Serayah McNeill may have told WWD that it was her first time attending the annual Jeffrey Fashion Cares benefit fashion show and auction last night, but the “Empire” actress sure made a sartorial splash.

The 22-year-old hit the event, held at The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York, in a head-turning look including a simple white tank tucked into a gold embellished skirt complete with a black fur coat and coordinating crystal gladiator sandals.

McNeill wore Giuseppe Zanotti’s Calliope High black patent leather heeled sandals featuring crystal-adorned straps wrapping around her calves up to her knees.

Meanwhile, “Transparent” actress Judith Light was also on hand to co-host the fundraiser — which raises money for organizations benefiting the LGBTQ community. This year’s proceeds go to the Elton John AIDS Foundation (HIV/AIDS research), Hetrick Martin Institute (LGBTQ youth services) and Lambda Legal (LGBTQ civil rights/activism).

The two-time Tony Award winner looked chic for the occasion sporting a shiny yellow floral skirt with a gray cardigan sweater and pointy snakeskin heels as she posed with Fashion Cares founder Jeffrey Kalinsky.

Kalinsky, who told FN, “I’m going for pizza afterwards,” wore Gucci Ace GG logo print leather sneakers with a coordinating Gucci belt.

Other notable attendees at last night’s 15th annual Jeffrey Fashion Cares soiree included industry heads like Brandon Maxwell, Diane von Furstenberg and Miss J. Alexander.

A few weeks ago, David, I would have given your email pretty short shrift. Oh yes, typical man, perpetuating the fantasy that women are all throwing their tampons at one another. I’ve seen The Devil Wears Prada, and I know the only person you can trust in a largely female office is the gay man. Look at those ladies, all desperately clawing each other’s faces to get that man/job/both. Bloody women!

I totally understand why this stereotype exists – to infantilise women, to make men feel better about themselves (really, take your pick) – but it has always been so far from my lived reality that the idea of fighting with a female friend over the date of a wedding seemed about as realistic as me suddenly sprouting wings and flying to Mars. So stick that in your vape pipe, Anne Hathaway movies, and blow it out your arse.

But occasionally something comes along that really does take your breath away. New Yorker writer Ariel Levy recently published her memoir about suddenly giving birth alone in a hotel bathroom when she was five months’ pregnant, and holding her baby son as he died in her arms. Some of you might have read my interview with Levy, who is a friend, that ran in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine two weeks ago. Soon after she lost her baby, Levy’s marriage fell apart and she lost her home. Now, even if Levy wasn’t a friend, I reckon I would have found this story pretty sad. Others, however, feel differently. In US leftwing magazine the New Republic, journalist Charlotte Shane declared that Levy’s book exemplifies “privilege and entitlement”. After all, Shane writes, “while surely [Levy] suffered, nothing about the vehicles of that suffering is rare or unexpected. Millions of Americans have divorced; millions more than once. As many as 10 million Americans lost their homes in the recession alone, and it’s estimated that up to a quarter of all pregnancies result in miscarriage.”

Now, this is a perfectly reasonable point of view, as long as you are the kind of person who, when a friend tells you they fancy lunch, replies with: “God, don’t you know people in Yemen are starving? Get some perspective!” But I would like to deal with Shane’s take on miscarriage. Leaving aside for the moment the insinuation that a lot of women suffer miscarriages and therefore should probably just get over themselves, this one-in-four statistic gets bandied around a lot. In fact, it only relates to miscarriages in the first trimester. When I had a miscarriage at 12 weeks after a healthy six-week scan, my doctor told me I was “entitled to feel hard done by”, and the chance of this happening had been just 5%. The odds drop a lot in the second trimester and what happened to Levy was most definitely both “rare and unexpected”, to say the least.

But what if it wasn’t? What if women were holding dying 19-week-old foetuses in every bathroom across the land? I can’t believe this even needs saying, but apparently it does in this privilege-screaming world of ours: you don’t need to be hurting more than everyone in the world to say you’re suffering. Women are discouraged from talking about miscarriage, which is largely why they are warned not to tell anyone that they’re pregnant until after the 12-week scan, in case they have to then tell people they miscarried and ugh, God, awkward, sadface, shrug, one in four, etc, etc. Talking about miscarriage is hard, partly because it’s so sad, and partly because it still feels like a private, shameful failure. The former will never change, but the latter might if more women feel able to share their experiences.

