NAOMI’S SPRING FLING
HOORAY, January is finally behind us, barring any further polar vortexes, hopefully we can now start looking towards spring, brighter days and new season trends. I may be writing these words wearing fleecy-lined joggers, a chunky knit and woollen socks, with the heating turned all the way up, but the laws of nature dictate it will eventually get warmer and when that day comes, I want to be wearing the right clothes.
To that end I have spent the last 24 hours studying
March’s Vogue magazine.
The ‘Spring Issue’ is second only to the famous September one in terms of pagination and revenue, and the editor’s letter and contents page aside, this hefty little tome kicks off with a whopping 130 pages of advertisements before we get to the first article.
Among brands jostling for front-of-book space are Chanel, Miu Miu, Bottega Veneta, Dior and Michael Kors; Louis Vuitton has a gatefold ad inside the front cover, while Celine takes six stiff black and white pages at the beginning of the spring collections section.
While I have mixed feelings over who the Vogue reader is under Edward Enniful’s still relatively new editorship – Instagram-loving millennials still living at home with their parents or rich middle-aged women splashing out on art and couture? – that’s a pretty impressive haul of high fashion names.
Once you work your way through all the gorgeous adverts, we learn that, according to Vogue’s experts, big trends for spring include lime green, tie dye, feathers, bows and cargo pants. The less said about the last one the better. I did the combat/ cargo trousers thing in the Nineties and have no desire to repeat the experience.
Elsewhere we learn that hats are back, so is elegant dressing as prescribed by high-end labels such as Escada, Bottega Veneta and Carolina Herrera, all three of which have newly appointed creative directors who are profiled here.
But the biggest ‘story’ of this spring issue is right there on the front of the magazine.
More than 30 years after she made her debut on page one, and almost 17 years since she last appeared on it, Naomi Campbell is the cover girl.
The Streatham-born supermodel and Edward Enninful go way back, and in his editor’s letter he says: ‘To me she will always be a legend, like the last of the silent move stars: Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Naomi Campbell.’
For the cover image, styled by Edward and shot by Steven Meisel, 48-yearold Naomi wears a dress from Ricardo Tisci’s first Burberry collection, while across 13 pages inside, she appears in clothes by the likes of Gucci, Chanel, Celine, Saint Laurent, Miu Miu, Prada and Valentino flanked by a clutch of hunky young men.
No sooner had the magazine hit newstands than rumours began swirling that Ms Campbell is dating former One Direction star Liam Payne, who at 25, is almost half her age. While the pair have yet to address claims of a relationship, there is no denying that they have been having a good old flirt on social media for all the world to see.
Perhaps those Instagram-loving millennials and rich middle-aged women have more in common than I realised.