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See Victoria Beckham's "very chic" latest collection

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See the latest Victoria Beckham collection for autumn/winter 2016

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You will never find Queen Elizabeth following a trend but, as our forensic analysis of the looks from the latest catwalks shows, she is certainly responsible for setting a few. As Her Majesty approaches her 90th birthday, it seems that her carefully considered, traditionally British and always jolly approach to dressing has proved highly influential on the AW16 collections which will shape what we wear next autumn.

Given that the Queen has been in the global spotlight for the majority of her adult life, it's hardly surprising that her unwavering sense of style has become iconic. As an article in Time magazine put it last year: "The Queen doesn't have to change to keep up with the times. If she just stays as she is, the times will circle back to her."

In her official duties, Her Majesty is known for choosing bright colours which she wears head-to-toe so that she can be seen from far away or picked out easily in a crowd. This way of dressing is often seen as tricky or overpowering for those of us without plaque-unveiling responsibilities.

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Here's proof that Queen Elizabeth was on every designer's new collection moodboard

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You will never find Queen Elizabeth following a trend but, as our forensic analysis of the looks from the latest catwalks shows, she is certainly responsible for setting a few. As Her Majesty approaches her 90th birthday, it seems that her carefully considered, traditionally British and always jolly approach to dressing has proved highly influential on the AW16 collections which will shape what we wear next autumn.

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In the spirit of nostalgia for the good old days before politics went berserk and dominated everything, today I bring you the Milan catwalks as good old-fashioned light relief. With all due respect to the pussy hats at Missoni, the headscarves at Max Mara and Alberta Ferretti, and the feminist slogans at Versace, we are now three quarters of the way through the month of fashion shows, and it seems to me high time we paid attention to what we are actually going to wear next season.

This is what next season looks like: it is a skirt or a dress that hugs the waist and is at its most fitted (while not skintight) from waist to hipbone, then swishes about a bit - possibly with a split, or a few pleats, or an asymmetric handkerchief hem - ending somewhere between the bottom of the knee and the ankle. Or it can be wide trousers, but cut so that they have the same feminine shape, with a high, fitted waist and a loose leg. The shoe probably has a bit of a heel, but it's definitely a walkable height. It is not so high as to make the shoe the focal point of your look, but not so low as to make a shouty statement about flats, either.

The top half is aiming for an elegant, elongated torso. So, instead of building out the shoulders or creating a V-shape to emphasise the contrast between shoulder and waist, you choose a high neck and natural shoulders for a straighter line. You can leave the waistline soft and natural, with a sweater or blouse that hangs loose, or you can wear a wide belt, but the overall shape is lean and fluid, not a cinched hourglass. Flourishes come at the edges, so the cuffs might be fancy, or there could be a frill at the neckline, or a huge statement earring. Or a pointed handkerchief hem, or a glimpse of a petticoat underlayer.

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Giorgio Armani, Milan fashion week. Photograph: WWD/Rex/Shutterstock

Does this sound frustratingly vague? I mean, I can see it would be a uselessly unspecific description if, say, I was a police witness urgently trying to describe a suspect. But once you get your eye in, this new shape is quite distinctive. The soft power silhouette makes its point from a distance. And the built-in flex is useful when it comes to actually wearing the look, because it means you can adapt it to the way you want to dress. You can create this shape with a sleeveless tank top and wide trousers, or with a fitted jacket and a loose pencil skirt.

This new look has been on the catwalk all through New York and London shows, but it came into focus in the courtyard of the Palazzo del Senato last week, at the Max Mara show. All the women were dressed head to toe in a single colour - the house camel, or a gorgeous sticky toffee, or sealing-wax red - which emphasised how the silhouette was seductively comfy-looking but sexy at the same time. Culottes, wide velvet trousers, skirts, long coats: they all had the same essential soft swagger, and it occurred to me that even the previous day's crazy World Book Day mash-up at Gucci had featured the same outline in its floral tiered dresses, and the opening look of a cardigan belted over a pleated midi skirt worn with chunky loafers.

Dolce & Gabbana's "fashion for all", with its diverse casting, showed how good this looks on body shapes outside of the pencil-thin model norm. Fendi made what I felt to be a cast-iron case for wearing the midi skirt over tight, over-the-knee heeled boots. Bottega Veneta's shrunken polo neck sweaters paired with dramatically swooshy skirts, showed how flattering this combination can be, making legs look longer in proportion to your top half. Giorgio Armani's silky, floppy trousers worn with classically Armani-soft jackets brought the look closer to pyjamas. Prada gave the skirts the house-blend goofy attitude with puffball shapes at knee height on slim dresses. Donatella swapped in a scuba-tight, high-necked base layer in place of a polo neck, which, worn over a chiffon skirt, kept the top half bodycon tight for a Versace twist.

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Max Mara, Milan fashion week. Photograph: Victor Boyko/Getty Images

Having got the important business of what to wear sorted, a quick aside on how this relates to the bigger picture: a new silhouette always has something to say about femininity - think of Dior's wasp-waisted new look with its regressive 1950s message, or the broad-shouldered power dressing of the 1980s. Next season's look leaves behind the androgyny of last year in favour of a shape that is recognisably womanly, but not exaggeratedly hourglass. It is femininity, as rewritten in a new age of female solidarity. And best of all, we can all wear it.

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The soft power silhouette: an hourglass for a new era

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In the spirit of nostalgia for the good old days before politics went berserk and dominated everything, today I bring you the Milan catwalks as good old-fashioned light relief.

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Power dressing. It's a notion fashion often trumpets as the next big thing - generally right after a period when women have been urged to waft around listlessly in hippy duds like Talitha Getty, or don diaphanous nighties during the day. Guess what? It's back for spring 2015 - but, in the current ADHD scramble of "Faster Fashion" (at both high end and high street), it's uncomfortably coexisting with hippy frills and drippy slips.

However, there's a twist to fashion's most recent incarnation of power dressing. For once, designers seem to be looking beyond its favourite, frequently rehashed cliché - namely the Dairylea triangle silhouette of sharp shoulders and short skirts that scream "authority", via Thatcher the Milk Snatcher and Joan Collins as Dynasty anti-heroine Alexis.

"I tried to avoid the phrase 'power dressing' in the context of the exhibition because I think we associate it with a very particular, 1980s quite masculine suit," says Donna Loveday, who co-curated the Design Museum's current exhibition Women Fashion Power (until 26 April). Of the exhibition, she states: "It's not power dressing. It's using clothes to suggest power." That's age-old - from Elizabeth I in her eyes and ears-embroidered cloak (not so subtle), to her contemporary incarnation and her ever-present hats (a subtler monarchical echo of the crown, without the weight).

Designers seem to have, finally, got the message. Maybe it's a spin-off from fashion's co-opting of feminism last year - a practice so ubiquitous it led Time to propose "feminist" as one of a list of words to ban in 2015. That, understandably, provoked a backlash: the publication has since apologised, but you understand its intention. It's not the ideology of the term, but its appropriation and overuse that the magazine objected to. In any case, it seems to have led designers to propose power dressing for spring without compulsory shoulder-stuffing, instead exploring a myriad incarnations of powerful women.

Nice idea. But when its realisation is a model walking wordlessly down a catwalk, power has to be evoked through appearance alone. That's rarely subtle. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana dressed their women as matadors; Donatella Versace cut her skirts short and taut - dressing sexily is her interpretation of power dressing. Tom Ford thinks very much the same, with his soaring hemlines and skinny flares kicking out over hyper-high shoes, models attenuated and towering at an altitude of roughly 6ft 6in. When his models had their breasts bared, bar strategically-placed jewellery, they resembled 21st century Boudiccas braving battle.

Of course, the physical manifestation of power varies according to the eye of the beholder. I saw Tom Ford's prowling, platform-shod models as embodiments of female power; many perceived the exact opposite, in those stocking-top short hemlines and fembot nipple pasties. They saw Ford's femmes not as fatales, but as surrendered women.

Perception is a big issue. Take the work of Lee Alexander McQueen, whose early collections of intentionally tattered clothing were frequently accused of misogyny. "I design clothes because I don't want women to look all innocent and naive, because I know what can happen to them," said McQueen himself back in 1996. "I want women to look stronger."

"I remember being shocked when people said, 'Oh, it's misogynous, it's misogynous'," says the stylist Katy England, McQueen's creative director on those shows. "I thought, 'What the hell are they talking about?' I didn't really get that at all." Case in point: the opening two spaces in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Savage Beauty exhibition, devoted to those early, "difficult" McQueen shows, consist almost entirely of clothes donated by women who (sometimes) bought and (always) wore the designer. They felt empowered by McQueen's provocative clothes, not encumbered.

That's a big issue with fashion pushing a power trip: who's to say how authority is articulated via clothing? Maybe it isn't even visual: when I think of power dressing, I automatically think not of Joan Collins or Armani power-suits, but of Phoebe Philo's clothes for Celine.

In fact, Philo's clothes are very similar to those of Armani in the Eighties - excluding the signature width of the shoulder. What Armani's clothes represented to a generation of women was an escape from dressing to be decorative: they were clothes for business, machines for living, to borrow from Le Corbusier. That's why women wear Celine today - it looks great, sure, but it does so unobtrusively. It lets you get on with your job.

Interestingly, Donna Loveday cited not a love of shoulder pads nor the impact of royal portraits as the impetus behind the Women Fashion Power exhibition. Rather, it was the exact opposite, of looking at "powerless best-dressed lists". You could argue that, as a result, the visual impact of clothes takes second place to a focus on the experience of women - from the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, to Dame Zaha Hadid - actually wearing their clothes.

Fashion can be empowering, I insist. Dame Vivienne Westwood - another woman included in the Design Museum exhibition - once said, "You have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes." The idea of dressing for success is as Eighties as, arguably, the notion of power dressing, but both have a validity today. Hillary Clinton is quoted in the Design Museum exhibition saying: "Now it's sorted. Women can express who they are more. You have to be aware of conventions, but you don't have to be a slave to them."

Maybe that's the most modern and relevant statement fashion can make about dressing women: that the choice, from Ford fembot to Dolce matador, is yours.

How powerful is that?

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Power dressing is back - but no shoulderpads

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Power dressing. It's a notion fashion often trumpets as the next big thing - generally right after a period when women have been urged to waft around listlessly in hippy duds like Talitha Getty, or don diaphanous nighties during the day. Guess what?

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"The best fashion show is definitely on the street. Always has been, and always will be." - Bill Cunningham

"Women who wear black lead colorful lives." - Neiman Marcus

"All my life I've pursued the perfect red." -Diana Vreeland

"The most beautiful makeup for a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy." - Yves Saint Laurent

"I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number of carats in diamonds." - Mae West

"The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive." - Coco Chanel

"I've always thought of accessories as the exclamation point of a woman's outfit." - Michael Kors

"Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick." - Gwyneth Paltrow

"You cannot fake chic but you can be chic and fake fur." - Karl Lagerfeld

"I've always thought of the T-shirt as the Alpha and Omega of the fashion alphabet." - Giorgio Armani

"Women should look like women. A piece of cardboard has no sexuality." - Alexander McQueen

"Style is wearing an evening dress to McDonald's, wearing heels to play football. It is personality, confidence and seduction." - John Galliano

"Fashion wasn't what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going." - Andy Warhol

"If I think about it too much, I can't get dressed." - Daphne Guinness

"Buy less, choose well." - Vivienne Westwood

"Luxury bags make your life more pleasant, make you dream, give you confidence, and show your neighbors you're doing well." - Karl Lagerfeld

"There is a shade of red for every woman." - Audrey Hepburn

"As far as I'm concerned, leopard is a neutral." - Jenna Lyons

"Real elegance is everywhere, especially in the things that don't show." - Christian Dior

"Let the others have the beauty. I've got the charisma." - Carine Roitfeld

"Treat your makeup like jewelry for the face." - Francois Nars

"Women think of all colors except the absence of color. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony." - Coco Chanel

"Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick and pull yourself together." - Elizabeth Taylor

"I design for the woman who loves being a woman." - Diane von Furstenberg

"Dressing well is a form of good manners." - Tom Ford

"It's really hard to walk in a single woman's shoes. That's why we need really special ones now and then to make the walk a little more fun." - Carrie Bradshaw

"If you wear things you adore, you just look better." - Margherita Missoni

"I can be naked as long as I'm wearing the right pair of shoes." - Anna Dello Russo

"Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping." - Oscar Wilde

"I wear my sort of clothes to save me the trouble of deciding which clothes to wear." - Katharine Hepburn

"Trendy is the last stage before tacky." - Karl Lagerfeld

"If your hair is done properly and you're wearing good shoes, you can get away with anything." - Iris Apfel

"I like being a woman, even in a man's world. After all, men can't wear dresses, but we can wear the pants." - Whitney Houston

"If I'm going dancing, then I wear the highest heels with the shortest dress." - Kate Moss

"I make clothes, women make fashion." - Azzedine Alaia

"Pearls are always appropriate." - Jackie Kennedy Onassis

"Do you prefer fashion victim or ensembly challenged?" -Cher Horowitz

"My fashion advice is to have a flattering mirror and then forget about it." - Vivienne Westwood

"A woman's perfume tells more about her than her handwriting." - Christian Dior

"Girls do not dress for boys. They dress for themselves, and of course, each other. If girls dressed for boys, they'd just walk around naked at all times." - Betsey Johnson

"I want to die with my blue jeans on." - Andy Warhol

"Do I make fashion mistakes? Yes, but I won't say what." - Domenico Dolce

"Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women." - Elsa Schiaparelli

"You can never be too rich or too thin." - Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor

"I actually used to smile a lot in pictures. I think I only stopped smiling when I got into fashion. Fashion stole my smile!" - Victoria Beckham

"A relationship is like couture-if it doesn't fit perfectly, it's a disaster." - Carrie Bradshaw

"I think in black." - Gareth Pugh

"You're never too old to play. You're only too old for low-rise jeans." - Ellen Degeneres

"Anything is possible with sunshine and a little pink." - Lilly Pulitzer

"I adore artifice. I always have." - Diana Vreeland

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Famous Words of Fashion's Greatest: Part Two

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"The best fashion show is definitely on the street. Always has been, and always will be." - Bill Cunningham "Women who wear black lead colorful lives." - Neiman Marcus "All my life I've pursued the perfect red." -Diana Vreeland "The most beautiful makeup for a woman is passion.

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For all the political punditry and economic moves monopolising the election headlines over the last seven weeks, fashion analysts have been equally occupied by Theresa May's "strong and stable" style campaign - which may have dramatically de-stabilised at times, but has maintained an overall balance of strict tailoring and flourishes of personality. Whether or not it secures her a majority, it makes her look as though she's in control, even if her decisions aren't bearing that out.

When someone gets it right, it's called power dressing, and it's an art form that no one in politics or public-facing careers can ignore. Even the notoriously anti-fashion Jeremy Corbyn has stepped up his efforts in response, apparently seeking advice from a stylist. Twitter users have gamely applauded the individual who has "turned the Corbyn look from a freight train-jumping hobo into a vaguely credible-looking...

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For all the political punditry and economic moves monopolising the election headlines over the last seven weeks, fashion analysts have been equally occupied by Theresa May’s “strong and stable” style campaign - which may have dramatically de-stabilised at times, but has maintained an overall balance of strict tailoring and flourishes of personality.

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For all the political punditry and economic moves monopolising the election headlines over the last seven weeks, fashion analysts have been equally occupied by Theresa May's "strong and stable" style campaign - which may have dramatically de-stabilised at times, but has maintained an overall balance of strict tailoring and flourishes of personality. Whether or not it secures her a majority, it makes her look as though she's in control, even if her decisions aren't bearing that out.

When someone gets it right, it's called power dressing, and it's an art form that no one in politics or public-facing careers can ignore. Even the notoriously anti-fashion Jeremy Corbyn has stepped up his efforts in response, apparently seeking advice from a stylist. Twitter users have gamely applauded the individual who has "turned the Corbyn look from a freight train-jumping hobo into a vaguely credible-looking...

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For all the political punditry and economic moves monopolising the election headlines over the last seven weeks, fashion analysts have been equally occupied by Theresa May’s “strong and stable” style campaign - which may have dramatically de-stabilised at times, but has maintained an overall balance of strict tailoring and flourishes of personality.

