Can you feel it? We are at that fevered point in the fashion year when all the new deliveries hit the stores and the urge to splurge is almost overwhelming. September’s fresh trends are here, offering us a chance to neutralise the things we don’t like and create a more pleasing idea of ourselves. This is the lure of new clothes, and it’s why all true fashion obsessives think that September is as exciting as Christmas to the power of 10.
So let’s talk about the zeitgeist. If clothes define it, what does the new 2014 season say about us? Dior’s bejewelled couture trainers suggest we want comfort, practicality and beauty rolled into one. Burberry’s wonderfully enveloping blanket coats speak of a need for warmth and snug protection. Gucci’s brilliant knee boots throb with sassy, 1960s sexuality. And Vuitton’s beautifully crafted Petite-Malle bags, which look like mini steamer trunks, are the most pleasing objects I’ve held in a long time. Handling one and hearing the sturdy clunk of its miniature lock made me nostalgic for a time when things were built with true artisanal precision. Of course, you could read too much into it. I’m pretty sure Christopher Kane’s “bin bag” lace-trimmed skirt isn’t a comment on recycling, but that perverse mix of polyester and lace feels very now. It’s at the top of my shopping list, alongside Topshop’s snake-print coat and over-the-knee boots, and an oversized cable knit from Whistles.
I’ve got the high, I’ve got the low; now to complete my modern wardrobe, I need something vintage. In a world of global brands and Instagram styling, a choice vintage piece will give your look an individual flavour. But vintage goes in cycles, just like everything else. One season, a classic 1950s Dior cocktail dress might do the trick, only to be trumped a few months later by a choice piece from Gianni Versace’s bondage gear collection.
So which vintage label should we covet now? Biba, the British fashion brand that defined the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s with sensual, languid clothes inspired by art deco and Victoriana — and it couldn’t be more 2014. Cameron Silver, of the vintage boutique Decades, has curated a sale of more than 100 choice vintage Biba items on farfetch.com (from £145) and says the look chimes with the times: “It’s a long-sleeve moment in fashion. Look at Valentino’s monastic ready-to-wear. Since the 1980s, we have had decades of sexed-up clothing, but there’s now a return to a soft, feminine, sensual look.” His top buys are the blouses. “They can be made very contemporary and worn with skinny jeans.”
Biba clothes were great then (people queued outside its Kensington High Street store) and they are still great now — there’s an amazing leopard-print fake-fur coat and sensual nighties — but the best thing about Biba is its designer, Barbara Hulanicki. At 78, she has swapped swinging London for Miami, but is full of energy and still designing (everything from fast fashion for George at Asda to hotel interiors). Her white-blonde fringe falls into her heavily kohled eyes just as it did in the 1960s, but today she wears lean Helmut Lang jackets and skinny jeans, and has fingers full of heavy ebony rings. “You come in on a generation and you run with them,” she says of her era-defining Biba years. Fifty years later, she’s still running: proof that zeitgeist-defining women, just like zeitgeist-defining clothes, never really get old.