Dress For Wedding

From Beyoncé to Kendall: the stylist who turned internet culture into fashion

Breakfast with Marni Senofonte, LA-based super-stylist to Beyoncé and Kendall Jenner, was never going to be a slice of toast. She emerges from the lift lobby in her smart Mayfair hotel, hugs me, finds us a corner table, takes off her sunglasses, hails a waitress and orders as follows: an almond milk cappuccino, a double-shot espresso, a cup of ice, some turkey bacon (“Very, very burnt, please”), a baguette with butter, mashed avocado on rye toast and fresh pineapple juice.

When the drinks arrive, Senofonte stirs two sugar cubes into the cappuccino, takes a sip and puts the cup down in its saucer, never to be touched again. A few moments later, she inquires after the double-shot espresso, which turns out to have gone into the cappuccino when she wanted it on the side. The double shot appears, and Senofonte pours it over the ice. Now she needs a straw. This arrives, along with the turkey bacon and the avocado toast, but the bacon isn’t crisp enough, so it goes back. Senofonte cuts the avocado toast into tiny pieces, pushes them around the plate, but doesn’t eat any. The turkey bacon reappears, crispier, but still not crisp enough. “That’s OK,” she says cheerfully. “I don’t really need to eat this stuff, I just need to smell it in the morning.” She picks up a shard of the bacon in her pointed fingernails and waves it around like a cigarette for the rest of our conversation. By now, our table is almost collapsing under the piled-up plates, but the only thing Senofonte consumes is the double-shot espresso, which she inhales through the straw in one gulp. “That’s the only part I really need,” she explains. “The cappuccino, that’s only there to make me look like an adult.”

Senofonte does breakfast the way she does everything: attention-grabbing, high-energy, ultra-perfectionist while flirting with crazy. That’s her vibe, even at 7.45am. After the visual spectacular of Beyoncé’s Lemonade album, the arresting Black Panther imagery of last year’s Super Bowl performance, a pregnancy-reveal Instagram post that became global breaking news, Beyoncé is now not only significant as a music artist, but also one of the most powerful visual influencers in contemporary culture. That makes Senofonte, who has been central to Beyoncé’s styling team since Lemonade, near as dammit the Anna Wintour of the social media age, in terms of the dominion she wields over what we want to wear. Those puff sleeves that are everywhere now, for example, may have begun on the catwalk, but took off when Senofonte made them a visual refrain in Lemonade. “I go into Topshop or Zara now and it’s all pouffy sleeves, and I’m like, we were doing that two years ago!” she says, delighted. “Tim White, who is Beyoncé’s tailor, and the whole wardrobe department literally wanted to kill me with all the pouffy sleeves I kept asking for. And now look! I’m so validated.”The addition to her client roster of Kardashian-dynasty supermodel Kendall Jenner represents Senofonte’s expansion beyond music and into fashion, introducing Jenner’s 83m Instagram followers to her style. Today, however, she is in London as an emissary from the court of Beyoncé. In seven months’ time, Beyoncé will perform at Coachella music festival, and the scale of the Beyoncé machine is such that the advance organisation necessary more closely resembles that for a state visit than for a mere stage performance. For the designers who dream of dressing Beyoncé, Senofonte is her woman on Earth; her schedule while in London for meetings about Coachella, and Beyoncé’s athleisure brand Ivy Park, is packed. An initial plan for us to go shopping together had to be abandoned in favour of an early breakfast. The night before we meet, I get another text that seems to want to cancel me altogether, but turns out to be for her personal trainer, sent to me by accident. “We’re good! Come early as you like!!” she clarifies by text as I am going to bed. (She is the same on WhatsApp as she is IRL: big on exclaimers, short on full stops.) In the morning, the phone buzzes again with texts sent overnight (“can’t wait to see you!”).

As a stylist to Beyoncé and before her, Lauryn Hill and P Diddy, among others Senofonte has had a long career already, but “in music, not fashion. That’s where I wanted to be, because I always felt like music influences fashion more than the other way around.” After decades when music was “sort of looked down upon” by the fashion elite, the emergence of sophisticated, multilayered aesthetics such as the one Senofonte has helped Beyoncé build has turned the tables. The world’s voracious appetite for fashion content can no longer be satisfied by the politesse of the catwalk. Rihanna in an omelette-yellow dress at the Met Gala, Taylor Swift in a bath of jewels, Beyoncé standing her ground in a burning house in a high-necked Victorian lace gown: these are fashion moments with the stadium-sized power to hold our attention.