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The pop artist Andy Warhol made his name creating images of iconic American names and brands, from Elvis to Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe to Micky Mouse - not to mention soup cans, Coke bottles and dollar bills. The last of these works, painted in the year before he died, was a portrait of his muse, a 23-year-old jewellery designer called BillyBoy* - in the form of a Barbie doll.

Not many people would have turned down the chance to have their portrait done by Andy Warhol, but BillyBoy* categorically refused.

"For many, many, many years he wanted to do a painting of me. And for some reason I didn't appreciate that idea," Billy explains.

"I felt it was futile. It would really get on my nerves that he just insisted and insisted on doing this painting, and sometimes we would argue about it."

Warhol had met Billy as a teenager in New York in the 1970s. The pair would be found at the fanciest bars in the city, or on shopping trips where Billy would choose stylish outfits for the artist. In his diaries, Warhol, commends the young designer for his "good eye" and his skill in picking out "the good stuff".

And it was on one of these shopping trips, to the 23rd Street Flea Market in Manhattan, that Billy finally relented to Warhol's demands for a portrait - in a way.

"Out of annoyance I said to him, 'Well if you really want to do my portrait, do a portrait of Barbie because Barbie, c'est moi.

"He took it literally. He took a Barbie that I had given him and turned it into a portrait and called it 'Portrait of BillyBoy*'."

By the mid-1980s BillyBoy* was synonymous with Barbie. He owned tens of thousands of the dolls.

A 1984 project had seen his collection dressed by the most famous fashion designers of the day, including Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior and Kenzo. A major exhibition of the dolls followed - installed in a TGV train, it toured France and stopped in all major cities, drawing thousands of visitors.

Find out more

Listen to BillyBoy* in The Why Factor: Why Do We Love Dolls? on the BBC iPlayer

Then, BillyBoy* designed two Barbie dolls for Mattel - Le Nouveau Theatre De La Mode and Feelin' Groovy Barbie. He was the first designer to have his name written on her box.

"If you speak to most collectors today who are middle-aged, they'll all say they started collecting Barbie in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that comes directly from my influence," says BillyBoy*.

Warhol's 1986 painting, Barbie, Portrait of BillyBoy* shows Barbie with blonde hair and bright blue eyes, against a powder blue background, which Warhol dubbed "Billy Boy blue". A later version of the same painting, simply titled Barbie, switches the blue for red.

Barbie in art and fashion

Barbie went on to be depicted by artists such as Kenny Scharf and David Levinthal, and she remains an inspiration to fashion designers

Jeremy Scott based his 2015 spring and summer collection for Moschino on the glamorous doll, sending models down the catwalk in plastic crop tops and dresses with long bleach-blonde wigs

Shoe designer Sophia Webster has just collaborated with Mattel on a range of hot pink heels and trainers emblazoned with the doll's iconic logo

BillyBoy* kept the portrait until last year, when it was sold at Christie's for £722,500 ($1,161,780), more than double its estimate. He stopped collecting Barbies a long time ago.

"I think Barbie is no longer touching on the zeitgeist of the moment," he says.

"If I had a daughter I would not give her Barbie dolls. I wouldn't want my child to be constantly obsessed with getting something, and that immense preoccupation with high-heeled shoes and clothes."

Rather than dressing and undressing dolls, he thinks it makes more sense for children today to spend their time making videos.

Warhol once famously declared: "I love LA. I love Hollywood. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic."

To him and others, Barbie is the perfect symbol of glamour, fun, superficiality and consumerism. A plastic face to represent not just his friend BillyBoy*, but something deeper about Western culture.

* BillyBoy* spells his name with an asterisk

Listen to BillyBoy* in The Why Factor: Why Do We Love Dolls? on the BBC iPlayer
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The pop artist Andy Warhol made his name creating images of iconic American names and brands, from Elvis to Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe to Micky Mouse - not to mention soup cans, Coke bottles and dollar bills.

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Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Thatcher, Thatcher, style limelight-snatcher. The former PM cleverly refined her clothing to reflect her rising power. The pussycat bows of her early career were ditched. She stopped wearing hats, seen as too middle class, to appeal to the widest possible demographic. Instead, she came to favour tailored suits with matching handbags and low Ferragamo heels - ideal for state functions and the televising of Parliament. She could adapt this look for different locations: blue for Conservative party conferences, adding fur in Russia and often incorporating the colour of the national flag of the country she was visiting. She enlisted Aquascutum director Margaret King as her fashion adviser and kept files on what she wore when, with outfits named "Reagan Navy" or "Election '87".

Tess McGill
One shudders to think how many cans of Elnett they got through on the set of 1988 yuppie fable Working Girl. When her scheming Wall Street stockbroker boss Sigourney Weaver broke her leg skiing (how 80s), Melanie Griffith's ambitious Staten Island-raised secretary came into her own. After all, she had "a head for business and a bod for sin". Griffith was Oscar-nominated and won a Golden Globe for her career-defining performance but it's her Cinderella-like makeover - going from leather blousons, brassy jewellery and candyfloss mullet to sensible bob, slinky frocks and Armani power suits - that sticks in the memory.

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Anna Wintour
"Nuclear Wintour", the notoriously aloof editor-in-chief of American Vogue and unofficial mayoress of New York, is the most powerful woman in fashion. Her understated minimalist look reflects that lofty status. As a front-row fixture, her every stitch gets scrutinised but the London-born 64-year-old knows exactly what suits her and sticks to it: a shift dress, tweed suit, kitten-heeled Manolo Blahniks, Peta-infuriating fur, chunky necklace, twice daily blow-dry of her perfectly polished, blunt-edged pageboy bob (framing the face with steely conviction) and those omnipresent over-sized black shades. The devil might wear Prada but she looks goddess-like in it.

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Alexis Carrington
The only things bigger than 1980s super-soap Dynasty 's ratings were the characters' hair and shoulder pads. Linda Evans, who played leading lady Krystle Carrington, was naturally broad-shouldered so costume designer Nolan Miller decided to embrace them - and padded the other female cast members' shoulders to match. Krystle's nemesis and frequent catfight opponent was Joan Collins's queen bitch Alexis, who became the show's clothes-horse-in-chief: all nipped-in waists, batwing sleeves, fur coats, outsized diamante jewellery and red lip gloss. It was the epitome of capitalist excess and a global audience of 250 million lapped it up. Well, until everyone started getting amnesia and that massacre at Prince Michael of Moldavia's wedding.

Madonna
If Bowie is the chameleon of pop, Madonna Louise Ciccone is music's mistress of disguise, constantly reinventing her image over the course of her 32-year career. When she arrived in the 80s, her unique style - be it a bridal dress, thrift-shop punk, Marilyn Monroe gown, religious iconography or bra and bangles - blended confidence, power and femininity. This reached its apex with her power suit in the David Fincher-directed Express Yourself video, wide-legged trousers adding elegance to her tailored jacket. Later came the infamous Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra, disco leotards, corsets, military and cowgirl ensembles. Don't go for second best, baby.

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Samir Hussein/Getty Images

Victoria Beckham
She might be half of one of showbiz's biggest power couples but the artist formerly known as Posh Spice struggled sartorially when she first moved to Los Angeles in 2007. Goldenballs had signed for LA Galaxy so the Beckham clan upped sticks, but Queen Wag Victoria was just too glossy, groomed and high-maintenance. Her body-hugging frocks, five-inch stilettos, statement handbags and perma-pout just didn't look right on the studiedly laidback, expensively dressed-down west coast. She nailed it eventually, of course. Now, as a surprisingly successful fashion designer with an eponymous label, she's helping a whole new generation of women to power dress.

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BBC/Artists Studio/Steffan Hill

Stella Gibson
Like Helen Mirren as Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison before her, Gillian Anderson's icily enigmatic cop from psychosexual TV crime thriller T he Fall reminded us of the power of the silk shirt: white or cream, tailored fit, a few buttons undone, tucked into a black pencil skirt or subtly high-end grey suit. Accessorised with carefully coiffed hair, stilettos and quiet confidence, DSI Gibson ran rings around her mostly male colleagues but couldn't quite catch Belfast's best-looking serial killer Paul Spector (played by Jamie Dornan). She's back soon for another go on BBC2 and retailers will be hoping those silk shirts are too - they reported a spike in sales when the first series aired.

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Princess Diana
The Princess of Wales famously couldn't wear high heels while married to Prince Charles - she was marginally taller than him but took great pains to look like she wasn't. As the 80s poster princess for Sloanes and wannabe Sloanes, she inadvertently started a trend for lower footwear. As their marriage disintegrated, the gloves came off and Diana started towering over Charles in stilettos. As the world's most photographed woman, her style evolved from demure, dutiful wife to glamorous global celebrity. Post-divorce, she was free to venture further into the fashion world, gracing catwalk shows and the cover of Vogue - all while working ye olde "check out what you're missing" look to perfection.

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Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama
The most fashion-conscious first lady is a very modern sort of power dresser. She's almost always seen in strong, structured outfits, yet doesn't shy away from bold colours or graphic prints. Her wardrobe teams high-end designers such as Jason Wu, Michael Kors, Céline and Stella McCartney with more accessible pieces from J Crew or Target - usually finished off by a cardigan, kitten heels and kitschy brooch. Classy, confident and a fixture on world's best-dressed lists, Obama has been a big sartorial influence on a generation of American women climbing the corporate career ladder. Her style-icon status has been compared to Jackie Kennedy's and she's only the second first lady to become a Vogue cover star.

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Cruella De Vil
"If she doesn't scare you, no evil thing will..." Who could be more power-dressy than a super-rich heiress obsessed with making a fur coat out of puppy pelts? The antagonist of Dodie Smith's 1956 novel, 101 Dalmatians, sports black-and-white hair, a white mink cloak and tight satin gowns with clashing ropes of jewels. She also drinks ink, eats pepper and lives in a sinister Suffolk mansion, Hell Hall. Disney based its 1961 film version on Hollywood diva Tallulah Bankhead. In the 1996 live action movie, Glenn Close played her as a chainsmoking fashion magnate, heading the House of De Vil - all PVC, corsets, spiked heels, long nails and jewellery made from teeth and claws.

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Margaret Thatcher Margaret Thatcher Thatcher, Thatcher, style limelight-snatcher. The former PM cleverly refined her clothing to reflect her rising power. The pussycat bows of her early career were ditched. She stopped wearing hats, seen as too middle class, to appeal to the widest possible demographic.

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Article with quotes from Madonna about the difference of equality between her and prince

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In 1990, Madonna was as astronomically popular as a boundary-bulldozing, unapologetically bacchanalian performance artist could get. Drawing from Harlem drag balls, "Vogue" went Number One nearly worldwide. The tour showcasing it, Blond Ambition, mixed spectacle with social commentary so sharply that it reinvented the pop concert and yielded the smash documentary Truth or Dare. And that year's The Immaculate Collection, her first greatest-hits set, would eventually rank among the world's biggest-ever albums, despite MTV banning its gender-blurring and cinematically exquisite "Justify My Love" video.

Some loathed this classically trained dancer/DIY provocateur - a megastar peer of Prince and Michael Jackson since her 1984 blockbuster Like a Virgin - with a venom reserved for successful women forging their own path. But for her vast audience, she was nothing less than liberating, and her uninterrupted string of hits defined pop for a decade. What some considered violations of taste made her more commanding: Even the way she toyed with ordinarily unflappable talk show hosts like David Letterman was more rock & roll than actual rock stars.

Nearly everything changed two years later with Erotica and Sex. Released respectively on October 20th and 21st, 1992, the first fruits of her multimedia Maverick entertainment company weren't flops; her fifth studio album, Erotica racked up six million sales worldwide and yielded several hits, while Sex - an elaborate coffee table book created with fashion photographer Steven Meisel and Fabien Baron of Harper's Bazaar - sold out its limited 1.5 million printing in a few days, an unparalleled success for a $50 photography folio bound in metal and sealed in a Mylar bag to evoke condoms. It remains one of the most in-demand out-of-print publications of all time.

But both record and book, despite a few positive reviews, inspired widespread vitriol. "There's nothing erotic about it, unless one finds the idea of a singing death mask sexy." That was Entertainment Weekly's take on Erotica's rendition of "Fever," but it summed up many assessments of the entire album. Others appreciated Sex's forthright presentation of LGBTQ sexuality and S&M even less. "Of course, some of us actually like the opposite sex; some of us believe it is possible to have great sex without whips, third parties or domestic pets," groused not some reactionary macho windbag, but a female film critic for The New York Times.

Why did projects Madonna intended to open minds shut so many down?

As her stardom snowballed through the Eighties and early Nineties, AIDS decimated the scene that helped birth Madonna. Taking music and fashion cues from lower Manhattan's punk rebelliousness and midtown's disco hedonism, pre-stardom Madonna was a fixture in the bohemian underground chronicled by photographer Nan Goldin in her autobiographical The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a likely Sex influence, along with the severe stylization of Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Robert Mapplethorpe. By 1992, AIDS claimed Goldin's subjects, Mapplethorpe himself, much of the art world (including Madonna's friend Keith Haring), and a growing chunk of Madonna's audience. It also killed and would go on to kill her cohorts, including Blond Ambition dancer Gabriel Trupin. Just as racism and the Black Lives Matter movement shaped Beyoncé's Lemonade, AIDS and ACT UP - the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the direct action advocacy and educational group whose motto was "Silence = Death" - yielded Erotica and Sex.

Madonna previewed both works with the lead single and video for "Erotica," which boldly picked up where "Justify My Love" left off, and is narrated by Mistress Dita, her Sex dominatrix alter ego. "Give it up, do as I say," she growls over gritty funk that combines the clatter of R&B's New Jack Swing with house music's heavy bottom. "Give it up and let me have my way."

But in much of what follows on the LP, the woman behind the vixen doesn't get what she wants: Her relationships fall apart as she awakens from spells cast by deceptive lovers ("Bye Bye Baby," "Waiting," "Words"). Booze, chain-smoking, and anonymous sexcan't numb the pain ("Bad Girl"), and a friend steals her man ("Thief of Hearts"). Meanwhile, comrades die ("In This Life") while kindred outcasts struggle ("Why's It So Hard"). "I'm not happy this way," she sings in "Bad Girl." Sensuality was merely part of the picture: Erotica is Madonna's concept album about love and intimacy under the shadow of plague.

In excerpts from his studio diary, Erotica's co-producer/songwriter Shep Pettibone - a skilled remixer who helped Eighties dance grooves evolve from disco to house music - archived the singer's feedback on the album's early slick mixes. "I hate them," she said. "If I had wanted the album to sound like that, I'd have worked with [earlier collaborator] Patrick Leonard in L.A." Instead, Madonna demanded rawness, "as if it were recorded in an alley at 123rd Street in Harlem."

And so her "Vogue" collaborator reverted to the rhythm-intensive immediacy of his remixes as he reworked much of the album until it boomed, banged and sizzled like his increasingly popular remixes: Pettibone's version of "Express Yourself" was the one heard in Madonna's massive video. Instead of composing a radio-targeted album later reshaped for the clubs, Pettibone, together with Madonna, and André Betts - a newcomer who co-produced "Justify My Love" with Lenny Kravitz - made Erotica resemble an alternately party-minded and private collection of 12-inch singles. Even ballads like "Bad Girl" take arrangement cues from club music; in this case, a somber, slo-mo slant on Black Box's piano-pounding house anthems.

Unlike Erotica, which contrasts moods and tempos but maintains a deep and yearning sonic continuity, Sex is varied in style and content. Some shots are straightforward, such as the introductory snaps of Madonna cavorting with two tattooed and pierced lesbian skinheads. The authenticity of her playmates accentuates the fastidiousness of her makeup and the newness of her fetish-wear, which makes Madonna look like a tourist. There's little less sexy than that.

Other photos are open to interpretation: One features four masculine figures standing at urinals with Madonna superimposed in pink. The clash of iconography and grain of the image means it takes some staring to notice one has a hand on another's ass - and even more scrutiny to realize these two apparent dudes are actually women; probably the same butches in the earlier tableau. Here Madonna looks like she's visited that same seedy men's room, and the double exposure insinuates it's on her mind. She's not alone: When bigots obsess over transgender folk in public restrooms, this is what they're imagining. They'd deny the compositional beauty of the image, but there it plainly is, contrasted and highlighted by the sleaze.