Sure, one woman losing her baby might not matter in the scheme of things. But on a personal level it is devastating and I’m pretty sure even women in Yemen feel sad when they miscarry. For anyone, especially another woman, to dismiss it with a blithe “one in four” comment while banging the privilege drum is spectacularly misguided. Miscarriage may be relatively common, but no woman should apologise for feeling uniquely sad about it.

I am very excited about this trend because it’s one that only makes sense to people who consider fashion magazines perfectly reasonable bedtime reading. To everyone else, it will look like you’re wearing the wardrobe from The Golden Girls, because that is what retro floral is – big ol’ ugly flowers. Honestly, this is my fantasy look (I blame all those Christmas vacations to Miami in the 80s visiting my grandmother) and, darlings, it is all over the catwalks for this season: Chloé! Gucci! Pucci and Fiorucci (maybe)! But as much as I love this look, I know it is also a classic “fashion goggles” trend, in that you need magic style specs to see these clothes as worthy of a four-figure price tag as opposed to looking like a really bad purchase from the 50p-and-under bin in Oxfam.

And, like I say, I approve of this. Occasionally, fashion should be silly and just for those in the club, a secret masonic handshake via the medium of an ugly brown Chloé dress that lets others know that you, too, read that article in Vogue about this season’s essentials.

So get out there, all you fellow retro florists, and let’s make Blanche, Dorothea, Rose and Sophie proud. I won’t be wearing Gucci, but I will share my cheesecake with you. Thank YOU for being a friend.

Today, American Apparel has closed all but one of its 13 UK stores instigating the loss of 150 jobs.

The announcement comes after the LA-based fashion brand filed for US bankruptcy protection for the second time this year in November. But, where did it all go wrong?

For more than a decade, AA was the embodiment of cool, with the brand’s quintessential items – simple T-shirts, crop tops, disco pants and running shorts – performing as a uniform for those in the know.

My problem with this – and I feel I’m not alone – is that the retailer is a one-trick pony.

Unlike brands such as Calvin Klein who has built an empire on selling pants, American Apparel hasn’t evolved. Nowadays, we live in a world of fast fashion and, while they might have expanded their product range since the beginning, it by no means matches up to the exacting standards of high street giants like Zara or H&M.

AA offer classic garments in bulk which, as a result, means a much smaller selection for young shoppers – a market that’s hell-bent on keeping up with the latest trends.

Sure, disco pants and bodysuits were all the rage for teens in 2012, but for the discerning woman, skin tight spandex will leave you looking like a lumpy post-makeover Sandy from Grease.

Alas, they swiftly fell out of fashion and deep into debt.

Changing fashion trends aren’t all to blame though; the retailer’s notoriety for racy advertising, and the exploits of its founder, must also take some responsibility for its demise.

In 2014, American Apparel fired its controversial founder Dov Charney over alleged sexual misconduct and, shortly afterwards, took out a restraining order against him.

It was he who pioneered AA’s candid snapshot aesthetic, often featuring sexual images of fresh-faced, scantily-clad young women.

Some - featuring girls wearing nothing but tube socks, sheer bodysuits or underwear - were so provocative that they were banned in the UK.

It seemed that, for American Apparel at least, campaigns featuring girls wearing next-to-nothing had become the norm. But, were these ads sexist or empowering?

Read more at: prom dresses online store

Glad you asked, everyone! People tend to think this is not something they need put much thought into. Just that dress from French Connection two years ago and some lip gloss, right? That’ll do!

In fact, dressing for the office Christmas party is probably the trickiest fashion quandary you’ll face all year. All outfits send a message. Some say: “Yes, I might be a middle-aged man, but have you seen my skinny black jeans? These have never seen the inside of a B&Q, I can tell you, mate! I’m all about the clubbing!” Others say: “Hello, I like to hibernate from November to March. Yes, I am in my pyjamas at 1pm on a Wednesday, what’s your point?” (See question below.)