Senofonte doesn’t just pick out Beyoncé’s outfits, she helps craft her iconography. For the singer’s most recent birthday, a roll call of her famous friends, including Michelle Obama and Serena Williams, were photographed wearing the wide-brim hat, braids and necklace that made up one of Lemonade’s key looks. Like a Warhol screenprint of Monroe or Elvis, the group portrait has a style that transcends the glamour of even the most famous sitter.

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From anti-EDL protest to the catwalk: the rise of Saffiyah Khan

You’ll remember the image from April. Saffiyah Khan 20, tall, mixed race, with nose-ring and a cropped fringe smiling with a mix of condescension and disbelief at the tight, pink face of Ian Crossland, group leader for the EDL, at a hate rally in Birmingham’s Centenary Square.

That no one spotted the same face on a catwalk at London fashion week this month is understandable. Khan wore a judge’s wig and some strangely ageing Kabuki-style makeup. Plus, Turkish designer Dilara Findikoglu’s spring 2017 show was the activist’s runway debut. But that looks set to change for Birmingham’s striking “symbol of resistance”, who has recently signed to Elite model agency in the hope that she might bring some of her determined activism to the fashion industry.Initially, Khan became a darling of the socialist left. Her phone didn’t stop ringing. She appeared on stage at Labour party events, did interviews and videos and, much to her delight, was offered free tickets to a Specials gig after it was noted she had been wearing a merch t-shirt. Then came the fashion industry. Invited to be part of the Elite’s new Collective division which represents talent rather than professional models Khan has since appeared in Balenciaga in Dazed and Confused, and been shot in Bethany Williams, a designer and lecturer in social responsibility, for the Fall magazine, where she was credited as a model. But this was her first time in a show.

“I had other agencies contact me but I knew this was best suited to me and what I wish to do,” she says. “Diversity is massively improving within the fashion world not just with models, but also editors, designers etc. There seems to be a real movement right now in terms of what fashion [wants to] represent, [with] more designers using [it as a] platform to promote a message of equality.” In recent months, she has also started designing her own T-shirts, which has piqued an interest in ethical clothing. “I see them [art and fashion] as two artistic processes which naturally overlap,” she says.

Findikoglu’s show was an energetic mix of hardcore punk and layered tailoring with elements of the occult woven throughout. Khan, by then a fan, was approached by the designer’s casting agent in the summer; Findikoglu had designed a dress, a pink folded column dress that trails on the ground, with Khan in mind. Khan was to be credited as “Justice” in the show notes, “on the back of her work as an activist”.The majority of Findikoglu’s press has focused on her setting a show that leaned towards occultish themes within a church. “The show [did] not deserve the negative response some people have given it,” says Khan. “Dilara was never wishing to offend or distress people... [she is] a very talented designer with an incredible eye for detail.” St Andrew’s church say they hired out the venue in good faith, but have since apologised for doing so.

Fittingly, Khan’s presence has once again this time inadvertently antagonised the far-right. Alex Jones, host of radio and YouTube show InfoWars, posted a video that denounced the designer’s show as being fit for a “satanist orgy” and part of a conspiracy of satanists that Jones claimed are “weak scum trying to play God and trying to run our lives”.

When events unfolded last spring, the 20-year-old activist admitted to being “slightly surprised” that the picture went viral. She had only wandered in to stick up for Saira Zafar, then a stranger, who had been surrounded by a group of far-right protesters shouting abuse. To the outside world (and indeed numerous think pieces), it was also notable for taking place a week after Kendall Jenner’s ill-advised “protest chic” Pepsi advert, which caused a spectacular PR crisis for both model and drinks company. Jenner eventually bounced back, while Khan’s career was just beginning. Incidentally, Jenner is also represented in some capacity by Elite.

Since April, Khan has spoken about solidarity and activism at talks in London, and worked with Labour, doing meet-and-greets backstage at the party’s conference in Brighton, and taking over Jeremy Corbyn’s Instagram. (She says they get on, but “I don’t [want] to pester him ... He is a very busy man!”) She describes herself as a “passionate activist, creative and photographer” with a focus on “saving public areas such as libraries, schools and health services”. She has also dyed her hair a light rose gold. “I get spotted every now and then, which I always see as a positive,” she says, unfazed. “It just motivates me to do more for my community.”