Clearly she intended to instigate more than that era's version of the far right: One of the most realistic photos depicts her in a gymnasium under a basketball hoop with books tossed about and a school uniform half off. One guy holds her between his legs, and another guy's hand is poised to explore her naked crotch. There's more than a suggestion of struggle: Only her strained smile signifies consent.

Penned by Madonna, the text also varies in tone. Sometimes she's acting out scenarios likely avoided in real life. Elsewhere she's clearly speaking her own mind, yet with the disclaimer, "Nothing in this book is true," which, to follow her logic, might be a lie. So when she wrote, "The women who are doing [porn] want to do it: No one is holding a gun to their head," critics lambasted the musician. Given that Madonna posed nude in 1978 when she was broke and couldn't stop Penthouse and Playboy from publishing the results in 1985, this statement comes across as atypically naïve.

Because Sex and Erotica launched Maverick and her renegotiated $60 million contract with Time Warner, speculation over the Material Girl's earnings framed nearly every critical analysis. But Madonna's moxie has never been just about profit and fame. As her charities and donations have attested for decades, she also aims to make the world a better place: She just opened a pediatric hospital in Malawi. Back then, she taught soft-core sex ed.

"I think the problem is that everybody's so uptight about [sex] that they make it into something bad when it isn't, and if people could talk about it freely, we would have people practicing more safe sex," she told Vanity Fair at the time. "We wouldn't have people sexually abusing each other, because they wouldn't be so uptight to say what they really want, what they really feel." Maybe that's a little simplistic, but it's genuinely humanitarian. At a time when the straight media essentially characterized all sex as dangerous, Madonna tried to illustrate that it could be safe and stimulating, particularly if we open our minds, free our bodies, and try something besides standard intercourse.

Nowadays, S&M and explicit LGBTQ imagery is never more than a few clicks away, but the internet was in its infancy in 1992: Photos of sexual activity were exclusive to specialty bookstores until Robert Mapplethorpe's headline-grabbing 1989 retrospective The Perfect Moment, which placed S&M and interracial gay sexuality onto museum walls. The resulting controversy - inflamed by North Carolina's obstructionist Senator Jesse Helms and his attempt to prevent the National Endowment for the Arts from funding "obscenity" - engaged viewers in a moral debate. Accordingly, Sex was never about pretty pictures.

Twenty-five years after publication, it's easier to differentiate between Sex's weaknesses and strengths. The sequence with pop rapper Vanilla Ice - Madonna's then-boyfriend - was always tacky, and the section in which she sandwiches herself between hip-hop's Big Daddy Kane and supermodel Naomi Campbell is more stilted than ever. Actress Isabella Rossellini - who appears in a man's suit caressing Madonna and her female friends with an emotional intimacy missing from those celebrity shots - nailed the book's major limitation when she told The Huffington Post in 2014, "Madonna was almost too beautiful, too perfect ... to have that vulnerability or the sense of shock that a regular, more normal, not-so-professional fitted body could convey." No matter how many personas the icon tries on like a pop-art Cindy Sherman, Madonna is Madonna when she takes off her clothes - maybe even more so.

Berliner Studio/BEI/REX/Shutterstock

And yet I recognize her intentions. Madonna and I are of the same generation, and before she was a star, we'd party at the same NYC clubs like Danceteria, where her career began. I lost my dad to cancer when I was young just as she lost her mom at age five, and so I know all too well how grieving reactivates that original deprivation, like when my very first lover died of AIDS 30 years ago. After that went co-workers, mentors and friends until the mid-Nineties, when combinations of antiviral medicines slowed and then ultimately stopped HIV's progression for many patients who followed their medication regimen with military precision.

But until then, if you lived in a major city and were gay or an intravenous drug user, sex worker or among their intimates, you were an endangered species. There was no cure, and our government was indifferent. Breaking their silence was essential to our survival and sanity. So when Madonna launched her business with Sex and Erotica, LGBTQ people knew she wasn't exploitative: She was trying to save our lives by politicizing her anger. The frustration of Erotica that critics of the era bemoaned, we applauded because it was our own. Sure, she borrowed some of our fabulousness, but she also gave back plenty.

Accordingly, Erotica is also filled with love. The album's steamiest - and funniest - cut, "Where Life Begins," celebrates cunnilingus with cheeky wordplay, but also sweetness and warmth: Crooning over Andre Betts' hip-hop ballad beats, she beckons the listener, "Go down where I cannot hide," as if to suggest her womanhood is this chameleon's constant truth.

The album's most driving dance track, the hit "Deeper and Deeper," revels in romantic surrender. But LGBTQ people interpret it more specifically about embracing same-sex attraction. "This feeling inside, I can't explain/But my love is alive, and I'm never gonna hide it again," Madonna belts in the concluding verse, hitting that declaration harder than anything in her catalog. Set in a pansexual nightclub much like Danceteria, its video pays tribute to Andy Warhol, here represented by actor Udo Kier - a Warhol graduate who also plays Sex's dungeon master. But it also tips a hat to Madonna's late mentor Christopher Flynn, who introduced the straight-A student and cheerleader to the gay discos of Detroit.

"I always felt like I was a freak when I was growing up and that there was something wrong with me because I couldn't fit in anywhere," she told director Gus Van Zant in Interview in 2010. "But when he took me to that club, he brought me to a place where I finally felt at home."

Her elegiac "In This Life" offers gratitude to Flynn and her late roommate Martin Burgoyne while addressing AIDS head-on. "He was only 23/Gone before he had his time," she sings of Burgoyne; "He was like a father to me ... taught me to respect myself," she croons about Flynn. Like "This Used to Be My Playground," the similarly mournful League of Their Own chart-topper released four months before Erotica but written and recorded midway through the album, this lament reveals the wounded child concealed behind her workaholism. Her fragility makes the singing stronger.

This sincerity spills into "Rain," the sunny single that revived sales eight months after the album's release, and the final track, "Secret Garden." Madonna ponders her feminine essence as a hidden paradise of pleasure, a Garden of Eden, and she reveals insecurities ordinarily concealed, hoping they'll blossom into self-knowledge. "I wonder if I'll ever know/where my place is, where my face is/I know it's in here somewhere," she whispers over a thrusting bass line, a gyrating breakbeat and breezy jazz piano that wanders with her thoughts. When she does sing on the chorus, she's not the ballsy belter of her hits, but an aching, affectation-free spirit waiting for "a place that I can be born," as if the true Madonna hadn't yet arrived.

REX

A quarter century after Sex and Erotica, the era's lingering image of the superstar is the shot of her fully naked - tresses teased and face painted like a Fifties starlet, a cigarette in her lips, and her feet in stilettos - thumbing a ride on a bucolic Florida street. Her nude femininity is perfectly sculpted, yet she exudes the assurance of a suited male bureaucrat. It's the book's most transgressive image, for it presents a woman self-objectifying, calling the shots instead of following them, sharing her amorous dreams with the pluck usually reserved for straight white men. There's no submissiveness; instead, its carnal opposite, flaunted while politicians and religious leaders preached abstinence as the only civilized response to a virus spreading throughout the world and claiming millions of lives. Instead, Madonna cast herself as Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Bunny.

This defiance flipped out men and women alike.

"I divide my career from before and after the Sex book," she told Spin four years later. " Sex was my fantasy, and I made money off of it. That is a no-no."

Her bravado lingered through Body of Evidence, a BDSM-charged thriller, and the Maverick-produced, straight-to-video drama Dangerous Game. Both were widely panned, as well as her 1994 Late Show appearance in which she asked David Letterman to smell her panties, smoked a cigar and said, "fuck" 14 times. In between, she staged her Erotica- centric Girlie Show World Tour, which furthered Blond Ambition's fearless exuberance, but only played three U.S. cities.

Madonna's sound and image then softened substantially with Evita, motherhood and wistful serenades like "Take a Bow" (her longest-running U.S. Number One) before she regained her audacity via 1998's soul-searching Ray of Light and 2000's experimental Music. And although some of her subsequent output has followed trends rather than setting them,she still puts on a rarely rivaled live show by foregrounding her body as the primary site of her art. That was daring in her Erotica/ Sex period. Doing that today, as a 59-year-old woman, makes Madonna even more radical. Watch her fiery acceptance speech last December at Billboard's Women in Music shindig if you think she's lost her edge.

"I was called a whore and a witch," she recalled of that epoch. "One headline compared me to Satan. I said, 'Wait a minute, isn't Prince running around with fishnets and high heels and lipstick with his butt hanging out?' Yes, he was. But he was a man. This was the first time I truly understood women do not have the same freedom as men. ...I [felt] like the most hated woman in the world."

Today, Erotica's melancholy desire is all over the boldest substantial pop from Lana Del Rey and Father John Misty to Frank Ocean and Beyoncé, and its dirty house grooves animate chart divas from Katy Perry on "Swish Swish" to underground rappers such as Zebra Katz on "Ima Read." Let's not forget that Grace Jones and Debbie Harry made Madonna possible. But there's an even more direct line between Madonna's unrepentant and emphatically female sensuality - particularly in this incendiary phase - and what followed from Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Ariana Grande, Tove Lo and now Cardi B. Without Madonna, modern pop as we know it would be unimaginable. Meanwhile, Sex's provocations have permeated advertising, which was hardly the point. (Meisel's wood-paneled 1995 campaign for Calvin Klein evoked teen porn so brazenly that the Justice Department got involved and CK pulled the ads.)

However, popular music and art are no longer thoroughly defined by a straight white masculine perspective. Nearly everything is more sexualized, and that's not entirely positive, but alpha male artists and submissive female subjects don't dominate as much as they've done for centuries. We've finally hit a tipping point when popular culture is offering more viewpoints and voices: That's why there's a rise in fascism to suppress them. Sex and Erotica's greatest contribution remains their embrace of the Other, which in this case means queerness, blackness, third-wave feminism, exhibitionism and kink. Madonna took what was marginalized at the worst of the AIDS epidemic, placed it in an emancipated context, and shoved it into the mainstream for all to see and hear.

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Why Madonna's Masterpiece 'Erotica,' Defiant 'Sex' Book Still Matter

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In 1990, Madonna was as astronomically popular as a boundary-bulldozing, unapologetically bacchanalian performance artist could get. Drawing from Harlem drag balls, "Vogue" went Number One nearly worldwide. The tour showcasing it, Blond Ambition, mixed spectacle with social commentary so sharply that it reinvented the pop concert and yielded the smash documentary Truth or Dare.

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Power Dressing

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Looking back, it seems almost bizarre that Theresa May has been reluctant to play the 'Tory Blue' card in her wardrobe so far as Prime Minister. After all, Margaret Thatcher often wore her political affiliation unashamedly head-to-toe, opting for cobalt dresses and suits throughout her years as PM for everything from conferences to elections and evening dinners. And every Tory leader since has had an electric blue tie or two in his arsenal.

But today is the first time in her high-profile public life that May has been so vibrantly party political in her wardrobe choices.

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PM power dressing: Theresa May reclaims Tory Blue in a new suit as she forms a minority government

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Looking back, it seems almost bizarre that Theresa May has been reluctant to play the 'Tory Blue' card in her wardrobe so far as Prime Minister. After all, Margaret Thatcher often wore her political affiliation unashamedly head-to-toe, opting for cobalt dresses and suits throughout her years as PM for everything from conferences to elections and evening dinners.

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power suit in the workplace

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It's a normal Tuesday morning in the office and people are staring at me. They look me up and down as I fill my water bottle. They give me side eye in the lift. This is not an anxiety dream. This is real life. My appearance is inspiring unspoken questions in my colleagues. Namely: what on earth is she wearing? And why?

What I am wearing is an Isabel Marant suit. It is woollen, grey and double breasted, with burgundy stripes and softly padded shoulders. In the Guardian's proudly dressed-down environment, where jeans and T-shirts are practically compulsory, I am an aberration.

It's not just scruffy journalists who don't wear suits in 2017. The world of work is in flux, and the world of workwear with it. In an age of telecommuting and the gig economy, the old rules are eroding. Formal attire is not extinct, quite yet, but it is endangered. MPs are no longer required to wear ties in the House of Commons; titans of industry wear hoodies as often as pinstriped suits.

As we face these anxieties, trust the fashion industry, in all of its contrariness, to back the corporate look in a big way, with designers from Céline to Calvin Klein sending suits down the catwalk. Meanwhile, a wonkier take on office wear - shirts spliced with blazers, herringbone jackets fashioned into strapless dresses - has become the calling card of brands including Palmer//Harding and Monse. Menswear has gone managerial, too. At Balenciaga the concept has spread from the clothes to the entire brand aesthetic, with business cards used as show invitations and boardroom carpet providing the backdrop for ad campaigns.

Fashion's corporate fascination has piqued my own interest in trouser suits for the first time since graduation. My usual work clothes are - and I deliberately employ a fancy word here to make this seem more aspirational - deshabille. The hard-cornered boardroom aesthetic isn't part of my fashion vocabulary for the same reason that I don't have a LinkedIn profile. Working in the dressed-down media is a big part of my identity, as is the lack of delineation between office and weekend clothes. On the moodboard in my mind's eye is Kate Moss's bedhead hair and the tousled insouciance of Carine Roitfeld 's casually misbuttoned silk blouse. Sadly, crumpled chic is rather less iconic the way I wear it - not least because I'm 5ft tall - but I'd rather be a bit of a mess than look as though I'm trying too hard.

Wearing a suit feels physically weird. It's a lot more fabric than I would usually put on my body. I'm hot. So hot that I tug at my collar like a dodgy banker in a movie about insider trading. Meanwhile, my colleagues appraise me, coolly. "It's a conspicuous look," one says. Another adds that I look "intimidating" and "a bit like a carpet". "You look fucking powerful," another says. He is smiling, but I sense a chasm between us. The stiff wool boxes me in, surrounds me completely. I feel weirdly isolated, as though I have set myself up in opposition to the tribe.

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Hannah Marriott wears a soft power shirt by Palmer/Harding available fromMatches Fashion, trousers byPrada with a bag byBalanciaga. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

The next day I trot into the office in high heels and a Stella McCartney checked coat-dress and one co-worker trills: "Oh, here she is, executive realness has arrived." This phrase, well-known to viewers of Paris Is Burning and RuPaul's Drag Race, is pertinent. Wearing double-breasted power tailoring does feel like a form of drag; a fantasy and a performance. It's also screamingly 80s - other colleagues compare me to David Byrne and Working Girl - harking back to an era when power dressing manuals such as John T Molloy's The Woman's Dress For Success Book advised females to smash the glass ceiling with their shoulder pads. Molloy's manifesto makes exhausting reading. Blouses should not be too high-necked or too revealing. Haircuts should not be too long or too short. Suits should ape men's tailoring but femininity should be subtly preserved. Women should avoid sweaters and floral patterns "which say 'lower class' and loser," he writes, charmingly. The history of women getting dressed for the office is so fraught that it almost feels as though somebody didn't want us there.

Still, power dressing has its benefits. I don't feel small any more. The finer details of my body shape feel irrelevant, which brings with it a sort of confidence. Occasionally, I interpret my own behaviour differently. After work, during my customary sprint from the tube station to my son's childminder, I feel less like an utter failure for resorting to running and more like a high-flying, productive individual for whom walking is not sufficiently quick.

I like this feeling of pulled-together efficiency. But the exaggerated lines of this outfit - the shoulder pads - are making me self-conscious. I feel like a throwback to an era when a different battle was being fought. Power dressing is still fraught with difficulty for women, of course, as the furore caused by Hillary Clinton's scrunchies and Theresa May's leather trousers proves. But the suit is not the neat solution that it pretended to be in the 80s. Author and editor Tina Brown, a keen suit wearer until recently, says: "When I look back I see how very overdressed we were with bigger shoulders. There was a sense that we had to be almost aggressively put together to make a statement, which is not where we are now or where we want to be."