With an office party, you need your outfit to make so many conflicting statements that we can only start to grasp what is needed by laying them all out. Here is what you need your outfit to say: “Hi! I’m actually surprisingly attractive, aren’t I? And you always thought I was just a mousey office person. But I’m not attractive in a now-you-want-to-sleep-with-me way, because that would be really awkward in the office. No, it’s more of a fun and funny but definitely-out-of-your-league way, so that you’re now nicer to me at work and maybe feel a little wistful when you think of me, but you know you could never, ever try it on with me. I’m like your mate’s really hot partner, right? Think of me like that. Also, I’m a lot more interesting than you thought, aren’t I? This outfit shows someone with secret depths of creativity, someone who is a little more woke, a little more on it than you thought. It’s the kind of outfit worn by someone who gets invited to secret midnight gigs, which is totally how I spend my evenings after you see me leave the office, not just sitting on my sofa wishing Bake Off was on. No, never. You respect me more now, don’t you?”

For men, this means a suit that actually fits; for women, this means a dress that isn’t two years old and from French Connection. That’s the other thing about office parties: the message is tricky, but the bar is pretty low.

Look, for the record, I really did try, OK? Because I, along with everyone else, got the memo sent to every columnist in Britain that the topic this season was something called “hygge” and that it was absolutely essential we treat it as an actual thing, under pain of losing our lofty status as opinion churners for hire. Sure, a couple of other things were happening this year that we could have written about – something in the political world, I think? – but hygge was the big one, the issue on which we absolutely must express opinions. To the laptop!

Yet two months have passed since the hygge klaxon went out and still, from me, nothing. I know! It makes no sense. I once wrote 4,000 words for a fashion magazine about how a store moved its shoe rack from one end of the store to the other. Surely I, of all people, could conjure up some kind of excitement/outrage/bigger meaning about hygge? No, I could not.

I get that hygge is a real thing in Denmark. I also get that clever, good writers are writing books about it. But, try as I genuinely do, I cannot see hygge as anything other than Danish for “choosing to be cosy instead of miserable and uncomfortable”. You know what? I think I’ve got that down pat already. Perhaps my fellow columnists have heretofore been living in the kind of photogenic but clearly horrible modern houses you see in fashion magazines’ homes spreads, all chrome and corners and bare, slate-grey floors on which they click about with their pointy-toed stilettos. The sort of homes with sofas as hard as boards and cupboards you can’t open because door handles are verboten. I, on the other hand, am au fait with the concept of getting into one’s pyjamas, ideally by 3pm in the winter, lighting a fire, inviting friends over and settling down with a giant pot of macaroni cheese. My friends are so used to seeing me in my pyjamas that, when one of them saw me in a dress recently, he was genuinely concerned that someone had died.

So, trying to be excited/outraged about hygge feels like attempting to stir an emotion about air, water or anything else that is just “the stuff of life” to me. I mean, thanks for validating my lifestyle choice of staying home, eating chocolate and wearing socks – I raise my hot water bottle in appreciation. But, seriously, does anyone live differently? This smacks of a trend that exists purely to sell to people things they already have. But that’s absurd – fashion would never do that.

So, I’m sorry. I appreciate that this will result in my invitation to the columnists’ Christmas party being revoked. I might even have my name removed from the Columnists’ Golden Charter, meaning – Oh, cruel world! – I’ll never appear on Have I Got News for You or Question Time. But I must live my truth. As Tony Blair said, albeit possibly not about hygge, I am the insurgent now.

YOU KNOW A nun when you see one. The uniform, known as a habit, is a dead giveaway. But the outfit you’re picturing in your head might look very different from the one worn by the sisters at your local convent. And yet, each ensemble’s meaning is immediately clear. That’s because nuns abide by a sartorial system that is at once endlessly adaptable and instantly recognizable.

That’s an impressive feat for any visual system. In the case of nuns’ habits, that system relies on a standardized combination of symbolic elements. “It’s really a kit of parts,” says Lucienne Roberts, cofounder of GraphicDesign&, a British publishing house devoted to design’s more esoteric subjects. For their latest book, Looking Good: A Visual Guide to the Nun’s Habit, Roberts and cofounder Rebecca Wright worked with illustrator Ryan Todd and theologian Veronica Bennett to dissect the dress of nuns from some 40 Catholic orders. The result is a fascinating work of reference on a subject to which you’ve almost certainly never paid much mind.

The book begins by cataloguing the various components that typically comprise a nun’s habit. These include things like veils, rosaries, tunics, medals, coifs (the cap worn under the veil), and sandals. It’s a collection from which each religious order draws some, but not all, of its sartorial elements. This section provides the reader with a visual framework with which to understand Todd’s minimalist illustrations, which rely on simple cues to distinguish between religious families.

