’s flower ensembles violate every rule about wearing prints: too loud, too big, too much like Aunt Peg’s Florida room.

But if no rule is broken, how would we know it’s fashion?

The spring collections in New York and Europe produced an amazing variety of trends: bold floral prints, intense color, jackets with peaked or rounded shoulders, transparency, and play clothes like jumpsuits and smock dresses with casual blazers.

What links all these ideas, though, is a taste for an extreme point of view. Even the jumpsuits are done in extreme shapes, particularly those by Stella McCartney and the English label Preen; Yves Saint Laurent makes a version in sweatshirt fleece.

Last spring, designers soaked their collections with bright color; now the palette looks violently bright, with livid pinks, siren yellows and deep, airline shades of blue. At Jil Sander, the designer Raf Simons treated color as a conceptual project, using two or three shades in combination to heighten the feeling of being drenched in color. Used on layers of tulle or gossamer silk, the effect also helped him mute qualms about transparency.

Mr. Ghesquiere’s jubilant prints of roses and peonies astonished even the fashion pros, perhaps because, in spite of their romantic associations, the prints seemed to spring from a hard nature. They have muscle, just as the curving lines of the Balenciaga outfits are clear and precise. By contrast, the sweet prints of Junya Watanabe seem normal to us , while the blown-up flowers of Mr. van Noten, Carolina Herrera and 6267, a relatively new label from Milan, look right.

As David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which advises the industry on trends, said, “If they’re not done in an extreme shape, they’re going to look like old prints.” Think of it another way: If you think your dress decisions no longer clearly indicate good taste or bad taste, you’re right. You and Aunt Peg finally have something in common, even if you don’t know what.

Much of fashion, like contemporary art and music, is addicted to extreme ideas, to an energy that doesn’t feel particularly intellectual. It just is, like the action of a pornographic movie. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons tried to suggest the confusion of culture, while Mr. Jacobs, it seemed to me, wanted to suggest the experience of contemporary fashion — specifically, the two-way-mirror effect of the runway, where you are the watcher and the watched, at once in the picture and outside it.

It becomes much harder, then, to see a logic and charm in the classical dresses at Bottega Veneta and Fendi, with their Grace Kelly lines, or in the cool austerity at Saint Laurent, where many of the shapes — the day skirts, the jewel-tone silk dresses and cotton blouses — subtly employed asymmetry. As Mr. Wolfe pointed out, with a laugh, such designs “are too directional for people to wear.” They’re not noisy enough.

So for now, fashion is in an insistent, suprapersonal mode. The most obvious expression of this is in the tailoring of jackets. For spring, shoulders extend away from the body, either up or out. The difference is significant enough that it seems as if the wearer is asserting herself beyond her physical space.

At Balenciaga, shoulders of tops rise into stiff peaks or explode into fuzzy pompoms of fabric. The Belgian modernist Martin Margiela takes his high, sharp blades of last season — a popular look on the Paris streets — and extends them even farther from the natural shoulder line. Chanel’s epaulets have the same effect.

Of course, one message is, “I’m important — coming through!” But tailoring has found an audience among young people, men and women alike, and many of the new spring shapes — the soft blazers at Stella McCartney, the vests at Proenza Schouler, the flouncy styles at John Galliano— are meant to convey a younger attitude. As Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director at Bloomingdale’s, said: “It’s a new signature that defines youth. It’s not the same old look from the old guard.”

Clothes in transparent fabrics, often in layers with undergarments exposed, received a lot of play during collections, beginning with Mr. Jacobs’s stripped-down evening gowns and Narciso Rodriguez’s more subtle veiling of black chiffon over simple lavender silk dresses. The most artful statement came from Mr. Simons, who opened the Jil Sander show with an outfit covered in a cocoon of silk tulle.

Yet apart from a few cries from retail executives (“too many nipples”), there was little objection to transparency. “Veiling might be a better word than transparency,” said Michael Fink, the fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue, noting that the effect was, for the most part, just that — an illusion of bareness. “Very little was vulgar,” he said.

Nonetheless, the trend means you’ll see even more frank displays of lingerie next summer; this being fashion, one trend begets another. Mr. Wolfe suggests that television shows like “Mad Men” might be behind the erotic interest in bras and so forth. “Sex is certainly not a new game,” Mr. Wolfe said. “But it always seems to work.”

Finally, if you’re not completely riveted to someone’s bra straps or dodging her shoulder pads, you might give a glance to her footwear. Shoes have become extreme statements in their own, dominating handbags. Much of the radical design is concentrated on the heels, with Surrealist collapsing heels at Marc Jacobs, Art Nouveau-inspired flowers at Prada, and metal fretwork at Fendi.

Magnificent Marimekko Patterns at H&M This Spring