Jaeger AW08: terrifying the pony club

Jaeger showed for the first time at London Fashion Week this evening. No-one could accuse the clothes they sent down the catwalk of being safe. With some pounding music which seemed to have pumped directly from a club in Shoreditch, and the models with long poker straight hair by Sam McKnight, the colours were black, petrol blue, forest green, camel.


What can you say about a shaggy Mongolian bomber jacket, sailor trousers buttoned up at the sides, long, lean silhouettes almost to the ankles, huge bows and lots of fringing?


I shared the car of a magazine editor to the after-show and she pointed out that a decade ago Burberry made macs. So maybe Jaeger can become an international fashion brand.

Huge buzz about Ossie Clark, their press person inundated with requests for tickets this morning, he tells me.

By the way, no prizes for guessing what colour the majority of the audience at London Fashion Week wears . . .

What am I supposed to wear?

Do I have to wear a jumpsuit. Where is my waist? Can I get the bootcuts out of the wardrobe? Swing jacket, yes or no?

Fifty answers to those Spring-Summer 08 fashion questions are right here

Inside UK Vogue

What shocks me is that many of the clothes on the rail are quite grubby - some of them are even torn. Apparently these designer samples go from magazine to magazine, location to location, getting staler all the time. I can't see why fashion houses don't run up some more samples but apparently they don't, so one of the many problems of organising a shoot is that you have to book the clothes, as well as the photographer and models, and return them on the due date on pain of death.

The clothes are all size 10 but Kate Moss 'can fit anything'. Apparently she even has 'miracle feet' that can wear any shoe size. But Alex is a bit worried about her hair. 'Does she still have the fringe? I don't mind the fringe but I don't want her hair scraped back.' She also tells Phelan not to let Kate look 'too boudoir. Keep that coolness about her, not too overtly sexy.' (A couple of weeks later, I see the photos of Kate Moss in the art room and exclaim rudely, 'God, she looks awful.' She has a sort of Mia Farrow or pottery-teacher hairdo and looks dead-eyed and desiccated. The art room goes into shock until Robin Derrick the creative director murmurs, 'Of course we haven't done any retouching yet'.)

Alexandra Shulman

I ask Alex if Kate Moss is always a safe bet for a cover? 'Nobody's a safe bet, but a famous model helps.' One of her problems, she says, is that there are so few superstar models now. In the good old days you could take your pick of Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Helena Christensen and a dozen others but now - although there are plenty of good models who are well-respected in the fashion industry - their names mean nothing to the public. They work so hard, they don't seem to have any life outside modelling.

Read on

Standing still for five minutes

And still I am feeling rough, so in the meantime, courtesy of George Szirtes who got it from someone else, this