For instance, many orders of nuns wear some form of girdle, be it a belt, a cord, or a cincture. Each type and subtype of garment carries specific connotations. Franciscan nuns, for instance, favor a cord over a leather belt, to reflect their order’s devotion to poverty. Its four knots, plainly visible in Todd’s illustration of the Franciscan garb, represent the order’s vows of chastity, poverty, obedience, and enclosure.

These are the kinds of minutiae encoded in the book’s pages, which the authors color code to differentiate between the various orders. Even the nuns’ orientation on the page is significant; some face towards the reader, while others face away. This is to distinguish between sisterhoods that are active in their communities from ones that live cloistered lives, respectively. The book itself, like the habits it analyzes, is a form of information design.

Presenting that information meant distilling complex social and historical subjects into simple visual patterns. “We had to make sure we weren’t editing it down too much,” Roberts says. GraphicDesign&’s approach draws heavily on the work of Otto Neurath, a curator and designer credited as the forefather of pictograms. Neurath is known for developing Isotype (International System of TYpographic Picture Education), a method of conveying complex social and historical information in pictorial form. Looking Good achieves something similar. While each order is accompanied by a few lines of explanatory text, the book was designed so that readers could grasp the differences simply by looking at the illustrations.

As Wright and Roberts explain in the foreword, religious institutions have long relied on colors and symbols to communicate their history, identity, and differences of belief. The nun’s habit encapsulates this observation perfectly. That makes it one of history’s most enduring, and adaptable, visual identities—and Looking Good an unexpectedly interesting graphic standards manual.

After ghosting, mooning and breadcrumbing, modern dating has taken a new twist: unghosting.

It is a term used to describe a person who has been ghosted - where a person ignores all contact to discourteously cut someone off – only to be hit up again by the culprit in hope of rekindling the flame.

The phrase was used by writer Gabrille Pedriani in a piece for Thrillist, and has also gained traction on social media.

She described the moment someone she had met up with once four months earlier texted her out of the blue.

He asked her “On a scale from 1-10” what the “rejection level” would be if he tried to say “what’s up.”

When she asked why he had texted her again, he simply responded: “Older = fewer options = more thoughts of the past.”

Pedriani went on to argue that ghosting has been normalised in dating, and “unghosting” is following suit. As people get older and the fear of “dying alone” kicks in, they may regret opting to explore the seemingly “limitless options” of dating rather than giving it a shot with one person that they experienced some feelings towards.

Twitter users have also adopted the term to describe their confusing when dating.

The phrase has emerged following a 2012 study which identified seven break-up methods. It found that ghosting - identified as withdrawal and avoidance - is the least ideal way to end a relationship.

Writing for The Independent, Relate counsellor Clare Prendergast suggested those who have been ghosted can cope by deleting the person’s number and by avoiding internalising negative emotions.

“Being dumped unceremoniously with no explanation taps into our deepest fears of abandonment," she wrote. "That’s why it’s so hard to come to terms with.

However there’s a compensation to being ghosted - when someone has suddenly gone from your life it is easier to get over them because you don’t see them and can’t be constantly reminded they still exist.”

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There were no paparazzi long lenses focused on the lake in Bath this summer when Pixie Geldof sank into the dark green water and held her breath. A minute passed. Earlier in the year she had recorded her first solo album, a bruisy collection of love songs called I’m Yours. Another minute passed. The water was extremely cold and extremely deep. Now 26 she’s been writing songs since she was 18, releasing records with a band called Violet, but as her debut album neared release she started to panic – that people would think of the songs in terms of, “things they know happened in my life”. Just before she reached three minutes underwater, she raised her head, gasping.

Pixie decided to learn to freedive one holiday, swimming with whale sharks. She had seen freedivers who could go right up close to the sharks, “and I was so jealous. I wanted to go down, and stay down.” Completists will find that paparazzi were watching on that occasion: “PICTURE EXCLUSIVE: Alexa Chung goes topless as she enjoys a sailing boat trip with bikini-clad pal Pixie Geldof.”

Back home in London at the house she shares with her boyfriend, musician George Barnett, she tells me she’s already done the written exam; the “static breath hold” in the Somerset lake was part two and was followed by a duration test. Next is depth. “The surprise,” she says with a chuckle, “was that I didn’t need to learn how to hold my breath. I needed to learn how to breathe.”