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Hannah Marriott in a coat dress by Stella McCartney. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

The next outfit on my agenda is very different: a wilfully anti-fashion fitted shirt, tie and tie clip, inspired by the menswear catwalks of Balenciaga, Martine Rose and Gosha Rubchinskiy. This looked achingly cool on the catwalks. Recreated via an M&S shirt and Acne Studios trousers because my body is not long enough to do menswear, it does not look cool on me. Alistair O'Neill, professor of fashion history and theory at Central Saint Martins, reminds me that this trend is all about context. Fashion designers have long been fascinated by workwear - think of the lumberjack shirts worn in city centres, not forests. This time it's white-collar work being mined for inspiration. True Gosha disciples, he points out, would wear this "to a club, or to go shopping, or when off to the skate park. The dissociation from office culture is what will make the clothes so enjoyable to wear by those who will consume them as fashion." Sadly, I am not hip enough to make this look work. I feel a bit like Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids, with a touch of Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer, brisk and no-nonsense, as though I am holding an invisible clipboard. Or, as a co-worker says: "I'm scared that you're about to make us do a team-building exercise."

The fourth and final look is a breeze, literally and figuratively. It's a billowing take on a striped shirt from Palmer//Harding. For the first time in days, I am not overheating. When I walk into the office my colleagues seem relieved. "I'm into it," our stylist says - the ultimate compliment. Then she strokes the fabric of the cuff, appreciatively. I am approachable, again.

The shirt is the perfect soft power garment. I also love the bag I carry with it: a huge Balenciaga tote with corporate-style logos running across it diagonally. The logos bring to mind the branding of desk phones and photocopiers; the unglamorous insignia that permeated our lives before the sleek black and grey lines of iPhones and iMacs took over. It is these details - the little logos, the business cards and tie clips - that are so evocative. They remind me of how much has changed in office lives, in the 15 years since I started working, and how much will continue to change. You know, when the robots take over. Against this context, the mundanity of an office - its paperclips, staplers and tea runs - has become a source of nostalgia, something to be cherished.

Meanwhile, I'm glad that, for the most part, shoulder pads have gone the way of fax machines and Filofaxes. But I would wear a suit again.
This article appears in the autumn/winter 2017 edition of The Fashion, the Guardian and the Observer's biannual fashion supplement

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How fashion's new obsession with office dressing made me feel like an 80s throwback

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It's a normal Tuesday morning in the office and people are staring at me. They look me up and down as I fill my water bottle. They give me side eye in the lift. This is not an anxiety dream. This is real life. My appearance is inspiring unspoken questions in my colleagues.

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Book

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The Fashioned Body provides a wide-ranging and original overview of fashion and dress from an historical and sociological perspective. Where once fashion was seen as marginal, it has now entered into core economic discourse focused around ideas about 'cultural' and 'creative' work as a major driver of developed economies.

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When women charged the corporate world in the late 1970s and early '80s, they did as any creature of prey would: they camouflaged themselves. Though André Courrèges introduced body-conscious pantsuits in '64, and Yves Saint Laurent his Le Smoking two years later, skirts remained standard until women began to discover, in the words of Margaret Thatcher's stylist, that ''she was in a man's world, and she had to look the part.'' And so was born the female power suit. Wide-cut, concealing and double-breasted, the suits, by designers like Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, had oversize shoulder pads, which served as both a bulking agent and an armor, and were styled with minimal concessions to femininity. Makeup looked more like war paint than ornament, and hair was teased out - hopeful intimidation-tactic chic.

Within a decade, designers like Donna Karan and Giorgio Armani took it upon themselves to cut a corrective pattern: Suiting slimmed down and softened up, and the female form was allowed to announce itself once more. The proportions of just a few years prior began to look like forced posturing. A silhouette that was once empowering now had the opposite effect, appearing more like a miscalculation of the means necessary to get ahead.

Throughout the '90s and into the very recent past, women wore to work what they might wear to dinner: silk blouses; tailored pants or jeans. No longer was the office a site of self-erasure and obligatory disguise, but a place where one could reveal not only gender but personality, too.

This fall's runways looked back to those costumes worn by women during the age of excess, but remade them as studies of masculine minimalism. At Balenciaga, barefaced models stalked down the catwalk as robotic office drones. At Dries Van Noten, wool trousers ballooned with pleats and white shirts billowed with a crisp surplus of cotton. The blazers at Calvin Klein were Goodwill-remnant-boxy; at Céline, the indigo suiting was so oversize that the jacket sleeves obscured the hands of models, making them resemble little girls dressed in their father's clothing. Overcoats at Jil Sander and Stella McCartney were voluminous enough to hide a banker's box full of discovery documents. Seldom were the looks modified at all for a woman's body. Busts and hips were obscured, and the palette was a spectrum most often seen under fluorescent lights - corporate blues, pallor grays and acid whites. These clothes are a reminder of a time when women understood they had to fight for a seat at the table - an era we hope, with each decade, is at last behind us. ''It's not what you are that counts, it's what they think you are,'' Andy Warhol once said - a sentiment that resonates with many women as they get dressed for work in the morning.

Of course, what appears on the runways doesn't always translate, at least not right away, to real (office) life. But single pieces do - a monk strap here, an expanded blazer there. Such items have taken on new significance in the year since Hillary Clinton campaigned in pantsuits and then all but disappeared from our lives: What once looked like power dressing now seems more like mourning garb.

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What Does New '80s-Inspired Workwear Say About Women - and Power?

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When women charged the corporate world in the late 1970s and early '80s, they did as any creature of prey would: they camouflaged themselves.

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In 1990, Madonna was as astronomically popular as a boundary-bulldozing, unapologetically bacchanalian performance artist could get. Drawing from Harlem drag balls, "Vogue" went Number One nearly worldwide. The tour showcasing it, Blond Ambition, mixed spectacle with social commentary so sharply that it reinvented the pop concert and yielded the smash documentary Truth or Dare. And that year's The Immaculate Collection, her first greatest-hits set, would eventually rank among the world's biggest-ever albums, despite MTV banning its gender-blurring and cinematically exquisite "Justify My Love" video.

Some loathed this classically trained dancer/DIY provocateur - a megastar peer of Prince and Michael Jackson since her 1984 blockbuster Like a Virgin - with a venom reserved for successful women forging their own path. But for her vast audience, she was nothing less than liberating, and her uninterrupted string of hits defined pop for a decade. What some considered violations of taste made her more commanding: Even the way she toyed with ordinarily unflappable talk show hosts like David Letterman was more rock & roll than actual rock stars.

Nearly everything changed two years later with Erotica and Sex. Released respectively on October 20th and 21st, 1992, the first fruits of her multimedia Maverick entertainment company weren't flops; her fifth studio album, Erotica racked up six million sales worldwide and yielded several hits, while Sex - an elaborate coffee table book created with fashion photographer Steven Meisel and Fabien Baron of Harper's Bazaar - sold out its limited 1.5 million printing in a few days, an unparalleled success for a $50 photography folio bound in metal and sealed in a Mylar bag to evoke condoms. It remains one of the most in-demand out-of-print publications of all time.

But both record and book, despite a few positive reviews, inspired widespread vitriol. "There's nothing erotic about it, unless one finds the idea of a singing death mask sexy." That was Entertainment Weekly's take on Erotica's rendition of "Fever," but it summed up many assessments of the entire album. Others appreciated Sex's forthright presentation of LGBTQ sexuality and S&M even less. "Of course, some of us actually like the opposite sex; some of us believe it is possible to have great sex without whips, third parties or domestic pets," groused not some reactionary macho windbag, but a female film critic for The New York Times.

Why did projects Madonna intended to open minds shut so many down?

As her stardom snowballed through the Eighties and early Nineties, AIDS decimated the scene that helped birth Madonna. Taking music and fashion cues from lower Manhattan's punk rebelliousness and midtown's disco hedonism, pre-stardom Madonna was a fixture in the bohemian underground chronicled by photographer Nan Goldin in her autobiographical The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a likely Sex influence, along with the severe stylization of Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Robert Mapplethorpe. By 1992, AIDS claimed Goldin's subjects, Mapplethorpe himself, much of the art world (including Madonna's friend Keith Haring), and a growing chunk of Madonna's audience. It also killed and would go on to kill her cohorts, including Blond Ambition dancer Gabriel Trupin. Just as racism and the Black Lives Matter movement shaped Beyoncé's Lemonade, AIDS and ACT UP - the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the direct action advocacy and educational group whose motto was "Silence = Death" - yielded Erotica and Sex.

Madonna previewed both works with the lead single and video for "Erotica," which boldly picked up where "Justify My Love" left off, and is narrated by Mistress Dita, her Sex dominatrix alter ego. "Give it up, do as I say," she growls over gritty funk that combines the clatter of R&B's New Jack Swing with house music's heavy bottom. "Give it up and let me have my way."

But in much of what follows on the LP, the woman behind the vixen doesn't get what she wants: Her relationships fall apart as she awakens from spells cast by deceptive lovers ("Bye Bye Baby," "Waiting," "Words"). Booze, chain-smoking, and anonymous sexcan't numb the pain ("Bad Girl"), and a friend steals her man ("Thief of Hearts"). Meanwhile, comrades die ("In This Life") while kindred outcasts struggle ("Why's It So Hard"). "I'm not happy this way," she sings in "Bad Girl." Sensuality was merely part of the picture: Erotica is Madonna's concept album about love and intimacy under the shadow of plague.

In excerpts from his studio diary, Erotica's co-producer/songwriter Shep Pettibone - a skilled remixer who helped Eighties dance grooves evolve from disco to house music - archived the singer's feedback on the album's early slick mixes. "I hate them," she said. "If I had wanted the album to sound like that, I'd have worked with [earlier collaborator] Patrick Leonard in L.A." Instead, Madonna demanded rawness, "as if it were recorded in an alley at 123rd Street in Harlem."

And so her "Vogue" collaborator reverted to the rhythm-intensive immediacy of his remixes as he reworked much of the album until it boomed, banged and sizzled like his increasingly popular remixes: Pettibone's version of "Express Yourself" was the one heard in Madonna's massive video. Instead of composing a radio-targeted album later reshaped for the clubs, Pettibone, together with Madonna, and André Betts - a newcomer who co-produced "Justify My Love" with Lenny Kravitz - made Erotica resemble an alternately party-minded and private collection of 12-inch singles. Even ballads like "Bad Girl" take arrangement cues from club music; in this case, a somber, slo-mo slant on Black Box's piano-pounding house anthems.

Unlike Erotica, which contrasts moods and tempos but maintains a deep and yearning sonic continuity, Sex is varied in style and content. Some shots are straightforward, such as the introductory snaps of Madonna cavorting with two tattooed and pierced lesbian skinheads. The authenticity of her playmates accentuates the fastidiousness of her makeup and the newness of her fetish-wear, which makes Madonna look like a tourist. There's little less sexy than that.

Other photos are open to interpretation: One features four masculine figures standing at urinals with Madonna superimposed in pink. The clash of iconography and grain of the image means it takes some staring to notice one has a hand on another's ass - and even more scrutiny to realize these two apparent dudes are actually women; probably the same butches in the earlier tableau. Here Madonna looks like she's visited that same seedy men's room, and the double exposure insinuates it's on her mind. She's not alone: When bigots obsess over transgender folk in public restrooms, this is what they're imagining. They'd deny the compositional beauty of the image, but there it plainly is, contrasted and highlighted by the sleaze.

Clearly she intended to instigate more than that era's version of the far right: One of the most realistic photos depicts her in a gymnasium under a basketball hoop with books tossed about and a school uniform half off. One guy holds her between his legs, and another guy's hand is poised to explore her naked crotch. There's more than a suggestion of struggle: Only her strained smile signifies consent.

Penned by Madonna, the text also varies in tone. Sometimes she's acting out scenarios likely avoided in real life. Elsewhere she's clearly speaking her own mind, yet with the disclaimer, "Nothing in this book is true," which, to follow her logic, might be a lie. So when she wrote, "The women who are doing [porn] want to do it: No one is holding a gun to their head," critics lambasted the musician. Given that Madonna posed nude in 1978 when she was broke and couldn't stop Penthouse and Playboy from publishing the results in 1985, this statement comes across as atypically naïve.

Because Sex and Erotica launched Maverick and her renegotiated $60 million contract with Time Warner, speculation over the Material Girl's earnings framed nearly every critical analysis. But Madonna's moxie has never been just about profit and fame. As her charities and donations have attested for decades, she also aims to make the world a better place: She just opened a pediatric hospital in Malawi. Back then, she taught soft-core sex ed.

"I think the problem is that everybody's so uptight about [sex] that they make it into something bad when it isn't, and if people could talk about it freely, we would have people practicing more safe sex," she told Vanity Fair at the time. "We wouldn't have people sexually abusing each other, because they wouldn't be so uptight to say what they really want, what they really feel." Maybe that's a little simplistic, but it's genuinely humanitarian. At a time when the straight media essentially characterized all sex as dangerous, Madonna tried to illustrate that it could be safe and stimulating, particularly if we open our minds, free our bodies, and try something besides standard intercourse.

Nowadays, S&M and explicit LGBTQ imagery is never more than a few clicks away, but the internet was in its infancy in 1992: Photos of sexual activity were exclusive to specialty bookstores until Robert Mapplethorpe's headline-grabbing 1989 retrospective The Perfect Moment, which placed S&M and interracial gay sexuality onto museum walls. The resulting controversy - inflamed by North Carolina's obstructionist Senator Jesse Helms and his attempt to prevent the National Endowment for the Arts from funding "obscenity" - engaged viewers in a moral debate. Accordingly, Sex was never about pretty pictures.

Twenty-five years after publication, it's easier to differentiate between Sex's weaknesses and strengths. The sequence with pop rapper Vanilla Ice - Madonna's then-boyfriend - was always tacky, and the section in which she sandwiches herself between hip-hop's Big Daddy Kane and supermodel Naomi Campbell is more stilted than ever. Actress Isabella Rossellini - who appears in a man's suit caressing Madonna and her female friends with an emotional intimacy missing from those celebrity shots - nailed the book's major limitation when she told The Huffington Post in 2014, "Madonna was almost too beautiful, too perfect ... to have that vulnerability or the sense of shock that a regular, more normal, not-so-professional fitted body could convey." No matter how many personas the icon tries on like a pop-art Cindy Sherman, Madonna is Madonna when she takes off her clothes - maybe even more so.

Berliner Studio/BEI/REX/Shutterstock

And yet I recognize her intentions. Madonna and I are of the same generation, and before she was a star, we'd party at the same NYC clubs like Danceteria, where her career began. I lost my dad to cancer when I was young just as she lost her mom at age five, and so I know all too well how grieving reactivates that original deprivation, like when my very first lover died of AIDS 30 years ago. After that went co-workers, mentors and friends until the mid-Nineties, when combinations of antiviral medicines slowed and then ultimately stopped HIV's progression for many patients who followed their medication regimen with military precision.

But until then, if you lived in a major city and were gay or an intravenous drug user, sex worker or among their intimates, you were an endangered species. There was no cure, and our government was indifferent. Breaking their silence was essential to our survival and sanity. So when Madonna launched her business with Sex and Erotica, LGBTQ people knew she wasn't exploitative: She was trying to save our lives by politicizing her anger. The frustration of Erotica that critics of the era bemoaned, we applauded because it was our own. Sure, she borrowed some of our fabulousness, but she also gave back plenty.

Accordingly, Erotica is also filled with love. The album's steamiest - and funniest - cut, "Where Life Begins," celebrates cunnilingus with cheeky wordplay, but also sweetness and warmth: Crooning over Andre Betts' hip-hop ballad beats, she beckons the listener, "Go down where I cannot hide," as if to suggest her womanhood is this chameleon's constant truth.

The album's most driving dance track, the hit "Deeper and Deeper," revels in romantic surrender. But LGBTQ people interpret it more specifically about embracing same-sex attraction. "This feeling inside, I can't explain/But my love is alive, and I'm never gonna hide it again," Madonna belts in the concluding verse, hitting that declaration harder than anything in her catalog. Set in a pansexual nightclub much like Danceteria, its video pays tribute to Andy Warhol, here represented by actor Udo Kier - a Warhol graduate who also plays Sex's dungeon master. But it also tips a hat to Madonna's late mentor Christopher Flynn, who introduced the straight-A student and cheerleader to the gay discos of Detroit.

"I always felt like I was a freak when I was growing up and that there was something wrong with me because I couldn't fit in anywhere," she told director Gus Van Zant in Interview in 2010. "But when he took me to that club, he brought me to a place where I finally felt at home."

