Must be the Season

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Céline next-season inspirations poster, handed out at their FW2012 show.


Via Wallpaper* – click here for a slideshow of A/W 2012 fashion show invitations.

Front Lines

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Splash page images from the Céline website.

I don't really know why I'm posting these, I just thought they were cool and unexpected.

Best Foot Forward

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[+] Céline SS2012 runway.
Awesome boldness.

R & R

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Céline Resort 2012. More at fashionologie.

Image of the Day

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One of my all-time favorite photos of Emily, in front of the Piet Blom-designed Cube Houses in Rotterdam.

That New Phoebe Philo

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Apparently it's Céline week on Pacific Standard again. Tough to choose but here are some of my favorites from the pre-fall collection.




See the whole collection and many others at style.com.

Skate On

An image from the Spring/Summer 2011 Céline campaign – Daria Werbowy photographed by Juergen Teller. Kind of reminds me of an old Stussy campaign. Unexpected but I like it a lot, it's good to mix things up.

Image of the Day

.The Barneys windows downtown are really cool right now, they all have fluorescent lightbulbs wrapped in colored cellophane. This photo doesn't really do it justice and I actually think the Lanvin window is my favorite, I just snapped this quickly yesterday on the way to a meeting. Anyway they're worth a look if you're downtown – I might take some more pics if I get the chance. (See some process shots at our friend Ashley's blog – she works on the Barneys windows.)

Best Foot Forward

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Oh, Celine.

[The Sartorialist]

Celine Resort 2010
[style.com]

Image of the Day

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A still from Perfect, the latest video by Ruth Hogben, which presents a slightly darker view of Phoebe Philo's Fall/Winter 2010 collection for Céline. Visit SHOWstudio to watch.

What a Girl Wants

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Phoebe knows.

Celine Resort 2011. More at style.com.

What's Next

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Celine by Phoebe Philo, SS2010
[ click to enlarge / more at Fashionologie ]

Back in June Emily posted about Phoebe Philo's first outing in the four years since she left Chloé, an extremely well-crafted cruise collection for the French fashion house Celine. I know it's killing Em to not be able to follow up with a post about Philo's first full Celine collection, shown a few weeks ago in Paris, but she's in school now and too busy to trifle with such things – so in lieu of her brilliant fashion coverage, I thought I'd post this video (half for her, half for you). Backstage at the show, the International Herald Tribune's lovable Suzy Menkes interviews Phoebe Philo about her excellent Spring/Summer 2010 collection. Click to watch at nytimes.com:

"It's very subtle, but it just looks right."*

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Celine Resort 2010 [click to enlarge]

Phoebe Philo presented her debut collection for Celine yesterday (Resort 2010, which will begin appearing in stores in November), and I thought it was a brilliant beginning. The pressure on Philo was tremendous. She'd been on hiatus from the fashion biz since the beginning of 2006, and after the magic she worked in her nearly 10 years at Chloé, the last five under the title of creative director, she had nowhere to go but down. But Philo rose beautifully to the occasion with a first collection full of clean lines and quietly luxurious details that should please Celine's mainstay clients, while injecting ultra-modern twists and a fresh mood that the cool girls can love. If that sounds like a vision that's trying to do too much, it wasn't; instead, it came across as coherent, cohesive, and timeless.

Celine Resort 2010 [click to enlarge]

Celine, which began in Paris in 1945 as a boutique selling made-to-measure children's shoes, and expanded into women's ready-to-wear, footwear, and handbags in the 1960s, has been essentially rudderless since 2004, when Michael Kors left after 7 years at the helm. I was often a fan of Kors's work for the label (one of my all-time favorite coats is his below, second from the left), but at the end of his tenure there didn't seem to be a lot of difference between his own line and the collections he was turning out for Celine (a distinction that I suppose can't always be easy to maintain when you're an established designer with a strong sensibility).

From left: Celine F/W 2004; F/W 2003; F/W 2004; F/W 2004
[click to enlarge]

Philo looks to be subtly taking the label in a new direction, and updating it enough so that it looks really right for now. She obviously has a talent for tapping into the moment, but this is not Chloé part deux – Philo just as clearly has an impressive ability to allow a label's own identity to breathe.

More images from the collection are below. I could easily have included the whole thing, as I thought there was hardly a miss and little redundancy in spite of the simplicity of the pieces and the strong themes that carried throughout.

Celine Resort 2010 [click to enlarge]

I can't wait to see what Philo does for Spring 2010. No pressure at all.

See the whole collection at style.com, here (and read Cathy Horyn's take – Philo "makes one of the strongest sportswear statements we’ve seen in some time. . . . [The clothes'] value is to a large and almost novel degree in their practicality" – here).

*Phoebe Philo speaking to Nicole Phelps about a detail in her Resort 2010 collection for Celine