The Style Files: A/W 14 - Style Icons

Every fashion season has its muses – those iconic females from the past who engage and fascinate today’s designers. Those sirens whose inimitable style designers attempt to not reproduce but reinvent on their own runways.  This A/W the catwalk drama and glamour at houses like Gucci, Valentino, Givenchy, Nina Ricci and Alexander Wang to name a few were centered on the cool, intriguing ladies of the 1960s and 1970s.

Who can blame designers for being entranced those decades and these women? It was a time when fashion was changing with head-spinning rapidity. The  ensembles of the 60’ & 70‘s were emblematic of a kind of freedom, sartorial and otherwise, that resonates so loudly, so profoundly today.

The wonderful thing about fashion is that we can embrace the aspects of the past that we love and forget the rest.  The black, red and white Valentino collection and Nina Ricci’s A/W 14 collection is so incredibly Jean Shrimpton, the model who personified the Mod aesthetic. And by the way – like so many muses – the woman herself didn’t think her looks were actually so hot. Shrimpton was wonderfully modest, but our other legendary muses, though exceptionally well bred, exuded a definite confidence. Hamish Bowles in his catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years made the observation that First lady Jacqueline Kennedy had an incredibly nonchalant approach to fashion. Her insouciant approach stunned and shocked her fellow citizens. Alexander Wang and Gucci paid tribute to her aesthetic in their collections.

The tragic Talitha Getty, the actress who Yves Saint Laurent adored, is a muse who has the distinction of having served two masters, revered by designers in her own time and today. Yves Saint Laurent rapturously described her and her husband Paul as ‘ beautiful and damned as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before the extraordinary future’. The floaty dresses and prints that were signature Tailtha were very evident on the Diane Von Furstenburg catwalk in a fitting tribute to one of the most revered ions of the 1970’s.