How to wear metallics

It's time to sparkle - literally.
Sequins, beading, treated silk, glitter mesh, sparkly lace, crystals... the American Music Awards looked like a Christmas discount store as celebrities opted for shiny, molten and blinged-out looks. Best on the carpet was Taylor Swift in a glittery mini dress by Zuhair Murad, Jenny McCarthy in a gold mermaid skirt and Stacey Kiebler in gun metal, embellished Collette Dinnigan.
Christmas party season is upon us and shimmering metallics scream 'celebration' like nothing else. But, beware: Hot? Yes. Sexy. Yes. Tricky to get right? Absolutely.

Too much is too much

 Gold says enough on its own don’t you think? The most important rule when it comes to wearing head-to-toe metallic is to keep everything else understated. Do you really need the chandelier earrings and the sequin bag? There’s a very fine line between looking elegant and looking like a Christmas tree when wearing tinsel-tone colour, so always follow the less-is-more principal and keep your accessories to a minimum. Try just one piece of jewellery (a ring, stud earrings), and make sure the shoes have simple, clean lines. If you’re wearing an all-out metallic gown, you should think about losing the jewellery altogether and carrying a handbag that blends with the tone of the frock.

Nail it with neutrals
Not all of us can/want to do head-to-toe metal, but you can still get maximum impact from the trend by wearing a single piece and mixing it with neutrals. Try a metallic skirt or pants with a cream jumper or a sequinned shirt with black cigarette trousers. In general, creams, pinks and greys looks great teamed with rose gold, gold and copper while black, grey and crisp white work best with silver and gun metals.
Play with colour
While most metallic pieces are in the standard precious metal hues (bronze, silver, and gold), there are some super-luxe options in brights like green, red and blue. Remember a little goes a long way with coloured metallics, so a chic way to bring them into your wardrobe is with glittery accessories – a statement shoe, a jewelled clutch - or a single, fabulous piece, like an embellished skirt or jacket.
Not too tight, not too short
You don’t want to look like a superhero - and tight gold and silver has the tendency to make you look like you're ready to save the Universe. Avoid this look by focusing on cut and fit - lamé, metal jersey, bugle beading and sequins can be very unforgiving and add inches, so make sure you check hem lengths, seams and shoulders before you leave the change room.
See our gallery, above, for buys to try this festive season.
Images: Taylor Swift, Stacey Kiebler and Jenny McCarthy dazzle at the American Music Awards. Getty.

10 Things He Hates About You

Not hot ... nanna knickers a la Bridget Jones.

 

Some conversations get underneath people's skin more than others. As a writer, you never quite know what the rub will be and I was surprised my column on what women hate men to wear caused such a strong reaction. From men. There was emphatic defence of Lycra, shark's-tooth necklaces and waistcoats worn over shirts - which apparently members of a secret society wear as their uniform.
The reaction prompted me to turn the table on the list and give blokes a right of reply. I posed the question to the male fraternity of Facebook and Twitter, I had a beer with a couple of bookies at Flemington on Cup Day, crashed my sister's best friend's bucks party at Bondi, rang my electrician, my Dad, my brother, all of my husband's mates and, of course, my husband, who - for the record - cannot stand platform Moon Boots. The knee-high kind, favoured by girl band members and astronauts. He hates that look about as much as he hates bananas. Which is a lot.
Much of the feedback was predictable: skorts, turtlenecks, romper suits, jumpsuits, heavy lipstick, heavy make-up, no eyebrows, dresses over jeans… But there were a few surprises, too: happy shoes, noisy jewellery, toe cleavage, tube tops, padded bras (false advertising), fake fur and over-sized sunglasses.

'Poo pants'
 

As with the fairer version, a theme eventually emerged. So here, with no scientific qualification whatsoever and in the voice of my male nom de plume, Paul Happy, are the Top Ten Things Men Hate About Your Wardrobe.

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1. High Waisted Jeans: That pouchy bit between the bottom of the zipper and the button… when you turn side on, it looks like you’ve strapped a denim hot dog around your waist.

2. Gladiator Sandals: These don’t make you look like Diane Kruger (Helen of Troy), they make you look like Russell Crowe.