Her elegiac "In This Life" offers gratitude to Flynn and her late roommate Martin Burgoyne while addressing AIDS head-on. "He was only 23/Gone before he had his time," she sings of Burgoyne; "He was like a father to me ... taught me to respect myself," she croons about Flynn. Like "This Used to Be My Playground," the similarly mournful League of Their Own chart-topper released four months before Erotica but written and recorded midway through the album, this lament reveals the wounded child concealed behind her workaholism. Her fragility makes the singing stronger.

This sincerity spills into "Rain," the sunny single that revived sales eight months after the album's release, and the final track, "Secret Garden." Madonna ponders her feminine essence as a hidden paradise of pleasure, a Garden of Eden, and she reveals insecurities ordinarily concealed, hoping they'll blossom into self-knowledge. "I wonder if I'll ever know/where my place is, where my face is/I know it's in here somewhere," she whispers over a thrusting bass line, a gyrating breakbeat and breezy jazz piano that wanders with her thoughts. When she does sing on the chorus, she's not the ballsy belter of her hits, but an aching, affectation-free spirit waiting for "a place that I can be born," as if the true Madonna hadn't yet arrived.

REX

A quarter century after Sex and Erotica, the era's lingering image of the superstar is the shot of her fully naked - tresses teased and face painted like a Fifties starlet, a cigarette in her lips, and her feet in stilettos - thumbing a ride on a bucolic Florida street. Her nude femininity is perfectly sculpted, yet she exudes the assurance of a suited male bureaucrat. It's the book's most transgressive image, for it presents a woman self-objectifying, calling the shots instead of following them, sharing her amorous dreams with the pluck usually reserved for straight white men. There's no submissiveness; instead, its carnal opposite, flaunted while politicians and religious leaders preached abstinence as the only civilized response to a virus spreading throughout the world and claiming millions of lives. Instead, Madonna cast herself as Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Bunny.

This defiance flipped out men and women alike.

"I divide my career from before and after the Sex book," she told Spin four years later. " Sex was my fantasy, and I made money off of it. That is a no-no."

Her bravado lingered through Body of Evidence, a BDSM-charged thriller, and the Maverick-produced, straight-to-video drama Dangerous Game. Both were widely panned, as well as her 1994 Late Show appearance in which she asked David Letterman to smell her panties, smoked a cigar and said, "fuck" 14 times. In between, she staged her Erotica- centric Girlie Show World Tour, which furthered Blond Ambition's fearless exuberance, but only played three U.S. cities.

Madonna's sound and image then softened substantially with Evita, motherhood and wistful serenades like "Take a Bow" (her longest-running U.S. Number One) before she regained her audacity via 1998's soul-searching Ray of Light and 2000's experimental Music. And although some of her subsequent output has followed trends rather than setting them,she still puts on a rarely rivaled live show by foregrounding her body as the primary site of her art. That was daring in her Erotica/ Sex period. Doing that today, as a 59-year-old woman, makes Madonna even more radical. Watch her fiery acceptance speech last December at Billboard's Women in Music shindig if you think she's lost her edge.

"I was called a whore and a witch," she recalled of that epoch. "One headline compared me to Satan. I said, 'Wait a minute, isn't Prince running around with fishnets and high heels and lipstick with his butt hanging out?' Yes, he was. But he was a man. This was the first time I truly understood women do not have the same freedom as men. ...I [felt] like the most hated woman in the world."

Today, Erotica's melancholy desire is all over the boldest substantial pop from Lana Del Rey and Father John Misty to Frank Ocean and Beyoncé, and its dirty house grooves animate chart divas from Katy Perry on "Swish Swish" to underground rappers such as Zebra Katz on "Ima Read." Let's not forget that Grace Jones and Debbie Harry made Madonna possible. But there's an even more direct line between Madonna's unrepentant and emphatically female sensuality - particularly in this incendiary phase - and what followed from Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Ariana Grande, Tove Lo and now Cardi B. Without Madonna, modern pop as we know it would be unimaginable. Meanwhile, Sex's provocations have permeated advertising, which was hardly the point. (Meisel's wood-paneled 1995 campaign for Calvin Klein evoked teen porn so brazenly that the Justice Department got involved and CK pulled the ads.)

However, popular music and art are no longer thoroughly defined by a straight white masculine perspective. Nearly everything is more sexualized, and that's not entirely positive, but alpha male artists and submissive female subjects don't dominate as much as they've done for centuries. We've finally hit a tipping point when popular culture is offering more viewpoints and voices: That's why there's a rise in fascism to suppress them. Sex and Erotica's greatest contribution remains their embrace of the Other, which in this case means queerness, blackness, third-wave feminism, exhibitionism and kink. Madonna took what was marginalized at the worst of the AIDS epidemic, placed it in an emancipated context, and shoved it into the mainstream for all to see and hear.

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Why Madonna's Masterpiece 'Erotica,' Defiant 'Sex' Book Still Matter

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In 1990, Madonna was as astronomically popular as a boundary-bulldozing, unapologetically bacchanalian performance artist could get. Drawing from Harlem drag balls, "Vogue" went Number One nearly worldwide. The tour showcasing it, Blond Ambition, mixed spectacle with social commentary so sharply that it reinvented the pop concert and yielded the smash documentary Truth or Dare.

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The first female artist to create a statue for Parliament Square in central London has unveiled the final design.

Gillian Wearing, who will produce a sculpture of Millicent Fawcett, the suffragist leader, revealed her design on Tuesday, shortly before its construction application was granted conditional approval by Westminster city council.

A detailed model of the monument shows Fawcett holding a sign that reads "Courage calls to courage everywhere", taken from a speech she gave after the death of fellow campaigner Emily Wilding Davison at the 1913 Epsom Derby.

Wearing also incorporated one of Fawcett's brooches into the design, borrowing the original from the Fawcett Society so it could be scanned and cast into bronze.

The Turner prize-winning artist will be the first person to produce a statue of a female subject for the square.

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has been working closely with the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, to ensure the statue can be unveiled for the centenary of the Representation of the Peoples Act 1918 in February, which granted some women over 30 the vote for the first time.

Wearing was named as the artist behind the statue in April, after a campaign in May last year by Caroline Criado-Perez, who attracted 85,000 signatures to an online petition that called for a statue of a woman to be erected in the square.

This year, the government announced that the monument would be paid for from a £5m fund to celebrate the centenary of women's suffrage.

Khan said: "As a proud feminist at City Hall, I have given Caroline's inspired campaign my full support and am delighted that we have been given the go-ahead to bring the first ever statue of a woman to the centre of British democracy in Parliament Square - something which is long overdue.

"Next year marks a century since the start of women's suffrage in the UK - one of our country's most pivotal moments - and our mission now is to ensure that we can begin the centenary celebrations with the unveiling of this landmark piece.

"This will be one of the most momentous and significant statues of our time and I know that Gillian Wearing's exceptional talent and unique insight will do great justice to the movement and Millicent Fawcett's legacy.

"We want this statue to depict the strength and determination of the women who dedicated their lives to the fight for women's suffrage and to inspire many generations to come - and I know Gillian's creation will do just that."

Wearing said: "I am really delighted that planning has been granted. Now Millicent Fawcett's statue can stand as an equal among male statues in Parliament Square."

Javid also welcomed the news: "Aged just 22, Millicent Fawcett gave her first speech on women's suffrage and then campaigned relentlessly for nearly 50 years before the vote was finally given to women.

"I am proud that this beautifully designed statue of Fawcett in Parliament Square will inspire a new generation to champion her struggle for equality and women's rights."

* This article was amended on 20 September 2017. The original referred to Millicent Fawcett as a suffragette. Although she worked alongside suffragettes, who employed different, and more militant tactics in their campaign, Fawcett herself is more accurately described as a suffragist. This has been corrected.

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Artist unveils design for Parliament Square suffragist statue

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The first female artist to create a statue for Parliament Square in central London has unveiled the final design. Gillian Wearing, who will produce a sculpture of Millicent Fawcett, the suffragist leader, revealed her design on Tuesday, shortly before its construction application was granted conditional approval by Westminster city council.

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From Theresa May's don't-mess-with-me chain necklaces to Coco Chanel's soft power pearls, statement necklaces have an impressive history as a power prop

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Whatever you think about her legacy, there's little doubt Margaret Thatcher - or her advisers anyway - knew how to work a look. As the UK's first female prime minister, she was under unparalleled scrutiny, and her wardrobe developed into an armour to deflect it. Like the Queen's signature sugar-almond suiting and court shoes, Thatcher found her public face through clothes and stuck with it to the end. Here are five elements that made up the Iron Lady's style.

The hair

While running for election in 1979, Thatcher's hair had some semblance of life - at times, it even looked as though it moved. That all changed once she reached in power. Post-1979, the hair - like her - stayed fixed in place. Thatcher underwent a subtle, but noticeable, makeover. Gone were the brightly coloured shiftdresses of the late 70s as Thatcher gravitated towards suits. A year before the power-dressing 80s, she predated, and possibly contributed to, that fashion trend. Her hair did too. Swept back from her face, it was like a helmet - held together by several cans of hairspray that, one imagines, could stand the force of one of those famous four-hour snoozes or any fight with Arthur Scargill. A visit onboard the Falklands-bound HMS Hermes, however, proved too much. Pictured in 1982, her hair was, for once, less than helmet-like. This was a one-time-only occurrence. She made sure it didn't happen again.

The pearls

Few things survived from Thatcher's pre-prime-ministerial wardrobe but pearls were an exception. Photographs from the 50s onwards show her wearing them - necklace and earrings - as the picture-perfect housewife. She even wore them for her wedding day in 1951, and apparently didn't take them off again. Recent pictures showed them still firmly in place, more than 60 years later. They make sense, of course. A twinset and pearls is the epitome of traditionalism - Thatcher may have dispensed with the knitwear (far too domestic, one suspects) but the pearls do their job handsomely. Expensive but not frivolous or decadent like diamonds (far too Elizabeth Taylor), they spoke of reliability. Seen as classic without being blingy, they fit into a look that wants to spell out reliability and no-nonsense conservatism. To put it another way, they're "this lady's not for turning" in a necklace.

The blue suit

Thatcher's style wasn't subtle - see her colour scheme. The Duchess of Cambridge wore a tennis outfit to watch Wimbledon (geddit?), and Thatcher could be accused of matching her for literalness long ago. For her first day as prime minister, she sartorially demonstrated that the Conservatives were back in the most obvious way; she wore Tory blue from head to toe, with a boxy jacket and matching skirt. A somewhat clumsy symbol, but it was one she liked. She was back in blue recently, meeting David Cameron in a shiny knee-length coatdress for their dinner at the Goring Hotel in 2011. Notably, Thatcher's allegiance to the colour wavered for her resignation speech in 1990. Foreshadowing Labour's dominance under Tony Blair seven years later, and perhaps hinting at her feelings about the events that took her out of office, her suit and lipstick were both blood-red.

The pussybow blouse

If the hair and suit represented the hard side of Thatcher - a woman-of-steel armour in a world of men's suits - her advisers were savvy enough to know there had to be something that played up her femininity. Rarely, if ever, seen in trousers, the skirt suit could only go so far, especially with those shoulderpads. Enter the pussybow blouse, a sloaney staple in the early 80s - Princess Diana was also partial. Printed, possibly polyester and with that rather silly floppy bow at the neck, the idea was to soften her look and even, dare I say, add an element of fashion into a practical, power-centric wardrobe. She certainly thought the pussybow was a fashion statement. While hosting a famous dinner for fashion designers including Zandra Rhodes and Katherine Hamnett at Downing Street in 1983 - when Hamnett used the opportunity, and her T-shirt, to protest against Pershing - Thatcher wore a theatrical velvet number topped by, you guessed it, a pussybow blouse.

The handbag and gloves

It may just seem like a mere receptacle but fashion knows the handbag is so much more - especially for power players. While Anna Wintour famously never carries one - all the better to demonstrate she is transported by car everywhere she goes - Thatcher's was a different kind of power. Hers gained a life of its own - or certainly a word: "handbagging". Used by her ministers in the 80s to describe a dressing-down by Thatcher, it was prompted by the prime minister's everpresent handbag. Square and black, it hung from her often-gloved arm (in a rather old-fashioned move, Thatcher wore ladylike gloves - even with eveningwear - well into the 80s). It was there for her first day in Downing Street for both her first and third term, on a golf cart with Ronald Reagan and accessorised with a hardhat on visits to building sites. Although what it contained remained a mystery - this was before mobile phones - she certainly got her use out of it. Auctioned by Christie's in 2011, the Asprey style bag she owned for 30 years was sold for £25,000.

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The Margaret Thatcher look: from the pearls to the handbag

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Whatever you think about her legacy, there's little doubt Margaret Thatcher - or her advisers anyway - knew how to work a look. As the UK's first female prime minister, she was under unparalleled scrutiny, and her wardrobe developed into an armour to deflect it.

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80s Fashion Pictures

For women in the 1980s, fashion was colorful, bold, and in some cases, outrageous. Anyone who grew up in or was around in the 1980s surely remembers some of the fashion trends that emerged that decade. Some were positive, and some were gladly put into the back of closets afterward. Take a look at the good, the bad and the ugly of 1980s fads and fashions.

Women's Menswear and Work Styles

If you ever saw the TV show Dynasty, you saw some of the most massive shoulder pads ever made. Alexis Carrington and Krystle Carrington were strong, dramatic characters, and they needed clothing to match. It wasn't long before women's suits and then shirts were made with shoulder pads already inserted. Some pads were removable, but others were permanent and gave women of the day a profile to match that of any football linebacker.

Casual and Workout Apparel

Casual wear in the 80s had a look that was uniquely its own.

Mini Skirts and Leggings

While mini skirts first gained prominence in the 1960s, they came back with a vengeance in the 1980s. The difference was that where the 1960s mini was usually a dress paired with go-go boots, the 1980s mini was often made of tight, clingy material that contained spandex or was made in denim. Of course, the 1980s mini was also often worn with legwarmers or leggings.

Exercise Clothes

The aerobic exercise craze hit full force in the eighties. Any self-respecting fitness buff was outfitted in leotards, headbands, and legwarmers. Legwarmers soon left the gym when women decided these fashion accessories looked as good with jeans and mini skirts as they did with tights. Legwarmers were available in nearly every color imaginable and were seen on many legs during their heyday.

Flashdance Fashion

When Jennifer Beals sported her off-the-shoulder slouchy top on Flashdance movie posters, a new fashion trend was born. Women everywhere jumped on the Flashdace fashion bandwagon and wore their shirts off their shoulders. Of course, this was a more casual look and wasn't appropriate for the office, but at malls, schools, and anywhere else they could get away with it, shoulders were bared.

Neon

Neon colors aren't the easiest to wear, but that didn't stop girls and women from sporting these super bright colors during the 1980s. Tops, skirts and jewelry were designed in garish neon greens, yellows, pinks and blues. Some makeup lines were also designed to match the clothes, so neon ruled the day for a brief time until women decided that all those bright colors were maybe just a little too bright, after all.

Acid Washed Jeans

What could pair better with the neons than tapered acid-washed jeans, with or without the ankle zippers and bows? Those were another 1980s fashion staple.

Lingerie-Inspired and Ultra-Feminine Looks

Perhaps in direct contrast to the menswear styles and shoulder pads the women of the eighties loved to wear, there were lingerie-inspired clothing styles running rampant in the streets as well. Feminine and delicate, women's garments with lace were popular during this decade. Perhaps one of the most memorable lingerie-inspired pieces was the cone bra bustier, modeled by Madonna.

Equally feminine were the poufy dresses of the 80s. Ruffles were big, literally, and there were lots of them. Some dresses were short and puffed up all the way around the skirt while others took the slim silhouette of a work-friendly dress featuring a modest bodice and pencil skirt and added a large ruffle or two around the middle.

Preppy Style

There was more to preppy style for women than Keds and dresses made with puffy sleeves and lots of fabric, though those were important components to the preppy eighties style. There were also turtlenecks, blazers, sweaters tied around the neck, knee high socks, pencil skirts, and pullover sweaters layered over button-ups or turtlenecks. Men and women both sported the colorful polo shirt with khaki pants look. Plaid was in, and so were wrap skirts that tied or buttoned at the hip.

