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Daily Mail, Monday, November 12, 2007
Wicked
SNIPPETS
HAIRDRESSER to the stars SARA ANTONIADES gives her expert opinion on the mane events in the celebrity world. This week, Peaches Geldof wows with a new bleached look but Renee Zellweger gets the classic bob wrong. PEACHES GELDOF AS A style frontrunner for her generation, Peaches is bang on trend with this edgy new cut and colour of the season (left). The choppy cut gives her a sassy grown-up confidence and the peroxide blonde shade is hugely reminiscent of her mother Paula Yates’s signature look. The chunky, tapered fringe suits her face shape and brings out her big blue eyes, plus, the blonde shade suits her pale skin. The only problem with bleaching your hair this blonde is it can cause serious damage. But by keeping the style short and the hair wellconditioned, you can avoid this. A vast improvement on the tangled, hippy chick bird’s nest look she sported in the summer.
RENEE ZELLWEGER RENEE’S new hairdo (left) is a classic example of the bob gone wrong. It’s a ‘boy bob’ — the type our brothers all sported as children — and it does her no favours. The look can work when Renee slicks it back and styles it for red carpet glamour, but for everyday wear it generally looks messy and unkempt. With her fine hair and her oval face shape, she needs a longer style that will settle around her jaw bone or a shoulder-length cut. The light fringe softens her face and this, combined with a longer style and more high and low lights to brighten the look, would be a low-maintenance but much better look. ■ HAC, 2 South Place, The Quay, Kingsbridge, Devon, 01548 853073.
A VERY Why fashionistas are spending thousands to get their hands on clothes with a heritage
N
OT so long ago the fastest way to update your wardrobe was, ironically, by throwing in something old and a bit tatty — a 1940s tea dress from your gran’s wardrobe, a 1950s cashmere cardigan from a charity shop or a retro brooch you bought for 50p at a car boot sale.
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But now vintage is everywhere it’s a different story. As ever in fashion, the cache is in exclusivity. Which is why true fashionistas are becoming obsessed with the ‘new vintage’ — clothes with provenance. Think: Chanel circa 1925, limited-edition Birkins or Dior designed by Gianfranco Ferre. The market for luxury vintage pieces with proven heritage or connection to an iconic design house has exploded. Never has there been so much cachet for a celebrity to sport archive Valentino or Chanel on the red carpet. Auction houses such as Christie’s now regularly host sales of vintage clothing. As a result of this demand, the price of designer vintage has more than quadrupled in the past five years. (or up to ten times if the piece has connections to a classic film, famed actress or rare period.) There’s also a growing clutch of websites devoted to selling authenticated vintage pieces at premium prices. This week Yoox.com is hosting an exclusive 100-item sale of Chanel vintage clothing (in May this year it launched a similar sale from the Gucci archive). The sale will include everything from jewellery to cocktail dresses and winter coats, some from as early as the 1950s and
SMALLS WORLD STAVE off those winter blues with lingerie from Australian label Pleasure State. It produces luxury pieces with Swarovski crystals as well as more everyday items. We particularly love the Pink Jacquard contour balconette bra, £68, and shorts, £50, (right). ■ Phone 020 7851 6629.
By Joanna Blythe others from the mid1980s when Karl Lagerfeld took the helm. Meanwhile, luxury auction sites such as Portero.com are now selling qualified vintage and second hand owned accessories including Piaget watches, Tiffany & Co, Hermès bags and Rolex watches. Upmarket London boutiques are catching on, too. Browns boutique now stocks E2, a label which combines vintage pieces by Pucci and YSL alongside contemporary clothing. The ultrahip Dover Street Market now includes a concession for Decades — LA’s coolest vintage store where Hollywood starlets including Chloe Sevigny and Julia Roberts buy their red carpet gowns. ‘It’s a consistently good part of the store,’ says store manager Dickon Bowden. ‘We have had some incredible pieces that sold the same day we received them.’ He reveals that recently a turquoise Chanel haute couture princess dress (designed by Coco Chanel herself) sold within minutes of arriving, although he won’t be drawn on the price. At the same time, small or on-theirway out fashion houses with a prestigious heritage have never been so attractive to investors and luxury conglomerates. Halston, the 1970s American label synonymous with Studio 54 glamour, is to be relaunched this February by film mogul Harvey Weinstein and shoe expert Tamara Mellon. The plan? A global luxury brand. Cult British label Ossie Clark is also scheduled for a revival this February with investment from WGSN (a fashion news service) founder Marc Worth. It’s a sound investment considering the
Waiting in the wings: Choice items from Chanel (above) and Hermes’s red Birkin (right) booming designer vintage market. Halston has always been popular with fashion-lovers, but with its relaunch imminent, the price of vintage pieces is set to rocket. Here the consumer base has expanded from a small niche to everyone from celebrities to fashion lovers and investors. Reese Witherspoon handpicked her own 2006 Oscar dress — a 1950s Dior number — in a Paris store, Mellon is said to
Daily Mail, Monday, November 12, 2007
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LIFE style
FINE VINTAGE
