Life and times

From stilettos to designer sneakers, Harper’s Bazaar’s fashion director on how the shows have changed

Harper’s Bazaar fashion director Avril Mair

I WRITE THIS from New York, where it’s day one of fashion month and -10C. Snow is forecast. Some of my colleagues look like they’ve reached the front row via Everest base camp – finally making sense of the trend for massively inflated padded coats, while the rest of us shiver in this season’s tweeds.

I don’t want to perpetuate stereotypes, but what to pack is the fashion editor’s main concern when it comes to covering the shows. An average day starts at 9am with a ‘catwalk experience’ in a multistorey car park and ends with dinner at Donatella Versace’s apartment, surrounded by supermodels – not forgetting another five shows, three presentations, two designer appointments and a meeting with a CEO squeezed in between. So finding an appropriate look is always going to be problematic. As well as a creative industry, this is a billion-pound business and sometimes one needs to dress for that.

It was not always this way: legendary Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow used to travel from NYC by boat to see the Paris collections twice a year, taking a suite at the Hotel Westminster for weeks on end, subsisting on Martinis and vitamin injections. She would hold her meetings sitting in bed wearing a white nightgown and a string of pearls. How things have changed. A few seasons ago, one of my colleagues was upgraded to first class on the red-eye back to London following New York Fashion Week. She reported that Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, spent the entire flight in a white Chanel skirt suit, sleeping bolt upright as if still on the front row.

OTHER THINGS HAVE changed too, of course. The era of shoe fetishism, for one. So long, old uncomfortable friend – nowadays we all wear wildly expensive trainers in order to literally run from show to meeting to appointment, even in Milan, where a cocktail frock and fourinch stilettos used to be de rigueur during fashion week, no matter the hour or weather. You can currently buy embellished Gucci sneakers on Net-a-porter for £1,080 – inspired by hiking boots, draped in crystal chains – on the offchance that you want in on this trend. You probably should: it’s telling that Balenciaga, a couture house founded 100 years ago by a designer dubbed ‘the master’, is now leading the charge when it comes to directional flat footwear (priced at a slightly more reasonable £695).

Though the posh trainer market has gone mad, some women – those with drivers, presumably – still demand stilettos. It can make for uncomfortable viewing on the runway: at the Giambattista Valli show during Paris couture in January, models had to contend with acres of tulle gown and vertiginous heels on a carpet strewn with loose crystals; one girl wobbled like a baby deer, wincing at every step. So much more empowering to see Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior, which speaks of freedom with her ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ T-shirt, but also in the way that she has loosened silhouettes and proposed a wardrobe for women that’s grounded – almost everything she designs comes with a flat shoe.

MEANWHILE, I’M ENJOYING one of the unexpected pleasures of fashion month: a good night’s sleep. Not that it can be measured in quantity when there isn’t a day that doesn’t end with a dinner for 600 or some other late-night happening. But for those of us who usually struggle – snoring partners, foxes in the garden, dogs barking at foxes – retreating alone each night to a quiet hotel room feels like a treat. As with everything in fashion, quality counts.

Anna Wintour spent the entire flight sleeping upright in a white Chanel skirt suit