Jersey Shore

 

3. Leggings: I always hear women talking about leggings and that they shouldn’t be worn as pants but those women are usually wearing leggings as pants. Here’s what we think: They don’t suit you. Not at the gym. Not at the shops. Not anywhere there are men.

4. Granny underwear: What? There is a reason it’s called GRANNY underwear.

5. Capri Pants/Pedal Pushers: You look like a deck hand from the First Fleet. What happened to the fabric on the bottom of your pants? Is that what they make scrunchies out of?

6. The Jersey/Geordie Shore Look: Tight mini skirt, fake hair, orange tan, spiders where your eyelashes should be… If you’re not wrapped around a pole and this describes what you’ve got on right now, then you look like you should be wrapped around a pole.

7. Dungarees/Overalls: Oh look! It's a life size version of Jemima from Play School.

8. Our Stuff: My jeans, my shirt, my boxers – the person who told you that men like seeing women in their clothing was someone called Cosmopolitan. Give it back. It’s not sexy and, also, it’s mine.

9. Animal Print: This is to fabric what Christy Turlington is to supermodels – we don’t get it. I’m sure its beautiful but you look like the sofa at my Aunt Lisa’s house.

10. a) Cargo pants: I don’t understand why you think that green, army issue pants made to protect soldiers fighting in extreme locations for long periods of time would be flattering worn with a pair of high heels to a bar?

10 b) Harem Pants: I don’t understand why you think that pants made famous by a male 80s pop star with only one bad hit song would be flattering worn with high heels to a bar?

10 c) Poo Catcher Pants: I don’t understand why you think pants that start with the word 'poo' would be flattering worn with high heels at a bar?
I’m giving the last word to Yves Saint Laurent whose sentiment echoes that of most men when it comes to women and our clothes. He said: “Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.”
And that is why we love you.

Check it out — anyone who has aspirations to be seen wearing the latest look had better get their wardrobe lined up

 

Models present creations by Marc Jacobs' spring-summer parades for Louis Vuitton.

REMEMBER that bit at the end of the film The Da Vinci Code , after Tom Hanks has been looking everywhere for the chalice or inverted pyramid or whatever it is that will lead him to the Holy Grail? After all the deciphering cryptograms and fighting people in churches, he finally realises that what he's looking for must be right back where he started his search, because what matters is the shape, and next to the big glass pyramid at the Louvre there's that little inverted glass pyramid, the one that makes a skylight over the underground gift shops, and so the answer was in plain sight in front of him all along.
Well, fashion for the new season is a bit Da Vinci, except the maths isn't so tricky and hoods are totes over. Just like Hanks, I was trying to figure out what it all means - is the key to a successful new season wardrobe to channel one's inner 1970s groupie (YSL) or planning a look around a surreal fluffy shoe (Celine) or wearing fuchsia top-to-toe (Gucci)? All along, the answer was right in front of me. I was going around in circles, and the answer was a square.
Fashion's holy grail right now is to be square. (Literally. We're talking right angles, not geek chic.) The square is the visual link that connects the season's key fashion shows with the advertising campaigns now launching in the glossies and the It bags now flying out of high-end British department stores. Because it's a shape, rather than a colour, or a decade, or a classic film, it's easy to miss - but once you spot it, the square is everywhere.

Christian Dior's show.
 

Paris fashion week was bookended by catwalk shows designed around squares. It began with Raf Simons' first ready-to-wear show for Dior, which was staged in a giant white cube built for the occasion beside the gold dome of Les Invalides. Inside, the space was divided into a series of interconnecting white rooms, linked by square windows hung with sheer curtains in sugar almond shades. A week later, it ended with Louis Vuitton and a stage set created by French installation artist Daniel Buren, which featured a giant checkerboard catwalk in white and buttercup yellow on which models carried handbags in the Vuitton Damier check. And both Dior and Vuitton have reprised the squares from their catwalk shows to star in their multimillion-pound advertising campaigns, dispelling any notion that the geometry was just a piece of set-dressing whimsy. The Vuitton adverts star models in checks, set against checks; for Dior, the square windows of the catwalk tent become an elegant backdrop for the Dior woman to strike her New Look poses.

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In London, the humble square began to show its style credentials before Christmas, when jumpers with squares on emerged as a surprise competitor to the traditional popularity of the festive jumper. In early December - peak season for a jolly snowflake/reindeer knit - the fashionables were placing orders for Richard Nicoll's latest men's knitwear, which features a simple square of blue or white on a grey background.
Windowpane checks are next up for a revival. They were widely admired on the catwalk for Sportmax in Milan, and feature strongly in the latest Topshop Unique collection.