Accessories

80s accessories were bright, colorful, and unique.

Jewelry

When Madonna first came on the 1980s music scene, she was dripping in cheap costume jewelry. As her popularity soared, so did her following of wannabes who dressed like her, styled their hair like her and adopted the trend of wearing tons of bracelets and long, hanging necklaces, often sporting crosses.

Scrunchies

The scrunchie likewise made its appearance known during this decade. It's a perfect hair accessory for the gym; it keeps your hair out of your face and can be easily washed. When legwarmers crossed over from the gym, so did the hair scrunchie.

Gloves

Whether it was a sequined glove made popular by Michael Jackson or the lacy, fingerless gloves Madonna sported, gloves were back on the scene. They were just much different from the pristine white gloves that ladies had worn for ages.

Headbands

Another popular hair accessory was the headband. Preppy women loved them.

Fashion Influences

What movies, stars and TV shows were most influential during the 1980s, leading the fashion trends? Some of the biggest influences include:

Dynasty, a popular network prime time soap opera

Dallas, another prime time soap opera

Michael Jackson, hugely popular 1980s pop icon

Flashdance, a fitness and dance movie starring Jennifer Beals

Princess Diana, England's newly married princess

Miami Vice, the ultra-cool cop series set in Florida

Aerobics, the high-impact fitness craze of the 80s

One Memorable Decade

While not every eighties fashion for women was great, the era is definitely definable by the clothes women wore. Some of you may have photographs of your eighties fashions, whether they were good or garish. You can still look back with fondness on the trends you followed when Valley Girls, preppies and shoulder pads ruled the day.

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For women in the 1980s, fashion was colorful, bold, and in some cases, outrageous. Anyone who grew up in or was around in the 1980s surely remembers some of the fashion trends that emerged that decade. Some were positive, and some were gladly put into the back of closets afterward.

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BOOK

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and power: how women's sexuality shaped human evolution

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psychology/human sexuality (see also social science - human sexuality)

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social science/women's studies - general

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Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution

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Sex, Time and Power Shlain offers carefully reasoned and certain-to-be-controversial discussions on subjects such as menses, orgasm, masturbation, menopause, circumcision, male aggression, the evolution of language, homosexuality, and the origin of marriage. Full description

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here's a fantastically annoying ad on Spotify at the moment for yet another Hits of the 80s compilation CD. Voiceover man hails "the decade that just won't die" - which is true, even though, along with a large number of like-minded people, I spent most of the 80s doing my best to kill them. But with shoulder pads and bad prints being the order of the day summer-fashion-wise, with Wire magazine championing a genre of music they call "hypnagogic pop" ("it refashions 80s chart pop-rock into a hazy, psychedelic drone") and with the release of two blockbusting remakes on the same day - The Karate Kid and The A-Team - it seems that the 80s zombie everpresence is being reaffirmed, in pop culture and, so I'd argue, just about everywhere else. Like it or not, the 80s are still what made us who we are today.

But why is anyone even bothering to revisit pap like The Karate Kid and crap like The A-Team? Is it just that we're reaching the final splintery barrel scrapings? Or could it be that there were some things that the 80s did much better than we do them now? This is something I have been loth to admit, but I'm starting to come around to it.

My slowly emerging respect, if not love, for the 1980s is not based on any lurking nostalgia I might have for my teenage decade. At the time I hated the time. I was 11 when we kissed 1979 goodbye, with the kids' chorus on Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall succinctly expressing my views on pedagogy, life, the universe and everything (as per Douglas Adams). Much of the coming decade gave me a kind of sick-in-the-back-of-the-mouth cultural nausea. I didn't really get rid of this taste until I decamped to Prague in the spring of 1990. On the streets there, not much had changed since before the Velvet Revolution - the red stars had been removed from the buildings all down Wenceslas Square, soon to be replaced by adverts for pilsner. Prices were still pegged at their communist levels. Jeans, too, were still pegged and stonewashed. But it felt like a different place. And I felt as if I'd escaped from Margaret Thatcher. She was harder to shake off than I anticipated, however.

The 80s turned out to be both the climax and the anticlimax of the cold war - a political conclusion that miraculously sidestepped nuclear war. And the more I think about it - and I've been thinking about it a lot recently - the more I see that it's only as a mess of competing and overlapping micro-cold wars that the 80s can be understood.

Philip Roth, in his lesser-known novella The Prague Orgy, made the clinching observation about the difference between the Soviet bloc and the US. "There, nothing goes and everything matters; here, everything goes and nothing matters." John Lydon put it even more succinctly in the Sex Pistols' Holidays in the Sun: "I'm looking over the wall, and they're looking at me."

The 80s were very much about cold war walls, with "us" on one side and "them" on the other: the west v the east, America v England, left v right. It's hard to see such polarisation in today's pop culture. Everyone admits to guilty pleasures. Everyone sneaks off and enjoys a junk food blowout, a multiplex no-brainer, Girls Aloud. To boycott things entirely seems over-strident, pointless. What do you think you're going to achieve?

But ironic consumption was something that the 80s pioneered. At my university in 1986, the cult movie was Top Gun. Students in groups of eight or 10 would go to see it, again and again. They would single out girls at student discos and serenade them with Unchained Melody. As they boarded buses, they would chant, "I feel the need, the need for speed." They were revelling in the beginnings of a so-bad-it's-good spree that continues to this day.

For some of us, though, bad meant evil. In communist countries during the 1980s, dissidents did their best to annoy, outwit and undermine the apparatchiks with ironic gestures. Their more serious work, though, was the creation of alternative culture - a space where open political debate could take place, where important books were distributed in lovingly typed samizdat editions.

One way I have of understanding my total devotion to the Smiths between 1984 and 1989 is as a minor form of cultural dissidence. The Smiths are rarely seen as a political band - not when compared to the Redskins or even the Jam. Their ideological stance is too easy to parody as an extended bedroom sulk. But Morrissey was one of the few public figures to say anything as overt as "the sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Thatcher escaped unscathed". To go along with being a Smiths fan involved a great deal of anti-consumerism. Meat was murder. Clothes came from charity shops, or your mum's bottom drawer. Music was supplied by genuinely independent labels - and the latest 12-inch remix from Level 42 was a work of the corporate devil. In other words, we were boycotting most of the world.

And this is where it gets complicated, because, looking back, I seem to find myself looking at myself over a wall. From 2010, where everything goes and nothing matters, Britain in the 1980s very much looks like a communist domain where nothing went and everything mattered.

Among the things, pop-culturally, that mattered most of all was Top of the Pops. If a film is bad, these days we say, "I want those two hours back." But if there was a really bad record in the higher reaches of the charts in the 80s, that meant you could anticipate a wasted four minutes of your life, waiting for it to finish and the next bad record to come on. But you couldn't not watch TOTP altogether, because there was just that chance that something life-changing (like the Smiths) might come along.

You weren't entirely alone in this. To see John Peel's grimace after he introduced, say, Barry Manilow was to know that some of "us" were working away in close proximity to white-socked partytime posers like Bruno Brookes or Gary Davies.

It's the "everything matters" aspect of the 80s that has started to turn my opinion of them around. One of the main messages of 80s Hollywood was "you can change your life". Often, this was done in some astonishingly vile ways. There's a mini-genre of movies which I've been having some fun trying to identify: the self-betterment-through-prostitution film. These include American Gigolo and Pretty Woman (1990, but filmed in the previous year). There's also the get-ahead-by-running-a-brothel mini-genre, such as the Tom Cruise vehicle Risky Business or Henry "the Fonz" Winkler's Night Shift - where the brothel is in a morgue. This kind of thing was acceptable then.

But the most iconic cinematic mode of the 80s was the sports training montage, as showcased in Rocky. This was a shortcut way for Hollywood to deal with the growing influence of music videos from MTV (not launched in this-side-of-the-wall Europe until 1987). Soundtracked by crashing synth-drums and AOR power chords, the montage showed self-improvement in catchy action - as the hero or heroine worked till they were musclebound. Ludicrous, I know. But it's hard to find anything with a similar get-ahead conviction these days. Fates tend to be accepted and lived with, not turned around. And, as a result, we're very good at something the 80s did disastrously or not at all - disaster movies.

Similarly, although 80s cinema seemed at the time to be about rapacious individualism, the moral of a film like The Breakfast Club was that if you put a jock, a geek, a criminal, a prom queen and a kook together for long enough, they'll find out they have a lot in common. Compare this to Twilight - imagine the carnage of a Saturday morning detention at Forks high school. Twilight's message is clear: some of us are vampires, some are werewolves, and never the twain shall share a lunchbox.

Rocky was also the template for the rise-from-poverty movie. Poverty being quite a major theme of the 80s, and something that isn't very often mentioned these days. Sylvester Stallone clearly spent much of his early career envying Pacino and De Niro, and turning his films into 90-minute audition tapes for Martin Scorsese. There's a direct lineage through Taxi Driver and Raging Bull to Stallone's Rocky (and his almost-forgotten street fable Paradise Alley) and on through The Karate Kid. At each stage, though, a little of the grit gets washed off, the poverty becomes a little more bogus. What's notable, watching 80s TV and movies now, is how much more gritty and soulful they seem than today's mainstream product. You believe Ralph Macchio's just some scrawny kid; you know Jaden Smith is a gym-honed star-in-the-making.

Not that the 80s weren't obsessively body-conscious. Fitness - be it Jane Fonda's Workout video, jogging or dirty dancing - was all some people cared about. This was the decade which switched us from leisurewear to sportswear, from leather-uppers to Air Jordans. Much of the music seemed to have been created in the hopes of accompanying a sports training montage, in the knowledge that it would be pumped, bumped and thumped to in gyms across the world.

This let's-get-physical dynamic made a strange hybrid when it crossbred with 80s poverty chic. You end up with oddities like Donna Summer's She Works Hard for the Money or Simply Red's Money's Too Tight to Mention. At the time, this seemed frankly hypocritical. Rich pop stars in glossy videos asked When am I Going to Make a Living? and asserted they were living in the Love of the Common People. The question is, where has all this stuff gone? It's not that I'm expecting protest songs in the Download top 40, but there seem to be an awful lot of non-subjects, an awful lot of things which just don't matter.

As I look at it now, 80s pop culture was exactly that - a culture not a monoculture. It tolerated diversity of race, age, appearance. Clearly, the 1970s were the great age of porky, beardy, ugly blokes making great pop (Abba, ELO, 10CC) - but the 80s still allowed the ill-favoured and over-40 to have a mainstream musical presence. Back then, not all pop was made by sexbots from Planet Airbrush. I've been trying to avoid the phrase "a more innocent age", but what else is there to say when you compare Bananarama trogging around the stage looking like your sister's overdressed mates to Lady Gaga's latest outbreak of joyless S&M squarebashing?

True, Lady Gaga is, most people would admit, quite a character. And it's most of all in the creation of strong characters that the 80s seems to beat us hands down. Again, this may be a hangover from cinema of the 70s. Any tyro Hollywood scriptwriter will tell you that they want their plots to be character-driven. But it's high-concept movies that dominate; the pitch comes first, the players can be tacked on later. Mr Miyagi - atrocious stereotype that he is - is a character who managed to transcend the movie he was in. The same goes for The A-Team. It's Mr T's iconic-ironic status that makes the show remarkable.

Maybe it's something paradoxical that I'm starting to treasure from the 80s - the very moments when they were striving to be what we are now, but failed. There's a particular style: the clumpy editing that predated digital; the dodgy complexions that couldn't be fixed in post-production. But there's also substance: the dying lights of 60s idealism and 70s social conscience; the glimpses of a world which, if it had known what really mattered, might have been completely different.
Toby Litt's novel King Death is published by Hamish Hamilton. The A-Team is reviewed on page 10 and The Karate Kid on page 11.
This article was amended on 6 August 2010. The sentence 'Although it was to be another two years before Douglas Adams coined that particular phrase' has been deleted because the phrase, 'life, the universe and everything' had been coined before 1980.

Movies, music and TV genres that the 1980s did best
Film Father-son body swap
This micro-genre's Citizen Kane moment was in 1988, when Tom Hanks wished himself Big. Hanks was beaten to the punch, however, by Like Father Like Son the year before, with Kirk Cameron and Dudley Moore.
Indian burial ground movies
Nothing can curse a house quicker than being built over a graveyard - those vengeful spirits just won't lie still. There are only two of these that count: The Shining and Poltergeist. 1989's Pet Sematary tried the same trick, but it's just not in the same class.
Non-feminist empowerment
After a wave of 70s films showcasing fearless, brilliant women breaking the gender straitjacket, the 80s saw a major variation: step forward dim-bulb Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. But Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda et al did some heavy lifting in this area with Nine to Five (1980). Andrew Pulver
Music Computer rock
As home computers reached awesome new powers of 48k and beyond, much music sprang up around these new machines. Kraftwerk's 1981 Computer World was the ultimate domestic microchip fetish; see also Oakey and Moroder's Together in Electric Dreams, and Gary Numan's Are 'Friends' Electric?
Songs about nuclear war
The frisson of impending apocalypse led to another new pop motif. At one end there was Frankie Goes to Hollywood's chart-topping Two Tribes; at the other, Stoke's pounding hardcore dons Discharge yelling through 1982's seriously harrowing A Hell on Earth.
Lipstick metal
Kiss and Mötley Crüe were silly enough, but the rouge-caked, backcombed, static-shock-hazard likes of Twisted Sister, Hanoi Rocks and Stryper were another level. Tom Hughes
TV Shows about the unemployed
After the first Thatcher recession, unemployment was the 80s' big preoccupation. Boys from the Blackstuff was the decade's Big Drama, but creative responses to the lack of a proper job propped up Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Minder, and Only Fools and Horses.
TV for and about lazy students
Full grants, tenured academics and cheap bedsits conspired to make the 80s student perfect TV fodder. Their scuzzy existences were satirised in The Young Ones, and sofa-dossers were catered for by quiz show Blockbusters.
Glove puppet superstars
Basil Brush and Sooty blazed the trail, but they were kids' stuff. As Tiswas and Going Live's audiences got older, so did the puppets: Spit the Dog, Gordon the Gopher and, biggest of all, Roland Rat (left). He saved TV-am, you know. AP

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The 80s: the best of times, the worst of times

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here's a fantastically annoying ad on Spotify at the moment for yet another Hits of the 80s compilation CD. Voiceover man hails "the decade that just won't die" - which is true, even though, along with a large number of like-minded people, I spent most of the 80s doing my best to kill them.

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We are on the brink of seeing three of the world's richest democracies be led by women. This is a moment to take stock, to measure how attitudes have changed to women in power, and what that means for the licence that they now have to define themselves.

It is always harder on the way to power: Clinton's battles with how to present herself as a woman aspiring to be commander in chief - strong or compliant, outspoken or measured - have threaded through the presidential campaign. In office, it would be what she does that counts. Long ago, Angela Merkel became the most powerful politician in Europe, a standing that made a virtue out of ordinariness. It is Theresa May who seems most interesting, and interested, in how she can use her personal brand to sell a political message.

May has an acute sense of how to manage her public image. Track her trajectory to the top and you track what is acceptable to mainstream opinion, or sometimes what is only just acceptable - one of her skills is her judgment of where people are, and how far it is possible to shift them in her direction, or at least enough of them for her to win the argument. She often does it in policy development: she has been ahead of Conservative opinion on matters ranging from the pressing need to recruit more female MPs, domestic violence and female genital mutilation to the conduct of the police and the need for a full investigation into the Hillsborough disaster.

May is hardly a slave to fashion. But as a Tory MP and now leader and prime minister, she embodies it. What she wears embodies what she wants the party to be. Her wardrobe is an object lesson in brand management.

May was first elected as an MP in 1997, the year of the Labour landslide, the year when there were 101 Labour female MPs. That year, precisely 13 Conservative women were elected. And, in an 1998 interview after she became one of the first new MPs to be given a frontbench job, she was confident that gender was irrelevant. How she has changed.

Back then, the Tories were in shock and in decline after 18 years in power. Recovery seemed distant. Yet, for Conservatives, office is always the principle ambition, and that means it often makes a very unconservative accommodation with social trends. After the 1997 defeat, powerful figures in the party grasped that appearing more female-friendly would be at the heart of modernisation. Soon, May was speaking on women's issues. In 2002, after the second election defeat, she became the first woman to chair the party. That was the year she described the Tories as the "nasty party". It was the year she wore kitten heels.