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Simone Rocha: ‘With every show I’m telling a story’

De Beauvoir Town in Hackney is known for many things, but bucolic views is not one of them. Yet look out of Simone Rocha’s office window and all you see is leaves and water. Somehow she’s found a rare spot along this busy stretch of the Regent’s Canal where a climbing vine has smothered all four storeys of the building opposite. So in addition to her vast dark desk, the photos of work by Nobuyoshi Araki, Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois and the wall of art books, Rocha’s office is full of dappled light off the canal and framed with a burst of vivid green. “It’s a blessing,” she says , gazing up at the wall of leaves. “It does make this place feel more natural.”

It also makes it feel like the perfect location for Rocha’s studio. A place where unsettling things are made. From her graduate collection in 2010 onwards, Rocha’s designs have riffed on traditional ideas of femininity, but always with edge or unease. Girly motifs pearls, flowers, tulle are worked jarringly with Perspex or embroidered plastic. Macramé bondage straps decorate pretty organza dresses. Ravaged hairstyles sit atop restrictive, embroidered Victorian dresses. For spring/summer 2018, her voluminous dresses were decorated with paper dolls and blood-red drop crystals.

Nature has played a role in her collections, too, but never as somewhere nice to have a picnic. Nature is the workplace of the African agricultural workers shot by photographer Jackie Nickerson which influenced Rocha’s spring/summer 2017 collection, resulting in Lucite-heeled wellingtons and rubber lace gloves. Its hedges are where Rocha kissed and smoked as a “wild, bold” teenager in rural Dublin, a reference offered for her spring/summer 2013 collection of neon daisies and gold tweed. Unbelievable leaves wrapped round a modern building, like those outside her office window, seem like something she could have dreamed up for herself.

“My whole ethos is the idea of femininity and how that’s integrated into women’s lives, how it makes them feel,” she explains, looking rather small and younger than her 31 years behind her huge desk though she speaks with remarkable confidence. “With every show you’re telling a story and you want to tell one that women connect with. Even if it’s a story about how men find women hot, women are still at the centre of that.”

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Her work has certainly struck a chord. Fashion industry recognition was instant. She showed her Central Saint Martins graduation collection at Fashion East in 2010, a prestigious showcase for young designers. Lulu Kennedy, director of Fashion East, says that she fell in love with Rocha’s MA collection. “Simone’s taste levels, references and materials were refined and she absolutely knew her own mind you could see right away she had what it takes to go all the way.” A year after, she was accepted for Topshop’s New Gen sponsorship scheme. She was a finalist for the LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize in 2013 and has now won three British Fashion Awards, moving from the Emerging Talent award in 2014 to British Womenswear Designer in 2016. Everyone from Rihanna to Gillian Anderson has worn her clothes.

The trick, she explains in her friendly but firm way, is to find the intimate and expose it. “As a woman designing for women it’s natural to make my designs personal. So when I had a baby it really influenced the collection, because I felt terrible. I couldn’t help but be influenced. I make better work if I let my guard down and put myself into it. ”Baby Valentine Ming McLoughlin whose father is cinematographer Eoin McLoughlin is now nearly two. “Motherhood is like an out-of-body experience,” says Rocha. “The hardest thing is the lack of sleep. Though being pregnant was terrible, too,” she adds, laughing at the awfulness of the memory. “If anyone asks me how a collection’s going, I say: ‘Well, at least I’m not pregnant.’”

There are less visceral inspirations for her clothes, too. And her emphasis on traditional craft techniques and textiles particularly unusual space-age fabric hybrids, such as laminated leather and plasticised crochet mean her designs are much more than the emotions embodied in clothes.

Autumn/winter 2017 offers an interpretation of camo and protective wear because it was created in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and Trump’s election victory. “There is velvet and padding in there because it can’t all be hard, even if the world’s gone tits up.” The spring/summer 2014 collection, which included pearl-topped stockings and voluminous skirts slashed with pearl-edged slits, was the result of a swim in the Irish sea. “All the rocks were licked by the water. I thought how amazing it would be to do something shiny, so we coated lace to make it wet-look. Then I wanted something else that came from the sea so that was the pearls… It all came from being in a place.”