Pixie was born in 1990, the third daughter of Sir Bob Geldof and TV presenter Paula Yates, after Fifi Trixibelle and Peaches, and grew up in the glare of photographers’ flashes. Paparazzi pictures from the early 90s show her looking into the lens with pigtails and a weary grimace as she trails behind Yates, who was pregnant with her little sister Tiger Lily and wearing a silk slip and lipstick. It was on Pixie’s 10th birthday that her mother was found dead of an accidental heroin overdose. Bob Geldof adopted Tiger Lily, whose own father INXS singer Michael Hutchence had committed suicide three years earlier. In 2014, at 25, her older sister Peaches was also found dead. The funeral took place in the same church in Kent where Peaches had been married, where her parents also had married, and where her mother was buried.

Pixie’s favourite things are Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sharks, music and pasta, but the order changes. On Instagram she mainly follows ocean accounts. Pictures of water. She talks with deep romance about her friends. She says things are “sick”, or “groovy”. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that despite the paragraph of tragedy that each profile of her requires, in person, Pixie is giggly, open, content. It’s a warm afternoon in London when we meet and her living room curtains are drawn; the effect is cosy, rather than bleak. Pixie’s white chihuahua Buster moults joyfully on the sofa and a Townes Van Zandt record plays in the next room.

She is embarrassed by her tattoos. On her right forearm in wide ornate script is the phrase, “What will survive of us is love”; she is having it removed. “But it’s the worst pain in the world, like the sun has heated an elastic band and is whacking you with it, again and again.” She laughs. “They should change the legal age of tattoos to 25. You don’t know what you want on your body for life at 16! I’m a different person now.” This is a theme she returns to – memories of moving through life as if stepping on stage, and then realising she’s “not that girl”.

Pixie used to find all the press interest in her family confusing. Often, Bob Geldof recently recalled, there would be 40 photographers walking backwards in front of them on the way to school.

photo: formal dresses nz 2017

“When you’re trying to build who you are as a person and the Daily Mail are telling you you’re something else, it’s quite… odd. At a point it gets to you, when you realise you’re walking into adulthood being seen as a person who really doesn’t exist.”

How was she seen? “As a crazy party girl. This mad wild child. They made it sound like I was doing something wrong.”

She fell into modelling, which is where she met the people (including Radio One DJ Nick Grimshaw and model Alexa Chung) who became her best friends. She was 14. “They joke that they saw my boobs come in.” She guffaws. “But I was focused on music from 18, and I didn’t want to be a ‘slashy’.” Model slash musician, slash designer, slash… “God knows I’m still avoiding it.”

Pixie doesn’t like “fame”, she says. “But I watch soaps, and I get it’s the same thing – people like to follow a storyline. I don’t want one thing to overshadow the other. I’m doing something that is real and it would be a shame if people just thought it was because I was famous. It’s more in spite of that, to be honest.”

When she invited Nick Grimshaw to listen to her album for the first time, he tells me over the phone, he drove to meet her feeling, “very stressed. What if it was horrible? If it had no heart, or purpose?” He sighs, a heavy relief. “Luckily it’s amazing. It sounds like ‘her’.”

The two see each other daily – yesterday she helped him assemble his new bed; they spent the evening watching Bake Off, her boyfriend in the armchair, Grimshaw spooning Pixie on the sofa. It was his dad that gave her a nickname that stuck, complaining Nick was “running around town after that Pepsi Geldof”. He giggles. “Can’t blame him, his confusion at those stupid Geldof names.” And it was Nick who worked hard to distract her from the horror of Peaches’ death, settling in to watch the Kardashians in the days before the funeral, feeding her pizza.

That was what she needed, she says, pointing to the spot on the sofa where she had sat, while her friends streamed in and out, “talking about nonsense. I live for annoying girl chat.” Even in those gaping moments of grief, she wanted her friends to tell her about the guys who hadn’t texted, the parties, the hangovers? “There was a moment when nobody came to me with their tiny tragedies, sure,” she narrows her eyes, “but their stories are how I made the record. It’s not easy to write a heartbreak record when you’ve been with someone for six years. You need tales. Lovely laments and ideas. Little things people said about their exes became storylines behind songs.”

In April, Peaches’ widowed husband Thomas Cohen released an album called Bloom Forever, in which he described returning home to find their son Phaedra playing by himself, and her body in the bedroom. “Longing I know, to find you alone / At the top of the stairs in your wedding dress.” Pixie’s album I’m Yours is more elliptical, though no less mournful. Her only allusion to her sister’s death is a song called “Twin Thing” – “Wish I’d known you like my own skin, so I could feel the hurt you were in. Wish we had that twin thing.”