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May dons a colour-block coat on her first day as prime minister. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

The kitten heels gave May an identity that was separate from her politics. In popular imagination, they were so ... well, unTory. They were a little quirky. They were almost cheeky. They were animal print, for heaven's sake! It was as if every other woman in the party was still in shiny leather brogues. What May said about herself with those shoes, she came also to say about the party. The shoes helped to identify where the change in public perception had to come; they began to lay the ground for a party leader who really was modernising. Only it was David Cameron who capitalised on it, not May.

Fashion writers applaud May as a woman who treats the frontbench in the Commons like the front row at a fashion show. It's much more than that - since that day at the 2002 party conference, May has never stopped using how she looks to indicate what she is thinking.

She dresses strikingly when she intends to make a striking intervention; as emphasis, not distraction. Last autumn, at the first party conference after the 2015 election victory, May made a deeply controversial speech about immigration in a zip-backed black Roland Mouret dress. A few years earlier, she had been equally provocative about the Human Rights Act in another party conference speech, in a waisted navy jacket and a dress with an asymmetric hemline. During what turned out to be George Osborne's last budget in March, she sat beside the chancellor in a scarlet dress. Soon afterwards, she had a dramatic haircut, following Clinton, Nicola Sturgeon and Merkel with the power bob ( AKA the Pob). At that point, it occurred to me she thought the Brexit vote might not go the government's way and that, if so, it would be her chance for the top. She was not going to lose out to the Camerons again. Picture the tortoise sturdily marching past the snoozing hare. Then remember last July's steps-of-Downing-Street colour-blocked coat and skirt by Amanda Wakeley, and read the wardrobe of triumph.

May can do this because wearing interesting clothes is at last a legitimate - maybe even a desirable - attribute for women in power, and she can take some of the credit for that. When she began her career in Westminster 20 years ago, an interest in fashion was taken as an indication of a woman who can read nothing more challenging than the captions to magazine fashion shoots. Labour women who took part in photo shoots soon after the election in 1997 were told they had destroyed their political credibility. When Sturgeon did the same thing in September last year, even the Daily Mail let it pass.

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At the 2015 Conservative party conference. Photograph: Ray Tang/REX Shutterstock

May has played a part in making style a legitimate part of a political personality. She uses what she wears to underline her wider message: every public appearance announces that she is in touch with a reality outside Westminster (even if it is limited to prosperous southern England), and that she shares ordinary people's - or at least well-off people's - interests in the quotidian concerns of life. But her appearance says something else about her, too. From statement haircut to shiny toe cap, her appearance represents her freedom from anxiety about what other people think - a quality that, May's friends say, is one of her defining characteristics.

May pushes boundaries with clothes as well as policies. Female MPs who reveal that, in fact, they - along with other women - do have breasts still get trolled on Twitter (when Alison McGovern wore a low-cut dress on Channel 4 News last year, she was accused of deliberately trying to distract male viewers from the interview). When May wore that red dress behind Osborne, I'm not sure she thought she was reclaiming breasts from sexploitation. But she was saying that she will wear exactly what she likes.

Contrast this with the Thatcher era. Margaret Thatcher made a Thatcher-shaped hole in the glass ceiling. Apart from the significant fact of being there, she did nothing to make it different for women. Her lack of interest in feminist revolution was exemplified by many things she did, and also by her outfits.

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May's 2011 waisted jacket and dress. Photograph: Toby Melville/REUTERS

Thatcher wore clothes to make her look less threatening than she was: her attitude to gender was far more fully described by her wardrobe than anything that she said ( a speech to the 1969 party conference archly quoting Socrates - "when woman is made equal to man she becomes his superior, and I would not dissent from anyone as wise as Socrates" - may be the best indication of her fey approach). In Thatcher's view, women could share power only if they let men think that they were still making the tea.

One of the more odd developments in feminist politics is the motherhood divide. In last year's Labour leadership contest, Helen Goodman suggested Yvette Cooper's experience as a mother made her the best candidate. It is a terrifying thought that if Andrea Leadsom, a mother, had not tried the same line against the childless May, Leadsom might now be prime minister.

But it has become much more likely that men will face similar random tests of their familiarity with voters' experiences. Women are no longer obliged to pretend to be domestic goddesses. It's hard to imagine May bothering to perpetuate the myth that she cooks for Philip every night the way Thatcher apparently cooked for Denis. Mr May has already been objectified as Maidenhead man, and his choice of outfits is almost as scrutinised as hers.

May says her heroine is Elizabeth I: head of a buccaneering nation; queen of Galleon Britain. And a woman with a fine appreciation for the power of a good frock.

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Theresa May's wardrobe: decoding her brand management

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We are on the brink of seeing three of the world's richest democracies be led by women. This is a moment to take stock, to measure how attitudes have changed to women in power, and what that means for the licence that they now have to define themselves.

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Royal Academy, London Until December 10
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In discussions about who is the world's greatest living painter, three names seem to crop up regularly: David Hockney, Gerhard Richter and Jasper Johns. All are now in their 80s.

Unlike the Yorkshireman and German, however, who've - broadly speaking - maintained a consistent excellence across the decades, Johns is often said to have scaled stunning heights between the mid-Fifties and mid-Sixties but been in steady decline ever since.

A career-spanning retrospective at the Royal Academy now allows us to judge for ourselves. Born in Georgia in 1930, Johns moved to New York in his 20s and found huge success with paintings of numbers, maps, target roundels and the American flag. In finding a place in high art for everyday subjects, he was one of the godfathers of Pop art.

As Johns himself saw it, he was asking viewers to query what 'the mind already knows'. He painted more than 40 variations on the US flag, for instance, from ones in assorted shades of white, to others set against an orange background.

Painted in the midst of the Cold War and McCarthy-era witch-hunts, they left the viewer pondering what - and whom - the flag represented.

These works still have resonance today - while 1963's Map has even more. It's a grisaille map of the United States and northern Mexico, in which it would be hard to tell where's where, but for Johns's naming each state in capital letters.

Interestingly, the border between the two countries - such a contested issue during Donald Trump's election campaign - isn't even visible.

In the Sixties, Johns turned to making 3D paintings, in which he affixed brushes, paint cups, rulers and other tools of his trade to his canvases. Paving the way for Conceptual art, the point was to convey how much more went into making a painting than ultimately meets the eye.

Sadly, Johns lost his Midas touch after that, and it hasn't really returned. Edging closer and closer to abstraction, his imagery has become increasingly opaque - at times, indecipherable.

We're told his influences range from Ludwig Wittgenstein to John Cage. Very few are artists - and it shows. Johns's recent works are less pictures than riddles in visual form. What to make, for example, of the mixture of fieldstone patterns, crosshatch motifs and the artist's handprints in Celine? Heaven only knows. Likewise the 'green angel' figure, which appears in many works.

Forever cool and detached, Johns gives away precious little about himself in his paintings. Not every artist is into candid, Rembrandt-style self-scrutiny, of course. But, I'd still expect to get some sense of the person behind 60 years' worth of art.

Johns has said he isn't 'interested in things which... express the personality'.

The result is a retrospective that's arid and frustrating - of paintings made with too much brain, and too little heart and soul.

Basquiat: Boom For Real Barbican, London Until Jan 28
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Earlier this year, a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat fetched $110.5 million at Sotheby's, the fifth-highest price ever paid for an art work at auction. It confirmed that - though he died of a drug overdose in 1988 - the New Yorker is the hottest name in art right now.

His works are collected by Leonardo DiCaprio and Tommy Hilfiger, among others. Jay-Z has rapped about him. The clothing brand Uniqlo has even reproduced Basquiat's imagery on trainers and T-shirts.

The British, though, have remained largely resistant to his charms: there's not a single Basquiat in a UK public collection. Until this week, he'd also never had a large-scale retrospective. Now, finally, is our chance to see what all the fuss is about.

Creditably, the curators steer clear of the posthumous myth that has built up around Basquiat - that of the self-taught genius who shot to stardom, dated Madonna, painted in Armani suits, and succumbed to the excesses of fame aged 27. They focus instead on his artistic progress, from his early days in Lower Manhattan making street art to the Neo-Expressionist paintings with which he wowed New York.

Basquiat retained a raw, street aesthetic throughout, packing his canvases with so many words, symbols and separate incidents they might better be called collages than paintings. In Glenn, a whole universe is disgorged from a masked shaman's mouth. In Dos Cabezas, a double portrait of himself and Andy Warhol, Basquiat's dreadlocks are a work of art in their own right.

This show is a revelation. The only thing lacking is a look at how and why Basquiat has become such a huge, cultural phenomenon in the 21st century. But that's not something I thought about once in the exhibition itself. The art was too engrossing.

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Jasper Johns at The Royal Academy: Misses the target

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Royal Academy, London Until December 10 Rating: In discussions about who is the world's greatest living painter, three names seem to crop up regularly: David Hockney, Gerhard Richter and Jasper Johns. All are now in their 80s.

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Women's Work: Being Female Before Feminism

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Women's Work: Being Female Before Feminism

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ON THE eve of the election, one of the many talking points making waves was Theresa May's bold shoe choices - most notably the leopard-print kitten heels worn when she launched her campaign to become prime minster, and the lip-adorned flats she sported as she progressed to the final stage of the Conservative Party leadership. It was also apparent she was very aware of the power of a statement necklace, whether it be a string of oversized pearls or a chunky option in a pop-colour shade.

But as she begins her fourth month at Downing Street, it seems like our prime minister has garnered the confidence to translate her natural flair with accessories to her clothes, continuing to push the boundaries of prime ministerial attire. Case in point: last night's the Pride of Britain Awards in London, where May stepped out in a skirt that, while sombre in shade, proved a brave hemline choice for a head of state. Cut several inches above the knee, the Amanda Wakeley dress showcased long, toned limbs which were booted with embellished Dolce & Gabbana kitten heels (May clearly knows that her legs are a great asset).

Paving the way for a second daring sartorial choice, today May stepped out in yet another enterprising skirt by Wakeley. This time it was navy, cut to the knee - on first inspection it seemed a pretty predictable choice. But when May turned around, she revealed an exposed zip, opened four inches.

No doubt she'll have a few more tricks up her well-tailored sleeve come party season.

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Theresa May's Latest Power-Dressing Move

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ON THE eve of the election, one of the many talking points making waves was Theresa May's bold shoe choices - most notably the leopard-print kitten heels worn when she launched her campaign to become prime minster, and the lip-adorned flats she sported as she progressed to the final stage of the Conservative Party leadership.

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The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay - Exhibition at Tate Modern | Tate

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This is the first UK retrospective to assess the breadth of Sonia Delaunay's vibrant artistic practice across a wide range of media. Tate Modern, 15 April - 9 August 2015

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Very good article. mentions warhol and maralyn munroe

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Very good article. mentions warhol and maralyn munroe

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Offered for sale among the extravagant and lavish gifts of the 1986 Christmas Book of the Neiman Marcus Stores is a portrait session with Andy Warhol, available for the now-bargain price of $35,000. "Mr. Warhol will create an acrylic on canvas portrait of you in the tradition of his museum quality pieces," the ad copy promises, offering a chance to own a work of art that is both "museum quality" and personalized to the customer's tastes.

Art critics were largely hostile to these shenanigans, and derided Warhol's recent portraits as vapid rehashes of his work from the 1960s. But Warhol was a shrewd and prescient observer, and he likely understood something that critics of the period had yet to fully grasp - that fine art, like so many other forms of culture in the late 20th century, had become merely another product to be bought and sold, a commodity whose value relied more on the artist's name than on any intrinsic quality or aesthetic merit. What appeared at that time to be a move of financially-calculated surrender has since been recognized as a more complicated and incisive gesture. Though he fully embraced the art market, Warhol also held it up to scrutiny and reflection, revealing the ways in which modernist notions of art as pure, unadulterated expression had given way to a new reality of the artwork as branding and merchandise.

1986 was also the year in which Madonna released her third studio album, True Blue, which produced a slew of chart-toppers that would go on to become classic 80s pop hits and staples of her catalog ("Live to Tell," "Papa Don't Preach," "Open Your Heart," and "La Isla Bonita," among others). Jeri Heiden, the designer of the album's cover, later said of the work: "She was already highly aware of the value of her image and was in control of it. After I took the photo, it appeared as if she was floating - her clothing was not visible. She took on the appearance of a marble statue, goddess-like." By this point in her career, Madonna needed little more than her own disembodied face to sell her music; she had become "goddess-like," an icon in an almost literal sense.

In her 2001 book Madonna: Like an Icon, music journalist Lucy O'Brien makes a direct comparison between this cover image and Warhol's work, noting its vivid, hand-tinted coloring that recalls Warhol's early silkscreens of celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor and - especially with Madonna's short, blonde hairstyle - Marilyn Monroe. "With this picture," O'Brien writes, "Madonna made explicit the connection between Warhol and herself, the vivid nexus between pop art and commerce. The late 1980s marked a new era of the pop artist as a brand, and Madonna became the first one to exploit this."

If True Blue signaled a new level of self-knowledge in Madonna's work, one in which she was "highly aware of the value of her image" as a brand unto itself, then Warhol's legacy, his witty, evasive manipulation of his own image and celebrity, was surely an influence, however indirect. But what, exactly, is the legacy of Warhol, and to what extent does Madonna's career adopt its sly, winking critique of popular culture and the alliance between art and capital?

The answer to the former question is, believe it or not, still a matter of some confusion. Warhol's most famous images - the Marilyn Monroe silkscreens in particular - have become icons of postwar American art, ubiquitous in popular culture and guaranteed exhibition "hitmakers" for art museums around the world. Audiences celebrate these works for their embrace of a culture that had previously been seen by artists and critics as "low" and unworthy of inclusion within the realm of the "fine arts." But within these ostensibly lighthearted, celebratory images lies a kernel of melancholy, a sense of unease about what the new world of consumer culture has unleashed both upon art and upon our collective humanity.

Warhol's obsessive repetition of Monroe in the silkscreen format mirrors the actress's endless appearances in the cheap, disposable print media of tabloids and gossip magazines. The new culture of images will no longer be dominated by art, he suggests, but by the endless slew of pop culture products that defined the consumerist society of the 1960s. More importantly, however, these works signal the degree to which Monroe became an empty site for cultural projection. Does Warhol see her as the flirtatious, charming ingénue and bombshell showcased in her films and publicity images, or is she a tragic figure, whose insecurities and turbulent love affairs sent her to an early, mysterious death?

The answer is neither, and both. Warhol recognized the way in which Monroe had become little more than an image in America's popular consciousness. Her enduring appeal stems from her ability to reflect each of these narratives simultaneously; any sense of the "real" Marilyn Monroe has long since disappeared behind a screen of cultural mythologies. Warhol's silkscreens, then, are both a tribute to a tragic pop cultural icon and a knowing commentary on the culture of celebrity worship that she helped to create. If Monroe and her face worked to usurp the fine arts for control of America's visual culture, they also ushered in a new era in which the human subject itself could vanish into an echo chamber of images and signs.

This critical aspect of Warhol's work has now been largely forgotten. Visitors to today's museums are often more interested in appropriating the recognizable graphic style of his silkscreens for selfies than they are in digesting the darker implications of his work. In this way, the ability of his art to look askance at contemporary culture, and to critique it, is gone.

True Blue reflects Madonna's nascent efforts to skillfully control and manipulate her image, but it is a project that she has continued to develop into the present day. By the late 1980s, she became adept at dividing her career into "eras" in which her music videos and personal style closely mirrored the sonic qualities of her latest album. In 1992 she released her notorious Sex book to coincide with the raunchy, S&M-inspired lyrics of her album Erotica and the video for its eponymous single. Perhaps more successfully, her 1998 album Ray of Light saw her adopting the religious mysticism of kabbalah, sporting henna tattoos and turning yoga into a mainstream cultural obsession. As countless others have pointed out, Madonna's success has lied primarily in her ability to "reinvent" herself, to imagine herself as a series of iconic images that occupy a large swath of cultural territory. Every diehard Madonna fan has their favorite look, their favorite moment in her career trajectory. Like Marilyn Monroe before her, Madonna is a figure who offers a number of "meanings" without ever really meaning anything at all.

