My fabulous fashion life

MATT SUDDAIN

My Personal Style: Explained

Fashion. It is my life. People often say to me, “Matthew, you clearly have a bold yet effortless personal style mixed with a raw sensuality. What’s your secret? Pheromones?”

My answer is that it starts with your attitude. What’s your fashion philosophy? Do you like things easy and simple to display your unique individual style, or do you like to show off said style with more extreme measures – like culottes? This season is all about a clean silhouette. Because who wants a filthy silhouette? The fringed opera cloaks and pre-vajazzled thongs of last year are out. It’s all about pale palettes: whites and creams. Some fashionistas are taking it to extremes, hiring fat people in cream suits to walk behind them, or only attending the openings of empty galleries, but this is taking things too far. The fat people are enough.
When you do finally get it right, though, the results will be… beyond the pale.

Posted by Matt at 6.15am. COMMENTS (0)

To Paris For The Autumn Shows!

No Wi-Fi at the airport so had to ogle. People are forever trying to get me to reveal my fashion secrets. The key, I believe, is to think beyond the clothes to what’s underneath. I spend a lot of time doing that. With my eagle eye I’ve noticed that hemlines have dropped to an on-the-knee length this winter, while with my fox eye I’ve noticed that this is both conservative and very sexy.

“This collection was about the empowerment of women,” says Donna Karan in the August Vogue. “Not on my watch!” said Gaultier as he unveiled his collection featuring knee-high stripper boots and crotchless chaps. And that’s just the men!

But as we all know, it’s not about the dress on the woman, it’s about the woman in the dress – and vice versa. Empowerment is an important issue for women of all dimensions and attractiveness scores. It doesn’t matter if you’re a daylight five who wears size 16, you’re still a woman. (From up close, at least!) This is what we want from fashion, isn’t it: real women of all shapes and sizes who can think for themselves – and all of them wearing knee-length skirts.

Posted by Matt at 2.43pm. COMMENTS (0)

It Has Long Been A Dream Of Mine To Have My Own Signature Fragrance…

… so imagine my delight on learning that this magazine was sending me to bespoke Italian fragrance engineer Ferrero Rocher. The process begins with a 90-minute burping of a whale. The requisite ambergris secured, the task of building the fragrance can begin. My preference was for a hearty blend that could enrage the sinuses of a wealthy cougar – but tasteful. I went for lavender, English woods, dungeon leather, with just a trace of boy-germs.

Posted by Matt at 9.01am. COMMENTS (0)

My Milan-California-Barcelona-Milan Trend Report

The Milan shows were an onslaught of kaftans, djellabas, ultra-lightweight shift dresses, wide-legged shirt-pants, straw-lined steam-shoes, pile-driven ferret-vests. Falco is considered by some to be among the more “lunatised” designers at work today. Why? Can you argue with his success? Can you argue with his shoes? He does. Why? How? These are the questions fashion must ask fashion, and quid pro quo.

To California for the Zamboni show, in which midgets trod the catwalk in miniature teepees with “FAT” daubed on them in red paint. I don’t think the message was lost on anyone. Sorry, ‘midget’ is so insensitive. I meant midget-Americans.

Then to Barcelona for the running of the interns, when underlings from all the fashion houses are sent out into the street and chased with paddles. It’s a tad barbaric, but I’d never miss it. You can spank up a storm, then retire to your balcony to watch the crimson sunset.

Back to Milan for still more shows. As I said, this season will be pared down, stripped back, lopped off and generally de-jazzled. But there’s always room for animal prints. From the racy spots of the Ghanaian leopard (it’s where we get  the term ‘G-spot’!) to the primal stripes of the endangered Bengal tiger, this look is no longer for movie prostitutes. Wear puma to an afternoon ‘thing’, or black panther for an evening liaison. Or mix it all up to look like a Fellini femme fatale. With the right animal print you could soon be… queen of the jungle.

Many of this year’s collections owe a lot to the Japanese concept of ‘Zen’, which, if you don’t understand it – which I do now – basically means pretending not to care about things you really care about. It’s like playing hard to get with the universe. Which, if you think about it, is exactly like most of the fashion people I see every day. And they didn’t need to sit in a cave and meditate for half their lives. They could go out and drink champagne and be fabulous! So I think that’s something to think about.

I visited Michelle Cosanostra’s store to view her fourth collection, inspired by the great schism of 1054. Her range features elegant lace-lined scuba masks, with the new addition of double-lace cloaks worthy of a Fellini femme fatale. Her collection might not exactly be Zen… but it is zensational.

Posted by Matt at 11.30am. COMMENTS (0)

A Rare Few Days Off!

It was so strange to go back to my old home for a visit and see some of the things
I used to wear. Did I really wear a clip-on mullet? Did I really wear a Ninja-turtle shell to my own wedding? Yes. Fashion is all about taking a risk, it’s about coming out of your shell. It’s so often about looking back, but often we do that so we can look forward, sometimes sideways, although it’s only really possible to do one of these, unless you’re Forest Whitaker, whom I saw at the Prada opening.

What will the big ethical issue be in fashion this year? Plus-sized models? Intern spanking? Whether it’s right to give Asian kids jobs in factories making clothes? (I know when I was 12 I would have killed for a job in fashion.) I think it’s a shame when ethics comes into the world of fashion, which should be about fun and feeling good. If no one suffered, would we truly know what joy is? It’s an interesting question to ask a small child.

Of course fashion has its naughty little secrets. We’ve all snuck out of our Norwegian ice-lodge in the dead of night and hired a shady guide to take us to a deserted seal colony where we’ve whiled away an evening merrily fashioning stoles and winter hats. Anna Wintour gets a dreamy look in her eye as she describes a situation we’ve all been in: when we’ve seen shoes we just had to have – and got them too. Anna did it by brutally beating their owner in a restaurant bathroom. How far would you go for fashion? For me, the answer is to Dubai for the Lapanza show. Lapanza is a new designer, but her gowns are simply… du-bai for.

Posted by Matt at 4.28pm. COMMENTS (0)

Some Final Thoughts

I have often wondered to myself, and to others, why Europe is the centre
of world fashion. Why not Papua New Guinea? Why not Jamaica? When you visit some of the so-called ‘primitive’ islands of the Pacific, such as Samoa or Australia, you see colour, movement, spontaneous draping, the use of affordable grasses and nut-casings. You see boys who want to be women, and men in comfortable wrap-arounds who swan about like Fellini femme fatales. And isn’t that fashion? Social consciousness, diversity, a lack of pretentiousness? When will Tonga have its moment in the fashion spotlight? The answer... is never.

That’s about enough from me, except to say, prepare, prepare, prepare! People say, “Matthew! You’re a fashionista! Tell us what will happen next year!” as drool glistens keenly on their lip. With so much history and culture to draw on it’s impossible to guess which ideas will get the nod next year. Current designers are experimenting with the Victorian era, Georgian chic, the ’30s, the ’40s, post-war Jamaica, quantum physics, the Cold War, Australian prison ships, cyberwarfare, vintage spittoons, the Inquisition, Operation Desert Storm, European austerity measures, the debt crisis and, of course, social networking. It’s enough to make any fashion-conscious person… want to harm themselves.

Posted by Matt at 2.22pm. COMMENTS (0)

- Sunday Magazine