light confection in sugar almond colours

This was a fun, light confection in Authentic Prada Bagssugar almond colours -  King’s Road- meets Julie Christie–meets candy floss hair.  So grosgrain/leather hair bands at the front, plenty of back-combing and buns at the back – what I’d call dishevelled couture hair, with more than a nod and a wink to a young Princess Anne.To reflect the clean, sleek modern lines of this collection we went for slick uncluttered hair with a softly architectural feel.  From a controlled side parting the hair was slicked back to fall in loose, heavy waves at the back – a modern femme fatale.

Stella’s modern, sexy eveningwear called for the same kind of hair, with individual looks for the ‘faces’ in the show  – a sexy chignon for Amber Valetta, sleek and chic for Yasmin Le Bon, big and wild for Shalom, a short shag cut for Stella Tennant and modern Bardot for Kate Moss – you get the picture.

In the palace courtyard, 350 guests huddled on specially erected wooden benches, Chanel-issued blankets slung across their knees, sipping from flutes of champagne or tumblers of whiskey, to witness ‘Paris-Edimbourg’ – Chanel’s latest Metiers d’Art collection, essentially a pre-fall collection that is shown once a year in a different location and celebrates the craftsmanship of the small ateliers owned by Chanel.  

He proceeded to rattle off Gabriel Chanel’s Prada Messenger Bagspassion for Scotland where she spent much of her time in the 1920s striding around on the estates owned by her lover the Duke of Westminster, borrowing his clothes and being inspired to design one of her most iconic creations – the tweed suit. Recreated in this collection by Lagerfeld in bold tartans and worn with great white pussy-bows at the neck, diamond-patterned tights, flat sturdy boots and sporren bags or whiskey flasks swinging from the hips. It was Coco on the moors reincarnate – only for 2013, she’s wearing bejewelled Fair Isle tank tops with her Plus Fours and listening to music inspired by Japanese video games, or ‘Scottish Manga’, as Chanel’s ‘sound stylist’, Michel Gaubert put it.

Asked if this was his first time in Scotland, Lagerfeld surprisingly conceded, ‘I must admit, yes.’ The designer has never been one for sightseeing, preferring instead to imagine the land that inspires him from his great library. ‘I am not a tourist, no,’ he pronounced, ‘But I know everything about Scotland, everything from Prada Shoulder Bag Leatherbooks.’