Les Diaboliques

You know it's going to be a good film when the leading lady enters onto her first scene wearing a pair of supercool ray-bans 6 years before Audrey Hepburn did it in Breakfast at Tiffany's and way, way before the Blues Brothers were doing it in in the 80s (not that I know if they were making it cool or uncool as I've always thought the film looked kind of lame and so have steered clear). And you know that it is this leading lady your eyes are going to be glued to throughout the film when she lights a cigarette with a cardigan slung over her shoulders compared to her co-star who enters looking like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz crossed with Bo Peep fluttering a fan and wrapped in a knitted shawl. Now, I'm not saying smoking makes you cool BUT smoking does make you look cool. I love her costumes too. It's the fact that Simone Signoret's wardrobe is so limited that makes her my best dressed film character of all time. Her outfits are all pretty similar: dresses belted at the waist with either that cardigan over her shoulders or her baggy mac but it's details like the white, diagonal pockets on the first outfit or the scrunched up sleeves of her mac that lift them out of "Yeah she looks alright", to "Oh my God I want to cut all my hair off, dye it and put my hands in my pockets all the time so that I look just like her". I'd also have to grow a proper pair of breasts and a set of hips to look that "smoking" (and I mean that to sound like when Jim Carey says it in The Mask). Basically, you should watch this film because it's an education in how to...

a) wear a belted dress,
b) make flats work with a pencil skirt,
c) roll up your sleeves,
d) turn a scrunched up old-man mac into a good thing.

It's also just a really, really good film. Go watch.

LFW re-see: Jayne Pierson

I was lucky enough to be in the front row for Welsh designer Jayne Pierson's catwalk show at London Fashion Week. Annoyingly, this was the only show I had my camera for, and the battery died halfway through.

Entitled 'Kingdom of Shadows', the collection clearly wasn't giving up on the gothic vibe that we've been seeing for a few seasons now. Black, black and more black was broken up only by the blue and silver of the gown above.

While I'm a bit over the Victoriana look, particularly in such extremes as this, some of the details really stood out. The corsetry of the afore-mentioned gown would not have looked out of place in a Vivienne Westwood collection, and the velvet detail over the sheer fabric that you can see in the third shot was really delicate and interesting. It's only the designer's fourth season at LFW, and it seems fairly certain we can expect some exciting things in the future.