“People put a lot of emphasis on the idea of music as therapy,” Pixie says, carefully. “It does help you explain how you’re feeling.” Buster yaps at a noise in the garden – recently, she tells me, he’s reinvented himself as a guard dog, despite being the size of a bagel. “What it did, though, was give me something to focus on. It was the best thing for me. Not the music itself so much, but the doing something, something that wasn’t sitting in my house staring in the corners.”

When Peaches died, their dad received thousands of letters from strangers. One New York cab driver told him he’d had to pull over to steady himself when he heard the news. “It’s beautiful that someone can live a life so short and yet make such an impact,” Pixie says, staccato, rubbing at an invisible mark on her jeans. “Things stop for a second with people like her. She changed worlds, both when she was alive and when she wasn’t.”

She looks up, and I ask her how she is. “Oh!” she says. “How am I?” There’s a long, toffee-chewing pause. “I am… OK. There’s no recovery from it. There’s no therapy for it. I mean, there’s no one day when it won’t be bad.”

She describes waking up, opening her eyes and every morning having to figure out how to get up, how to live. “I have a very lovely life. Except there will always be something missing.” She takes a breath. “You don’t want to be the kind of person who knows how this feels, but unfortunately, I am.” A camp shrug, a grim smile. “I realise now that everyone is just trying to live, as well as they can. And some people can’t.”

Spending time with Pixie, drinking her coffee, it’s easy to see why her friends feel protective. Why her dog has taken to barking at the door. As someone who works with pop stars every day, does Nick Grimshaw secretly wish his best friend had chosen a career away from cameras? Pixie’s life, he says, “happened the wrong way round. She was a celebrity before she was born. Now she’s making choices. If there’s publicity, there’s a point to it. Finally.”

Picking through tabloid photos of Pixie’s life online, from baby pictures to funerals, what remains is a quizzical, disdainful look at the camera, a weary, “Really?”

“Isn’t it mad that paps still exist in an age of Instagram?” she asks. “The only reason I can think is for the bad angles. For a picture up a girl’s ass.”

I wonder if being photographed like that for so many years has politicised her. “No, but I am sick of a lot of stuff, through things I’ve experienced as a… as a ‘lady’. The music industry is a weird place and even though I know I have to make myself heard over all the men, I still apologise for it. I’m now at the point where I’ll say what I think. But then I will text an apology: ‘Sorry for being a nightmare today.’ That’s not something related to me being in the public eye, is it? That’s all women. We start and end with ‘sorry’.”

She is excited about returning to the studio. She’s excited about the idea that, one day, a girl might sing one of her songs at karaoke. She’s excited about returning to the lake for her final depth test. “Now I realise why people call second albums difficult. You’ve had an entire life for the first one.” Or two lives, or three. “I wonder if the next one will sound completely different. I wonder if it will be happier.”

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This season is all about leather – real or faux – but while hauling out your old favourites is permissible it’s time take it up a notch. The humble leather jacket is one of those pieces that never goes out of style but for autumn/winter the classic, luxe fabric has levelled up to give pencil skirts, dresses, trousers and skirts a new season makeover.

It’s a material that works well all year round and in its multiple guises adds a tough girl accent to the most saccharine of ensembles; so buckle up and join fashion’s biker girl gang.

Like most trends its popularity was fuelled by a recent stint on the runway where leather became the go-to fabric for a horde of designers. While some opted for subtle detailing – take Mary Katrantzou’s houndstooth jackets patched with leather applique – others went full throttle. Mulberry kept things traditional with a leather jacket, tapping into London’s punk and rock ‘n’ roll scene but elevated the material on an olive green ruffle trim dress and pleated black skirt. One of the most unlikely appearance though was from Oscar de la Renta who showcased a red leather shift dress and a skirt bonded with neoprene.

If to you, the idea of hopping on the back of a motorbike is all too lurid then be sure to ease in to this trend gently; try toughening up sweet florals with leather detailing or start with the basics and invest in a god quality jacket. Don’t be afraid to veer off from the customary biker either, nowadays most styles can be found in leather from the bomber to the trench. For every day, winter wear, we suggest dressing one staple piece down with a chunky knit.