If Rocha sounds more like an artist talking about her work than a fashion designer talking about seasonal trends, well, that’s what she intended to be. She still prefers to work in 3D on models or stands rather than sketching like a typical designer. Her father is John Rocha, the celebrated Hong Kong-born designer, and he and Rocha’s mother, Odette, worked on his celebrated international fashion label together. In fact, John Rocha also won a designer of the year award at the British Fashion Awards, back in 1993.

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J.W. Anderson x Uniqlo collection is here and this is why you should get in quickly

One of fashion’s favourite designers has crafted an ideal line-up of wardrobe classics.

Classic British clothing might not be words that ring out immediately as synergetic with the Australian lifestyle, but it’s a design ethos we all have hanging in our wardrobes. Trench coats? Yes. Tailored separates? Essentials. Cable knits? What would a cool spring night be without one? Lucky now you can update the gamut with the launch of a collaboration that sees Jonathan Anderson of J.W. Anderson lend his design prowess to Japanese retailer Uniqlo.

“It ended up me kind of, in a weird way, designing for myself for the first time, which I never normally do,” the creative director told Vogue in London a few months ago. This means in place of Anderson’s usual unexpected pastiches for his own label, there are pragmatic and refined classics like extra fine merino wool jumpers, shirting and light weight t-shirts in versatile colour ways.

It came from a thinking that, bombarded with imagery every day in the digital age, it is refreshing to pare back. Hence primary colours sit alongside neutrals in the 33-piece collection. This along with a trademark Anderson break with convention means he envisages the divide - between the men’s and women’s collection - being bridged. “I’m hoping that people are going to go into Uniqlo and they’re going to buy womenswear and buy something else in the men’s.”

Our picks: the holiday-ready striped cotton ruffle skirt, pinstripe pants and outerwear which will be worth the investment. Duffles, herringbone coats and quilted jackets tap into British heritage pieces, something Anderson consciously looked to; wardrobe cornerstones like tailoring and Fair Isle knits touch on bedrock of British design pioneered in Savile Row and Scotland respectively.

This being Anderson though, they’re not with out a modern bent. The Uniqlo puffer gets a rework in blown up proportions and all-over tartan, trenches are reversible while work pants are a relaxed take on the utilitarian piece.

Two reasons you should be one of the first to get to Uniqlo? It’s launched overseas and we’ve already seen the ruffle skirt on the street style set in London, and bags and bags walking out the door from the label’s Oxford Street London store.

The collection is in store today. To read Vogue’s full interview with Jonathan Anderson, pick up a copy of the November issue, on sale Monday.
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Fluffy slippers and fancy Marigolds: how suburban style stole London fashion week

Afew snapshots from this London fashion week. Christopher Kanebackstage after his show talking about the smell of bleach in his house that accompanies having a new French bulldog puppy, and the frills of the Royal Doulton figurines that his mum used to polish obsessively when he was growing up in Glasgow. Cindy Crawford’s model children, Kaia and Presley Gerber, catwalking at Burberry in check caps past a photography exhibit that included Martin Parr’s 1981 shot of Dubliners hunched under flimsy umbrellas as they battle rush-hour rain. (As an image of fashion in the rain, that shot is about as far from the romantic iconography of the raindrop-dappled, collar-popped Burberry trench as it is possible to imagine.) Plasticky bucket hats at Donatella Versace’s Versus show. The deadpan tones of Neil Tennant singing Pet Shop Boys’ West End Girls, a song that emerged as the unexpected theme tune for the season when it opened both the Burberry and Topshop shows. A skirt and a top made from rough linen tea towels at JW Anderson, frilly cushion-handbags at Mother of Pearl, a silver clutch bag moulded from the shape of a polystyrene kebab box at Anya Hindmarch. Designer Richard Malone cheerfully naming the bright colour palette of his dresses as a homage to supermarket carrier bags: Tesco blue, Co-op turquoise.

This is street style, but not as fashion usually knows it. This is not the peacocking Insta-bait that has become the default uniform of London fashion week, all thousand-pound tracksuits and limited-edition bumbags. This is street as in ground-level, not street in the sense of being the coolest kids on the block. Actual real life, not a performative version of it. And this is different. Because from its beginnings as a breath-of-fresh-air backlash against the stuffiness of the catwalk, the street-style arm of fashion has over the past few years calcified into a bloodless beauty contest driven by cold, hard cash. One survey released on the eve of fashion week estimated that micro-influencers those with about 10,000 social media followers can command a fee of £3,000 a post, with many of these posts clustered around the venues and hashtags of fashion week.

