Vice Style

Roberto Piqueras moved from Madrid to London last year thanks to sponsorship from Burger King, weirdly, and after displaying his stuff last season at Primitive, he did a proper show on the path leading from his east London council flat to the main road. Roberto's androgynous digital print pieces with neon accents are basically his take on the nu-rave fashions he wishes he'd been in London to see. Generally, styles come back around after approximately fifteen years, but the tumblr/seapunk/GeoCities/nu-rave trend is acting more like goth, in that it appeared six years ago, receded, has been resurrected, and will probably affect fashion on and off for a quite long period of time.

Before we were introduced to maker of the least boring shoes in the world, Igor Dewe, words like "fashion film” and "performance art" made us think of pretentious people confusing pointless acts of whimsy for groundbreaking social commentary. Sure, Igor's French, but his videos mess around with conventions in the best possible ways. They'll make you ask questions, questions like: “Did he just make that glass of juice with his dick?”

Below are our favorite Igor Dewe videos. Give them a watch and maybe those insane shoes you just read about here will make a bit more sense.

Fashion East is kind of like being awarded a scholarship by the fashion powers that be, in that your show is produced and promoted for free, leaving you to concentrate on important things like the actual design, rather than worrying about stealing your lunch from the Esso garage because you spent the rest of your money on fancy invites and a "music mixologist". One of my colleagues is on the menswear panel, so I have to say nice things, but the sheer quantity of Fashion East success stories—including Gareth Pugh, Meadham Kirchhoff, and Roksanda Ilincic—kind of does that for me already. As well as runway shows, there's a shared presentation by a load of designers on menswear day. This year, 13 designers displayed their collections, but we picked the best six, because reading 13 interviews in a row would probably be a bit much.

So given I know nothing about menswear, this show was just a special treat for me, really. I promised I was going to try and write seriously about man clothes, but on my way to the show I saw a cute guy on the tube helping a lovely old man carry his bags up the stairs—swoon—and my ability to think about anything other than dream babes became seriously impaired. Basically, the Topman Design show was a fucking babe-fest. From the minute I arrived at the Royal Opera House, I was jibbering and sweating from the amount of high quality stubble and Cutler and Gross in my vicinity. Forget male models, gay fashion guys are SO. HOT.

Louise's stuff used to seem sort of funny and camp and silly—she never really designed for dull people, celebrities and wannabes, or stuff normal people want to wear to work—so the fashion snobs wrote about her being fun, but you could tell they didn't really get that fashion needs people like Louise because what it can never be is boring. The clothes have been getting better and better and, what with the jewelry she did last year for ASOS and the make-up range due out with Topshop, she's starting to look like she's gonna come up from behind and butt-fuck this game up, as Eminem would put it.

Growing up and watching Hollywood's depiction of the world of fashion—like hyper-real industry documentary, Zoolander, and the Freddie Prinze Jr classic, Head Over Heels—I was always under the impression that fashion shows were like the height of camp theatricality. All false air kisses, pouting, hot boys and babes, champagne, dark concepts, and shameless, superficial vibes. Although, in my relatively short time writing about fashion, I've come to realize that the phrase fashion show actually just means waiting in a queue with hundreds of people who are all more important than each other, sitting next to someone who once styled Kate Moss and absolutely HAS to tell you about it, then watching people walk up and down in front of you for ten minutes, before being ushered out by a power-tripping P.R girl with a clipboard to go through the whole fucking ordeal all over again.

All of those conflicting ideals left me confused as to what a runway should be, so I thought I'd use London-based label Kokon To Zai's show to get a handle on the mysterious world of fashion and do my first proper bit of investigative journalism to expose what really makes up a fashion show. Whisteblower alert! 

Vauxhall Ones To Watch is basically a round-up of new designers worth paying attention to according to some bigwigs at Vauxhall Fashion Scout. The panel, including Katy England, David Koma, and Marios Schwab, describe themselves as a “critically acclaimed springboard for the next generation of design talent”. Whatever. Whether or not Vauxhall actually participate in the judging process is unclear. I don’t know if it was the front row seat I was shuffled into, or the presence of fashion icon Kate Nash across the room, but this felt like a real fashion show. You know, like actually important. Not just pumped up PR chicks waving their asymmetric chiffon at you. Exciting!

OK, so I am gonna level with you here. Before last night's Pam Hogg show, I had never been to a "proper" catwalk show before. Why, I am not entirely sure. Fashion has always been of interest to me, but more on a scale of buying Jordans and old metal shirts and leather jackets, not spending $700 on some socks made out of the uteruses of dodos. For some reason buying outrageously expensive items of clothing has never really been my thing, but there sure were a lot of people at this show rocking thousands of pounds of outfit. Saying that, I didn't really see anyone who looked amazing, amazing, but, I have NEVER SEEN so many hot chicks in all my life in one place. It was almost like my dick versus reporting from fashion week. 

Luckily, I knew that Pam Hogg makes booty-enlarging multi-panel catsuits—so I was pretty psyched for both my dick and fashion week. I do not in any way look like the type of guy who should be at a top tier show as I am not gay, a model, or rich-looking. This seemed to be pretty obvious to all inside, where my ticket was checked by maybe six-to-eight different 'attendants'—about five more than had checked my boarding pass at the airport on the way back from Norway last week, seriously. Anyways, here's some of what I saw, once inside.

Okay, so Topshop were not fucking about. We were met at the door of the Topshop space with a tray of champagne and a foyer full of It-Girls with names you wish you didn’t know were parading their Topshop skinny jeans. They also had a Topshop café, which was giving out things that sounded pretty fancy.

Fam Irvoll is a Norwegian womenswear designer who's known for her innovative, playful approach to design. By that, I mean she usually makes clothes that would almost be on a par with Jim Henson's creations, had he used a tiny bit of his visionary genius for fashion, rather than wasting it all on brightening up the lives of children around the world, the selfish bastard. Last season, Fam's runway show was all knitted dresses with bulbous, knitted 3D heads where boobs and shoulders should be, children's party make-up, and fuzzy cyberpunk hair, so I was looking forward to seeing this year's collection strut down the runway in an inevitable barrage of colorful weirdness.