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After a couple of sticky seasons of realignment under its new chief executive, Paolo Riva, the house of Diane von Furstenberg presented its first collection under the new creative leadership of the Scottish-born designer Jonathan Saunders this weekend. Diane’s new man, who arrived at the forty-year-old design house founded by von Furstenberg in May of this year, didn’t stage a show, choosing instead to host a series of one-to-one presentations in which to suggest a new look at the house. It looked good: here was a fluid collection of highly wearable dresses, separates and jackets in juxtaposing print styles and colours, alongside a small but core collection of accessories.

Fans of Saunders’ clothes (the designer closed his eponymously-named London based design house last September) will well recognise his hand here: the house’s wrap dress had been recut on the bias and fabricated in bold graphic colour ways (a classic Saunders statement) and the wide printed trousers in fluttering kimono silk prints, bold striped separates and statement silky asymmetric dresses were reassuringly familiar. But the new accents were subtly done: his vision remains true to von Furstenberg’s extremely womanly brand of feminism.

“I wanted to revisit the brand values of DVF,” said the designer of his initial interaction with the fabled label. “I wanted to capture the brand’s effortlessness, colour, and print in an imaginative way.” It makes for an exciting proposition.

For Riva, who is in the process of repositioning the brand as a house of “aspirational luxury”, rethinking its pricing architecture and re-examining and editing the product lines, Saunders’ appointment has been vital in helping change the customer’s perception of DVF. Put simply, Saunders brings with him a design integrity and the lustre of fashionability which has, arguably, been a little lacking at the house in recent years. This collection felt more relevant and — crucially — cooler. Riva picked up a handbag, primary green, with a canvas lining, simple strap and no visible branding. It will retail for around $700, slap in the middle of the market. Was it enough to seduce a new customer? It certainly made an interesting proposition.

The collection presented this fashion week will arrive in stores from February and while most of it was on display at the presentation certain pieces were held back. Riva is yet to fully embrace the ready-to-buy structure that has seduced New York fashion of late. But the new boys are keeping back a few surprises.

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ATLANTA — The 24th annual Jeffrey Fashion Cares gave Atlanta’s fashion patrons a look at fall collections from designers such as Saint Laurent Paris, Balenciaga, Brandon Maxwell, Vetements, Manolo Blahnik, Gucci, Lanvin and Céline, while raising thousands of dollars and awareness for the Atlanta AIDS Fund and Susan B. Komen Greater Atlanta.

Held for the second year in a row at the upscale Phipps Plaza in a white curtained-off space not far from the Jeffrey Atlanta boutique, the sold-out event sought to raise as much or more charity dollars as last year, which was $700,000. Guests including included Rigby & Peller chief executive officer Ginny Gerard and Sarah-Elizabeth Reed, wife of Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed, socialized before moving to their seats. An auction for trips and jewelry raised $71,000, not counting donations ranging from $100 to $5,000 sought afterward. A weeklong trip to the South African Thulani Game reserve ended up going to two competing bidders for $15,000 each.

Jeffrey Kalinsky, who started the event in 1992, tried to pass on as much of the money as possible to the charities without putting it into the reception or fashion show. Phipps Plaza, he said, donated $50,000 to them, and the food and open bar were donated. Most of the fashion comes from his stores.

Event chairs Lila Hertz, Louise Sams and Jeffrey McQuithy mixed with guests before joining Kalinsky onstage to welcome everyone and encourage donations. The fashion show included cashmere, leather, glossy brocades and liquid silks with fall colors based on a monochromatic palette with color blocks, and colors focused on lemon yellow, royal blue and shades of red. Other trends were a street style, highlighted by designers Vetements and Marques’ Almeida, with key elements of oversizing seen in parkas, bomber jackets, furs and shearlings.

Brands Kalinsky added this year included Marques’ Almeida and Brandon Maxwell, who has been styling Lady Gaga. He is most impressed with Maxwell. “His looks are among my favorites in the show tonight,” Kalinsky said. “He had his first show in New York a year ago, and I said, ‘This is the real deal.’”

Next year, Jeffrey Fashion Cares celebrates another milestone — the 25th anniversary. Kalinsky has, of course, been focusing on year 24, but said he’d like to make the reception bigger and more important next year. Recalling 2012, when the charity event celebrated its 20th year and surprised everyone with a flash-mob dance, Kalinsky said he’d love another “fabulous flash mob.”

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