Models present creations by Marc Jacobs' spring-summer parades for Louis Vuitton.
 

I've got my eye on an extremely nice navy-and-white windowpane skirt-and-tunic co-ord - that's a matching set, do keep up. In my dreams, I'd be accessorising it with this season's best-pedigreed It bag: the Grace Box by Mark Cross, a glorious and defiantly angular mini-trunk, which is a direct descendent of the Mark Cross bag carried by Grace Kelly inRear Window. (Sadly for me, the new bag carries a very 21st-century price tag of almost $2000.)
Like the weather, fashion can only be reliably forecast in fortnightly chunks. But sniff the wind, and you will find that the signs point to squares, straight lines and geometric shapes dominating fashion next season as well as this. Sarah Burton's triumphant spring-summer '13 McQueen collection was themed on womanhood and female power but eschewed curves for the hexagons of the beehive. Alexander Wang, whose aesthetic is clean-lined and graphic (check out this season's knee boots) is about to take over at the storied and influential house of Balenciaga. For now, the learning curve ends here, in straight lines.

We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss fashion as shallow. We're more influenced than most of us care to believe

Showing off ... fashion, like art and movies, is about suspending disbelief.

 

For some, fashion has a whiff of shallowness to it. Thought is profound, says the received wisdom, but clothes are superficial.

For example, I was once invited onto a television program about fashion. As the token philosopher, I suspect my job was not to share my sartorial tips (‘geek chic’), but to give my eyes-over-bifocals professorial contempt for beauty and clothes.

Friends and colleagues will agree that I’m no ambassador for fashion or style. Torn cheap jeans shorts and a Marvek Hulk t-shirt usually win over a Rhodes and Beckett shirt and fitted Levis.

But it is absurd to pretend my clothes are alien to me. They convey a casualness that softens my professional profile; they speak to pop culture tastes, and wariness of academy formality. To deny this is what the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘bad faith’: refusing responsibility for my own existence.

And every item in my wardrobe was designed, produced, distributed, purchased, and is now worn by a paying consumer. This is the point of Meryl Streep’ssharp monologue from The Devil Wears Prada, as she chastises her blithe assistant. “It’s sort of comical how you think you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry,” she deadpans to a doe-eyed Anne Hathaway in a cerulean jumper, “when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.” Those who are wary of fashion’s influence are still touched by its industry.

Alongside the rag trade is clothing’s social currency. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted in his book Distinction, so many of our tastes and habits speak to economic class and social status. Food, music, accent, gestures, couture or bargain bin jumpers: they arise from social distinctions, and reproduce these within us. While we are not mindless automatons, argued Bourdieu, even spontaneous splurges and improvised outfits usually obey unwritten social laws.

And this is not just a French quirk. In Accounting For Tastes, Tony Bennett and colleagues demonstrated how many of Australia’s everyday choices are marked by socioeconomic standing. “The care of the body,” they write about beauty and fitness, “is both more intensive and more extensive as one’s educational level rises.”
In short: even if I am contemptuous of fashion, the economic and social character of clothing will stick to me like synthetic underwear on a summer jog.

But why be contemptuous of fashion at all? The basic idea is that thought and beauty are somehow at odds; that the industry of style is in conflict with the enterprise of thought.
This is false. Yes, fashion can be ludicrously priced, and sold on hype instead of talent or craft. But this is true of the art market. Much fashion is trivial or pretentious – again, this is true of all arts and crafts. Both art and fashion, as industries, can corrupt or cultivate their chief worth: semblance.

Semblance is an old-fashioned word, but in this case it means a show: display, appearance, performance. It is something knowingly false, which is enjoyed without pretending it is straightforwardly true - the way we ‘suspend disbelief’ at the movies. In many cases, semblance is literally superficial: a surface, whether painted, projected or embroidered.

The philosopher and poet Friedrich Schiller once noted that semblance and reality are bedfellows, not enemies - as long as they are not mistaken for one another. And to avoid this, we have to be familiar with both: to seek truth and savour the show.