Old-school at the Oscars: (from left) Renee Zellweger in a lemon Jean Desse gown and Julia Roberts in vintage Valentino, both in 2001, and Reese Witherspoon in Dior in 2006 have a host of vintage Halston pieces and auction houses are now attracting as many fashion junkies as they are antique enthusiasts. Some of the highest-value items are those related to film stars. Last year Christie’s grabbed headlines with the sale of the iconic black Givenchy dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At Tiffany’s. The bidding reached a whopping £410,000. In this case, the dress was more than just vintage Givenchy, it was cultural history. ‘Having a great story behind a
piece always adds to value,’ says Monica Turcich, vintage expert at Christie’s. ‘Without the story, that Givenchy piece was just a little black dress; but with the provenance, it’s a £410,000 design icon. ‘People fall in love with the history behind a piece. We sell pieces with royal connections, like the massive sale of Diana’s dresses in 1997 [auctioned a few weeks before her death]. Buyers fall for the romance of owning a piece of that fantasy lifestyle.’ For collectors, vintage also has
the advantage of being wearable. A 1950s Dior suit can be viewed either as a work of art to be looked at only, or thrown on for a fabulous dinner party. ‘We have three real groups of bidders and registered buyers — collectors and museums, dealers and those buying to wear,’ says Turcich. ‘The collectors range from national museums to couture houses looking to fill gaps in their archives, or your average girl on the street. ‘I’m seeing more of the women who buy-to-wear being increasingly knowledgeable and interested in acquiring an iconic name, so the buy-to-wear girl is fast becoming a collector.’ It helps that luxury vintage pieces are now also a credible investment, so people are getting in early. ‘People see them as tradeable assets — someone will buy a 1993 Louis Vuitton Murakami bag knowing it will become a collector’s item,’ says Stephanie Phair of Portero.com. She adds that many savvy insiders now buy pieces by young designers with small runs, aware that their collection will be much coveted in future. Pieces by Chanel, Hermes, Chloe and other brands in good condition regularly retain or increase in value over time — even if you wear them occassionally. Turcich adds: ‘Wearing an item can affect the value — it’s difficult to wear anything without affecting it in some way. That said, most of the best vintage has been worn at some point, so just being worn isn’t enough to destroy value. The dress from Breakfast At Tiffany’s, for example, was made to be worn by Audrey Hepburn and, therefore, is more valuable than if it had been just a nice black Givenchy dress. ‘It depends on why you’re buying: if to wear, then it won’t matter; if you’re buying to collect, you’d probably want to store it as is.’ Value is also connected to current trends or events. For example, the recent sweep of body-conscious trends in designer collections has seen fashion-lovers clamouring for archive Hervé Léger and Azzedine Alia. After all, when anyone can walk into Harvey Nichols and snap up a dress from the current collection, but it takes considerably more money and fashion know-how to track down an original from the 1980s heyday. Why else have Victoria Beckham, Kate Beckinsale, Keira Knightley and Lindsay Lohan all been sporting their ‘bandage’ dresses on the red carpet recently? ‘Fashion has become such a disposable industry. If you see three celebrities wearing the same Chloe dress the same day, the designers are totally over-exposed, the same designs are everywhere,’ concludes Steve Philip, co-owner of Rellik vintage and collector of Vivienne Westwood. ‘But what isn’t everywhere is an old classic.’
THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO INVESTMENTFASHION FUNMI ODULATE, author of Shopping For Vintage (Quadrille, £12.99), gives her advice on buying vintage with provenance.
CONSIDER THE PRICE IF IT was expensive then, it’ll be expensive now, and, all things being equal, it will be expensive in the future. The rarer the piece the more expensive it will be as the economics of supply and demand will always prevail. Designers, for instance, only make a handful of couture pieces; these will always appreciate in value more than something from a ready-to-wear collection, regardless of how ‘iconic’ that collection may be.
RESEARCH YOUR ERA BEFORE parting with any cash familiarise yourself with authentic vintage clothing by consulting an expert, and visiting museums, auctions and vintage fairs.
STUDY LABELS CAREFULLY YEARS ago, buyers from department stores could purchase the licence from designers to reproduce exact copies of their work. These are obviously worth significantly less than the designer original, so look out for labels which say ‘Bergdorf for Madame Gres’ rather than simply ‘Madame Gres’. Diffusion lines are also worth less than the original main line. A designer such as Halston
produced Halston II, Halston III and Halston IV diffusion lines, then finally licensed his name to U.S. chain store JC Penney. Look out for the white label with ‘Halston’ written in black: this is the main line and, therefore, the most collectable, particularly the silk jersey, sequinned and Ultra Suede pieces.
CHECK THE CONDITION IDEALLY, if something is bought as an investment, it should not be worn. If it is, it should be worn only very occasionally. The joys of wearing a collectable piece — especially one that is very fragile — could be cut short when you find out how much the garment has been devalued as a consequence.
BUY A DESIGNER’S SIGNATURE PIECES KERRY TAYLOR, of Kerry Taylor Auctions for Sotheby’s, strongly advises buying a designer’s signature piece. ‘If you are buying to collect, the pieces should always have a wow factor. The only things that hold their value as time goes by are the statement pieces.’ Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look collection is always a sure bet. The ‘New Look’ revolutionised the face of fashion at the time and is, therefore, most likely to fetch more money than something from a run-ofthe-mill 1953 collection by the same designer.
Cultural history: The iconic Breakfast At Tiffany’s dress worn by Audrey Hepburn (above) was auctioned last year for £410,000