Fashion is bored with the pretentious modern incarnation of street style. But there is no appetite for a return to the snotty, unreconstructed public face of fashion that went before identikit front-rowers inscrutable behind sunglasses. Instead, this fashion week reached for something less polished, and more human. Both Christopher Bailey and Donatella Versace, two of the grandest designers on the London schedule this week, talked about having models try on the collection at fittings and being interested in their views on how to put the pieces together. At Topshop, the inspirations were the gritty, radiators-and-all aesthetic of Corinne Day and “the days before Instagram; the fun behind closed doors and neon lights”. Anya Hindmarch built a 3D model of a house for models in housecoats and fluffy slippers also seen in Muppet brights at Hannah Weiland’s Shrimps to parade proudly around. After the show, she talked about “the joy in the repetitive beauty of suburbia, the idea that inside these cookie-cutter houses are the most beautiful individual dreams.”

Christopher Kane called his muse for the season “a new kind of domestic goddess”. Kane has always loved the kitsch kick of the banal lace dresses mimicked piped royal icing, this time around but also celebrates, in every collection, romance and sex appeal as part of real-life experience rather than as fairytale. Pheromones pack just as much punch in the kebab shop and the minicab office as they do in any VIP room. Everyone knows that; this season, fashion is just telling it like it is. Even the icons of this season are faces recognisable from the TV in your aunt’s house, rather than in-the-know obscure references you have to posily pretend to be obsessed with. Princess Diana is still major (see Ryan Lo’s pussy-bow blouses), as is the Queen the young version, as played by Claire Foy in The Crown season one who was a muse to an Erdem show that got everyone even more excited about his forthcoming H&M collaboration. At Christopher Kane, the Queen’s long gloves came in slick patent: half Her Majesty, half Marigold.

The question now is what this real-talk means for our real-life wardrobes. Most hearteningly, it heralds a return to practicality. I can’t remember a fashion week when so many outfits even party dresses were styled for the catwalk with a sensible waterproof top layer. Transparent raincoats and practical outerwear, including baseball caps and bucket hats, were on almost every catwalk from Topshop and Burberry to Mary Katrantzou and Emporio Armani. Cardigans totem of the popping-to-the-shops iconography of British dress will continue to be a fashion statement next season. (At Erdem, they were worn looped around the shoulders in the manner of a silk scarf.) Molly Goddard, who said her muse for the season was off “to an art gallery, and then for a steak”, put Wellington-flat boots with her party dresses.

Pastels are on the way back. There are two very different eras in play, but both come in mint and lemon and pink. There is a 1950s feather-duster femininity with a nod to the young Queen; but there is also a new soft spot for the unsophisticated late-1990s, early-2000s (Liam Gallagher in a Burberry check shirt, Paris Hilton in glittery mules). The former is likely to be big on the more grownup high street, the second will have the cult following. Both eras are big on pastels. After the urbane, self-conscious chic of top-to-toe greige, these have a cheery kind of charm.

In fashion, however, being down-to-earth only stretches so far. The new suburban street style is sexier than fashion has been for several seasons, and bra tops are absolutely everywhere for next season. In other words, the vibe is real-life but with Hadid-level abs. The new skirt suit a skirt with a matching bra top came in rustic linen with a matching midi skirt at JW Anderson, or perky and miniskirted at Topshop. Slightly easier to wear is the leotard-tight top tucked into a long pencil skirt. Lingerie-influences lace-edged camisoles and nightie-flimsy cocktail dresses were everywhere, but best at Preen, where they came in chic chalky and creamy versions of this season’s pastels. I’m saving for one of those, already. And one of the fluid, easy dresses in coral or fuschia smocked silk at Roksanda if I can afford it.

“I feel like we live in a time overexposed to imagery of perfection,” designer Roksanda Ilincic said after the show. “I wanted to come back to real life, to clothes that look a little handmade, to a woman dressing to please herself. So I tried to navigate towards something more basic but to make it beautiful, of course, so with incredible fabrics. So unfortunately, it’s not going to be cheap.” That’s fashion for you: still a fantasy, even when it gets real.

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