If Schiller’s right, the runway’s haute couture weirdness is no threat to genuine thinking. It is a semblance, which is never enjoyed as anything else. It might be a luxury for the ludicrously rich, but this is often a problem with the market, not with the clothes themselves. Likewise for cufflinks or a race day fascinator: they are chiefly enjoyed as a show, or not at all.

In this light, there is no epic war between fashion or style and thought. There are priorities of class and status, time and temperament - I might donate to charity instead of buying a shirt. But I can still admire its precise fit, harmonious lines and crisp Egyptian cotton.

Fashion is often superficial - and we can enjoy its surfaces without ditching depth.

Lessons from the Ghost of Fashion Past

It’s slightly disconcerting when you’re visited by a woman dressed in colonial clothing in the middle of the night. Why do ghosts always look like they’ve just walked off a cattle station in 1901? Anyway... In true Dickensian style, this ghost was purpose-driven. She wanted me up, out of bed and ready to take a trip back to the beginning of 2012. No time to change, no need for shoes because we were going to walk through walls, down runways and onto the red carpet as we reviewed the year in fashion. Flying through the days, over the months, nestled in amongst clothes both good and bad, she showed me style lessons that were as much about life as they were about clothes.
If all the party frocks, colleagues in a Santa hats and Wham! music in the elevator is making you feel like Scrooge, turn your "bah, humbug!" around with this bumper sticker wisdom from my night with the thoroughly fabulous Ghost of Fashion Past.
Dress for the job you want

Barack Obama dressed like a leader every single day this year. He was never out of a suit. Sometimes he wore no jacket, occasionally he rolled up his sleeves, but he always dressed like a leader. His wardrobe consistency served as a subliminal reminder that he was in absolute control, getting the job done - a man committed to keeping his job. Obama highlights the power of clothes - what they say about who you are and what you want. Clothes allow you to say so much without needing to utter a single word.
In 2013, make like Barack and dress for dreaming.
Wear underwear



You know that thing your mother used to say about ambulances and accidents and underwear? It was sage advice. Exhibit Anne Hathaway: alighting from her limousine at the New York premiere of Les Miserables, her gorgeous Tom Ford gown opened to reveal… her naked va-jay-jay. Apparently Anne doesn’t wear underwear and now we all know that. A night that should have been about Oscar buzz turned into a night of No Panties buzz and now she’s sitting next to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in the Google cache.
In 2013 it will be the little things that count.
Style is an onion


There is a big difference between developing a signature style and getting stuck in a fashion rut. Madonna's in a rut, Britney is in a rut, so is Cameron Diaz. Looking back at their collective 2012, it was a jumble sale of leotards, ill-fitting bandage dresses, Ugg boots, triangle bikinis, cut-off jeans and cheerleader dresses. Ageing is a truism from which none of us can escape and managing it with grace is all about adaptation. Just because something suited you in 1991 doesn't mean it suits you anymore. Style is like an onion - you need to keep peeling back the layers to keep it fresh.
Make 2013 the year of not wearing a leotard to dinner.
Think outside the square


I wish I’d worn pink on my wedding day. I didn’t because I thought I shouldn’t – brides wear white, right? It’s all too often about what’s in and what’s out, what’s appropriate, what’s not and we lose our nerve when it comes to trying new things. Jessica Biel’s beautiful pale pink Giambattista Valli bridal gown was a pastel reminder that when it comes to fashion, you should to do things your own way.
In 2013, follow Mrs Timberlake's groove and write your own rules.
Leggings Are Stockings With The Feet Cut Off Them.



Christina, Christina, Christina... Write it on a post-it, tattoo it on your arm - whatever it takes - but seriously, for the love of Chanel jackets, stop kidding yourself that leggings are a substitute for pants. Or can be worn under a dress. They cannot.
Make 2013 the year of burning every pair you own.
Use your good things


Michelle Obama, Kate Middleton and Kim Kardashian (never thought I’d put those three women together in a sentence) led by example in 2012, wearing their favourite outfits over and over again. Watching them recycle everything from ball gowns to blazers is every reason you've ever needed to start using your good things. Don’t leave a dress you love hanging in the closet forlornly, waiting for a special occasion. Wear it to a barbeque or around the house - life is short and fabulous clothes should not be saved for rainy days.
Make 2013 the year of counting blessings and using them before they expire.