Yesterday we looked Mango’s spring / summer 2012 look book and, from a perspective of the success of Zara versus Mango, focussed on why Zara gets the buzz and Mango little love. You can add another element to the equation today: inconsistency.

The number one way to console ourselves when we make a permanent dent in our own exterior is to convince ourselves that people aren’t really all that dissimilar to rustic furniture; a few character marks actually make us more interesting. But often as a model such things as scars – even birthmarks, moles, character lines – get the once-over with the the kind of healing…

She was the second model I’d seen running this Paris fashion week. The first was Anna Selezneva leaving Balmain’s fall 2012 showing – Anna ran away from the street style photographers as fast as her immaculately toned legs would carry her. Aline Weber was the second.

As I somewhat unkindly posed to a designer during this current a href=”http://www.fashionising.com/fashionweek/paris-fashion-week”>Paris fashion week, fall 2012 may prove unkind to the fashion industry’s big names if women reject the androgynous and voluminous aesthetics being offered up on runways en masse. Making themselves look bigger is seldom high on the list of things anyone wants to achieve through their clothing, and as a result many…

Give me a cinematic reference and I”m yours to keep. That being so, this shoot had me at the title: Dark Knight. Granted Anna Selezneva isn’t going about saving Gotham City in a bat suit, but there’s the shadowy quality, the all-leather outfits (more of a nod to Catwoman, perhaps), the photography angles that feel just a little disorientating. With those elements the Steven Pan…

It’s the fashion calendar to get your hands on, and yet the 2012 Pirelli calendar shows little in the way of fashion. Or, more realistically, it shows little in the way of what most people consider to be ‘fashion': clothes and accessories. Instead the coveted calendar plays to the concepts of fashion and lifestyle, fashion and sensuality, and fashion as youth. The task of realising next year’s…

Anna Selezneva looks so gorgeous in this shoot for the latest issue of Vogue Russia that I’m willing to ignore the deja vu that gently tugs at the back of my mind. The styling – in this instance by Geraldine Saglio – just doesn’t seem entirely new. Thinking back that’s probably because it might as well be a direct sequel to last month’s shoot starring…

When Tom Ford paired up with Carine Roitfeld for a Vogue Paris issue, the diamonds didn’t just drip from the wrists of an impassioned elderly couple, or the fingers of dolled up children; they also continued to carve out a deeper reputation for the magazine as envelope-pushing. This time Tom Ford’s hand wasn’t involved, though his red velvet tuxedo does make a welcome and luxurious…

It’s the calendar that proves that to see fashion as something solely to do with clothing is to limit its definition to far too great a degree. Hence, with fashion more about lifestyle, Pirelli’s annual calendar offering attracts more attention then any other that will be used to ring in the new year. So it is that the rumours for the 2012 Pirelli calendar have…

Flying into Rome yesterday the first thing to greet me was not a Customs officer nor even someone at passport control but rather the branding of a forgettable, mid-20th Century with Emporio Armani. Alas for the building, but luckily for the label, the lighting, mood and overall composure of Emporio Armani’s spring 2011 campaign is far less forgettable, having been photographed by Mario Sorrenti and…