“Meghan Markle Smart Works fashion line: See her collection - Vox.com” plus 1 more

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Meghan Markle Smart Works fashion line: See her collection - Vox.com Posted: 12 Sep 2019 12:00 AM PDT Five months after giving birth to baby Archie, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, is back to work. Thursday, September 12, marked the launch of her fashion collection with the British charity Smart Works, a line of five women's workwear pieces that brings together four different British clothing brands. The collection, called the Smart Set, includes a Marks & Spencer crepe shift dress for $32, $138 tote bag from John Lewis, a $245 blazer and $148 slim-fit trousers from Jigsaw, and a classic white button-down for $125 from designer (and close friend of Markle's) Misha Nonoo. For every piece purchased, one will be donated to Smart Works. Some, like the tote bag, are already sold out, while the blazer and trouser set aren't available to ship to the US. Markle herself wore two of the pieces, the shirt and the trouser, to debut the collection at the John Lewis store in London Thursday. There's a reason why each item appears startlingly simple: Smart Works offers coaching and styling sessions for unemployed women ahead of job interviews, many of whom may not have the budget to purchase an entirely new, office-appropriate outfit to appear professional. (Americans may be more familiar with Dress for Success, a similar organization based in the states.) "Since moving to the U.K., it has been deeply important to me to meet with communities and organizations on the ground doing meaningful work and to try to do whatever I can to help them amplify their impact," Markle said in a statement posted on Instagram. Under each product description is a quote from Markle: "Not a hand out, a hand held." Since becoming the Duchess of Sussex, Markle has incorporated her status as a wildly influential fashion icon in her royal duties, and it's clear that post-maternity leave, she'll continue to do so. Yet while Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, has followed a more traditional script in terms of her relationship to the fashion industry — she favors a handful of rather prim British designers at public events and her 2016 appearance in British Vogue was limited to a low-key photo shoot in the countryside — Markle has approached her royal status more like a modern lifestyle influencer. For instance, her first charity project as the Duchess of Sussex was a cookbook featuring recipes from the Hubb Community Kitchen, formed by a group of women in the aftermath of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, in which 72 people died. Instead of the typical photo spread in British Vogue, she instead guest-edited this year's September issue after casually shooting a text to its editor, Edward Enninful, and filled its cover with 15 "forces for change," including women like Laverne Cox and Jameela Jamil (there was also an empty space that was meant to look like a mirror, so that "you see yourself as part of this collective," she wrote.) Meghan Markle in her Smart Works collection on September 12. Samir Hussein/WireImage Meghan and her husband Prince Harry also managed to get their own Instagram account, separate from @KensingtonRoyal (the official page for William and Kate) in April, despite previous Buckingham Palace statements implying the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would be grouped into the larger family's social media accounts. This all makes sense for a woman who was already a food and fashion influencer in her previous life. Aside from her work as an actress, most notably on the TV show Suits, Markle also had a blog called The Tig, where she wrote about healthy recipes, travel tips, and beauty reviews and interviewed celebrities. It's the world she lived and became famous in before she'd ever met Harry. It's also — among a great deal of other things — what's exposed Markle to fanatic and often cruel criticism, largely from the British press. There are the much-discussed physical signifiers of Meghan's difference: She wears messy buns! She had no-makeup makeup for her actual wedding! She doesn't always follow "royal protocol"! And the undercurrent beneath all of it is that she is a biracial American, a stark contrast to the royal family's history of marrying their white, posh British peers. Every decision Meghan makes as a royal is heavily reprimanded by the press; despite the fact that she wasn't the first royal to guest-edit a magazine, her choice to do so was called "idiotic," "shamelessly hypocritical," and "shallow" by various columnists. Critics also reportedly condemned the price points of Markle's new collection as too high, despite the fact that the entire point is to subsidize the cost of the clothing items so that a second can be donated to Smart Works. Choosing affordable workwear for unemployed women as a banner cause is a telling sign of Meghan's role as a royal: The kind that can use the word "feminist" without appearing visibly uncomfortable, who champions women entering the workforce, and who isn't shying away from her former life as an influencer. Sign up for The Goods' newsletter. Twice a week, we'll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

2020 Is Coming. How Will it Look? - The New York Times Posted: 02 Oct 2019 01:54 AM PDT PARIS — It's a complicated thing for a designer to be responsible for the last show of a fashion week: There's an expectation, illogical though it may be, that the event may somehow sum up all the others; put a nice, neat bow on top. This is compounded when the show is the last show of the whole four-city season, and it's even more fraught when the season we are talking about is the first season of the next 10 years. On the other hand, that designer also gets the last word. So what was Nicolas Ghesquière, artistic director of Louis Vuitton women's wear, saying Tuesday night as a dark courtyard of the Louvre was illuminated by hundreds of smartphone lights from the crowd waiting just outside the barricades (clamoring for a glimpse of Alicia Vikander, Ruth Negga, Catherine Deneuve) and the spring 2020 ready-to-wear marathon came to an end? Mr. Ghesquière had built a giant, plain plywood box (from sustainably sourced wood, of course, all to be recycled) inside the Cour Carrée. On one wall of the box was a giant screen and on it, a video of a woman's head, neck and shoulders, set against a lightening sky was playing. Her eyes were closed, as in repose. The sun rose behind her, and gradually they widened. Then she opened her lipsticked mouth and began to sing, and a door in the base of her throat (well, not literally: it was in the wall) opened, too. Out a model emerged, like Athena from her father Zeus's head — but not exactly. The tune, by Sophie Xeon (known professionally as SOPHIE), the Scottish video and music producer and artist, was "It's O.K. to Cry." Thus the dawn of a new decade. Also some old ones. Mr. Ghesquière was at romp in the fields of fashion, mixing up Belle Époque prints — swirling curlicues and Art Nouveau portraits; fecund florals; thoughts of Sarah Bernhardt and Marcel Proust — with rainbow sequin zigzag knits and lacy embroidered tulle. The silhouettes had a contemporary motility (thank goodness, no panniers) though there were some puffed sleeves. Also skater skirts and tulip skirts; flared, cropped trousers; neat jackets, and bibbed dresses. Waists were small and the dominant shape was an angular hourglass. On every look, a curling cattleya orchid was pinned. In an interview before the show, Mr. Ghesquière talked about how "today's world can create anxiety; a fear of 'what's going to happen,'" and the desire to "not make things too new. We don't always have to be scared of retro," he continued. "We grow from what we learn." Image Miu Miu, spring 2020CreditValerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Fashion is in the midst of a whole lot of growing pains. And yet rather than retreating into the glories and comfort of the past, it is putting it all in the centrifuge and going for a spin. There's a sense that things need to change, and not in the sped-up, frenetic way prompted by the dawn of Instagram a few years ago — not in the get-everything-to-everyone-all-the-time way of endless drops and constant content delivery — but in a deeper, more systemic way that involves challenging received convention and tradition. Yet it clings to those traditions even as schisms appear on all sides because: Help! What's next? New social groups — the communities fashion serves, or should serve — are emerging and coming to fore, new value sets cohering. Miuccia Prada acknowledged that reality in her Miu Miu show, a parade of sweater girls that had come undone, in fuzzy angora and curvy pencil skirts with kick pleats at the knees, sleeveless coats with mismatched rows of buttons (one, plain and neat; one, big and playful), and raw linen smocks sometimes covered in drips of paint from the little flowers that had been daubed on. See what you want — a little bit 1950s, a little bit Hitchcock — but in the end we are all our own canvas, free to scribble as we will. Might as well make it clear. The questioning began in New York with the rebel yell of a new group of designers breaking through, continued in the existential identity crisis of London, pretty much skipped Milan and burst into full-bloom in Paris, where a sense of impending doom (environmental, political) drove some of the best work in seasons. There's no resting on the laurels of the logo, or the artistry of the atelier. That produces results that can be pretty, but insubstantial. Too much is going on. Fashion is either a part of the broader conversation, as it ought to be, since it provides the uniforms that reflect its unspoken cues, or — who cares? The bar should be high. The time of ceding the high ground to streetwear; the time when designers blathered on about "just clothes," is at an end. That's so 20-teens. 2020 is coming. Time to get dressed.

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