Though O'Brien is quick to highlight the similarities between Warhol and Madonna, her comparison invites a more difficult, murky analysis than the straightforwardly congratulatory one she proposes in her book. In looking at Warhol and Madonna together, we must ask ourselves: how much does Madonna continue the mode of criticality that is latent in Warhol's work, and how much does she simply exploit his understanding of personal branding and self-promotion? Can we read her career as a commentary on the worlds of celebrity and pop music under late capitalism, or is she merely using the precedent set by Warhol to make a name and career for herself?

Madonna's most overtly critical attacks on popular culture tend to read as somewhat tone-deaf and unaware. In her 1994 single "Human Nature," she lambasts the American public for its censorship and disapproval of her work during the Erotica era two years prior: "oops, I didn't know I couldn't talk about sex," she croons over a sinuous, R&B-inspired beat. The song seems to suggest that the earlier album represented some kind of honest, searching exploration of Madonna's sexuality, as opposed to the scandalous marketing stunt it was clearly intended to be. Why would she bite the proverbial hand that feeds her in this way? While Erotica was not her most commercially or critically successful work, the publicity it generated made her a talking point the world over, and it hardly derailed her career.

It is at moments like this (and especially later on albums like American Life) that Madonna seems to misread and misunderstand her impact as a cultural figure. Rather than fully grasp her role as the arche-postmodernist of pop music, a skillful (if cynical) manipulator of images that signify much but "mean" very little, Madonna recasts herself here as the misunderstood artiste, whose work represents a brand of "genuine expression" of which Warhol would have been highly skeptical.

This strange disconnect in Madonna's thinking - her ability to recognize the value of images for her career without fulling grasping the implications of that dependency - ultimately led to the commercial flops and reduced cultural impact of her later career. One might locate the beginning of this downslide in 2004, when she launched the Re-Invention World Tour to coincide with her album American Life. If she had hoped to continue mining Warhol's legacy and gesture towards it, this choice of title was a misstep, mainly because it highlights her position within late capitalist image culture too overtly and with too much self-conscious awareness to be effective. Warhol continued his coy game with celebrity culture and the art market until his death, but he knew better than to acknowledge what he was doing outright - to do so would be to shatter the tenuous balance between collaboration and critique on which his art relied. In highlighting her own history of "reinvention," Madonna breaks the fourth wall that allowed her career to function so successfully up to that point.

Furthermore, the title "Re-Invention" indicates a new degree of seriousness and obsession with her own legacy that was absent from her earlier work. Madonna doesn't seem to understand that her career as a "re-inventor" essentially mocks the notion of authenticity that was once at the core of all artistic enterprise. Rather, she frames her re-inventions as moments along a personal, expressive journey that sees her as a vanguard and maker of profound cultural statements. The singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright would comment on her subsequent Confessions Tour: "I went to see her London show and it was all so dour and humourless. She surpasses even Joan Crawford in terms of megalomania." As Madonna became consumed with making increasingly self-congratulatory statements about her own value as a pop cultural icon (culminating in 2015's tragically heavy-handed single, "Bitch I'm Madonna"), she seemed ever more removed from the sly self-promoter who had so deftly marketed herself from True Blue into the early 2000s.

If the ultimate failure of Warhol's criticality lay in the co-opting of his signature aesthetic by the very instruments of capitalism that he hoped to critique, Madonna's failure stems from both an overabundance of self-awareness and a lack of it at the same time. By continually reminding us of her own influence and effect on pop culture, she inadvertently lays bare the contradictions at the core of her career. What Madonna has offered us more than anything is image, a chimerical world of fantasies and desires that stand in for larger ideas such as glamour, female empowerment, fashion, and sexuality. Yet she would rather see herself as a musical innovator and artistic pioneer, two roles that her own career would suggest are not only outdated, but unnecessary. Where self-knowledge worked in Warhol's favor, allowing him to occupy an indeterminate but fascinating and rich space in contemporary culture, that same form of knowledge was Madonna's undoing, revealing the limitations of her understanding about what her career symbolizes with regards to the possibility of artistic expression in the postmodern, late capitalist moment.

In many ways, the career of Lady Gaga offers a fitting conclusion to this history, and serves as yet another warning for future pop artists who may choose to adopt Madonna's pattern of conscious self-fashioning. Bursting onto the scene with her highly successful debut album The Fame in 2008, Gaga quickly absorbed the lessons of Madonna's most successful projects and began to "reinvent" herself on an almost daily basis. Every red-carpet appearance and candid photo showed her in outfits more outrageous and over-the-top than the last. A lover of masks and high-fashion, avant-garde headgear, her face remained almost completely invisible for much of her early career, hidden to such a degree that for a time it was difficult to know what she actually looked like. More importantly, her music videos became highly-anticipated cultural events, replete with provocative imagery and a constantly shape-shifting personal appearance.

In these early, propitious moments, Gaga seemed more aware of herself as a collection of images than Madonna ever had. Here was a pop-cultural figure who understood the fundamentally illusory nature of her work and its constructed, heavily-packaged quality. By 2010, when her iconic video for "Bad Romance" was breaking viewing records on YouTube, it seemed that Gaga might be the ultimate fruition of all that was promised, but only partially realized, in Madonna's much longer career.

But just as Madonna misunderstood her own legacy and succumbed to a flawed reading of her value as a figure within pop culture, so too did Gaga begin to believe her own hype. 2011's single "Born This Way" was an almost cynical, painfully clumsy acknowledgment of her role as a gay icon that offered a shopworn and sophomoric interpretation of the pop-anthem-as-personal-affirmation formula. Her 2013 album ARTPOP was an even greater conceptual failure, enlisting art-world figures such as Jeff Koons and Marina Abramović to reinforce the idea that this was art, and not simply pop music, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Like Madonna before her, Gaga's experiments violated the feigned obliviousness needed for such a project to succeed and revealed a profound shortcoming with regards to her own self-awareness. For what is suggested in the work of Warhol and even Jeff Koons, whom she enlisted to create the album's cover, is that art itself may no longer be possible, or at least not in the way it has traditionally been understood. If Gaga's earliest albums represented the potential for a fascinating transformation of culture under late capitalism - the possibility that simulacral experience might become a medium unto itself -  ARTPOP was a retreat, a retrenchment into the already-discredited notion that popular culture could somehow replace or replicate the values of the art that had preceded it.

In the wake of ARTPOP'sfailure, Gaga abandoned many of the more outrageous elements of her persona that had defined her work since the beginning of her career. Gone were the meat dresses and giant eggs, the outré videos and frenzied stage antics. In its wake came Gaga the singer, who showcased her vocal abilities on a standards album with Tony Bennett and a series of performances at awards shows and sporting events.

But "straightforwardly talented female singer" is an already-crowded market in popular music, occupied by middling artists like Demi Lovato and Jessie J who possess similar vocal abilities to Gaga but lack her imagination and personality. At this moment, Gaga stands poised to reinvent herself yet again, with a new single and a new album on the horizon. Though it is unlikely that she will ever recapture the conceptual force of her early work, she remains uniquely poised to offer new statements on the relationship between music, branding, and celebrity worship in the contemporary moment.

To use the term "failure" with regards to the work of Warhol, Madonna,and Gaga is not to suggest that they offer nothing to contemporary observers of culture, nor to imply that their efforts were fruitless or valueless within the history of art and popular music. Rather, their careers offer a cautionary example of the pitfalls and blind spots involved in creating a body of work that is both deeply entwined in consumer culture and "outside" of it at the same time. In what ways might new pop artists craft a persona and cultivate a career that offers the potential for critique? Is such a mode of criticality even possible in 2016, or is the inevitable fate of all critical culture to be absorbed into the very system it hopes to challenge? Though the answer to that last question seems at this moment to be "no," these issues will continue to linger over pop music well into the future, revealing the limits of the medium to offer challenging, thought-provoking work in a market where such qualities are rarely valued or upheld.

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Madonna, Lady Gaga, and the Legacy of Warhol - Michael Vetter - Medium

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Offered for sale among the extravagant and lavish gifts of the 1986 Christmas Book of the Neiman Marcus Stores is a portrait session with Andy Warhol, available for the now-bargain price of $35,000.

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From the early 20th century until her death in 1979, Sonia Delaunay painted, designed fabrics and clothing, ran shops as well as a textile design company, and collaborated with poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars and Tristan Tzara. She played gender games, was a polyglot, danced the tango, translated Kandinsky, and was a thoroughly modern woman artist in a man's world. She was indomitable.

Born Sara Stern to a Jewish family in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1885, the artist lived with her well-to-do aunt and uncle in St Petersburg from the age of five. Intellectually well-versed, she studied painting in Germany and, by 1907, was working through the influences of Gauguin, German expressionism and the Fauves, whom she had seen in Paris. Her early paintings look as if they want to break free.

Her marriage to the gay German art critic and dealer Wilhelm Uhde in 1908 allowed her to settle in Paris. Uhde had visited Picasso's studio in Montmartre and had seen his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. He also showed the work of Henri Rousseau and gave Delaunay her first exhibition the following year, where she showed a tense, sexualised and confrontational reclining Yellow Nude, with coruscating blue shadows, the sinuous body offset against a background of juddering angular patterns.

In 1910, she divorced, to marry the aristocratic, avant-garde (the term meant something then) painter Robert Delaunay. She stopped painting, turning to needlework and embroidery instead. In 1912, she gave birth to a son. This might look like the typical story of the talented wife subsumed by the sovereign demands of the male genius. It isn't.

Sonia Delaunay is now rightly seen as a stronger and more complex artist than her husband, who died in 1941. Although the Delaunays were regarded as collaborators in a single artistic project, the truth was never so simple. The major retrospective at London's Tate Modern, which comes here from Paris, is wonderful - and something of a relevation. Far from retreating into the applied arts and stereotypical "women's work", Delaunay sought instead to extend art into the everyday and the broader material culture.

Her first purely abstract work seems to have been a sewn patchwork quilt, designed as a cradle cover, whose wonky rectangles and triangles of clear colour recall both cubism and Russian folk art. She made abstract book bindings and decorated a wooden box for her son's toys. She also started making clothes and adapting the fashionable garments of the day into what she called "simultaneous dresses", whose geometric shapes and slivers of coloured fabric accentuated the sway and movement of the body. These were paintings to be worn.

She made clothing for Robert and the two of them would step out to such burgeoning Paris nightclubs as Le Bal Bullier, quintessentially modern places alive not just with music but with electric light. Delaunay's clothing subsumed their wearers in the overall atmosphere. Just like clubbers today, they could get lost in the music, the light, the rhythms and atmosphere. Tango and foxtrot were the grooves.

By 1913, she was painting again and her Electric Prism works - along with a frieze-like, four-metre-wide canvas depicting Le Bal Bollier - syncopated modern life. The dancers dance and your eye dances, too, caught up in the painting's stop-start, relentless tango rhythms. That same year, she collaborated with Cendrars on the publication of a poem describing a trip from Moscow to Paris on the Trans-Siberian railway, in which Cendrars's text is shifted this way and that by Delaunay's colour. Her rhythmic, abstract images and patches of colour sway like the train, and give us flashes of the world hurtling by the windows. The whole thing is a delight. Typeset text and painted words vie with one another, and Delaunay used the optical effect of simultaneous contrast (by which the juxtaposition of different colours affects how we perceive them) with great energy, subtlety and vitality. She grasped the constant disruption and speed of modern life and gave it form.

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Court shoes, 1925. Courtesy Musée de la Mode et du Textile, Paris

At the outbreak of the first world war, the Delaunays were in the Basque country and stayed in Spain and Portugal throughout the conflict. She painted street markets and flamenco dances, and began to design clothes in earnest. Losing what income she had from Russia after the 1917 revolution, she opened (with Sergei Diaghilev's help) a string of shops in Bilbao, Madrid and Barcelona, selling clothing, fabrics and homeware. Returning to Paris after the venture failed, she was able to set up her next business on a surer footing.

Several rooms and vitrines in this marvellous exhibition are dedicated to Delaunay's garments, fabrics and fashion work, from designs for the cover of Vogue to photographs of models. There's also a shot of architect Arno Goldfinger (so detested by Ian Fleming he turned him into a Bond supervillain) in a swanky pair of Delaunay pyjamas. Her high-end clientele included actor Gloria Swanson, for whom she designed a coat. She stitched poems on to clothes, designed costumes for Diaghilev and dadaist theatrical productions, decorated film sets and turned her family apartment into a kind of domestic installation.

Lengths of fabrics she designed turn on moving rollers behind glass, and swatches and colour-ways, neckties and beachwear, parasols and handbags and shoes fill vitrines and display cabinets. There's even a 1925 film shoot, in colour, in which women model her garments. All this is more than fun. I look at it as abstract painting by other means. Delaunay even registered Simultané as a brand name. Some black and white designs recall optical art, while the way she infiltrated abstraction into the fashion industry looked forward to pop art. One fashion shot has two models in Delaunay designs with a Citroën painted in "simultaneous" livery. She produced an enormous quantity of printed textiles for a chain of Netherlands department stores. Some of this, inevitably, has dated, yet her abstract patterns are often as simple and pure as the best geometric abstract art. Which is exactly what it is.

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Coat made for Gloria Swanson 1923-24. Private collection © Pracusa

In 1937, Delaunay produced, with assistants, a number of mural-sized canvases for the Paris international exposition. Only three remain. Celebrating French technology, they depict aeroplane engines, a propeller and a cockpit instrument panel. Mixing enlarged technical drawings of engine parts, cut-away sections of pistons and engine blocks, coloured spirals, discs, targets and calibrated dashboard dials and temperature gauges, these vividly coloured tempera paintings might have been made today and are filled with optimism for a technological future. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Paris exposition, the Germans and Russians were bickering, and Picasso was showing Guernica in the Spanish pavilion, a reminder of the German air attack on the ancient Basque capital. This room is a complete knockout.

Postwar, the show focuses on later paintings. Colour becomes flatter, the paintedness of Delaunay's forms more acute. They are as serious and playful as any abstraction made anywhere. Circles are still bisected by lines. Her aesthetic remained unchanged. Rectangles slide together and apart. She knows where to give things weight and solidity, and where to let the painting breathe. Her touch is full-blooded, assured, careful and careless, as modern as it ever was.

* The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay is at Tate Modern, 15 April - 9 August.

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Sonia Delaunay review - the woman who made colour dance gets a knockout show

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From the early 20th century until her death in 1979, Sonia Delaunay painted, designed fabrics and clothing, ran shops as well as a textile design company, and collaborated with poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars and Tristan Tzara. She played gender games, was a polyglot, danced the tango, translated Kandinsky, and was a thoroughly modern woman artist in a man's world.

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The great French writer Voltaire famously said: 'I disapprove of what you say and would defend to the death your right to say it'. In this way, he encapsulated what it meant to be an enlightened human being - someone prepared to consider all points of view.

But in recent years the principle of freedom of speech, sacred since Voltaire's 18th century, has been lost, and this is surely one of the most sinister features of our times. It is as if we are entering a new Dark Age of Intolerance.

The irony is that this intolerance has come about as a result of what were initially good intentions. One of the things which makes me happy as I grow older is the thought that during my lifetime we have all tried to become a kinder society.

When I was a boy and a young man, for example, racist jokes were the norm on radio and TV. Now they would be unthinkable. Mockery of homosexuals, and the equation of being gay with being limp-wristed and camp, were absolute norms of comedy when I was growing up. Now no longer.

Such jokes have gone the way of boarding-houses which used to put 'NO BLACKS. NO DOGS. NO IRISH in the window'. Obviously, all civilised people feel pleased by this.

But somehow those initial good intentions - to be kinder to and more tolerant of others - have morphed into a political correctness that has had the very opposite effect.

Two notorious recent examples of this concerned the treatment of a Christian baker in Northern Ireland, and some Christian bed and breakfast owners in Berkshire. The baker had not wanted to make a wedding cake for a gay couple who were getting married. The B&B owners had refused to let a gay couple share the same room in their establishment. In each case they were successfully sued for unlawful discrimination.

Now, a gay activist would no doubt say this was a good thing, arguing that the baker and bed and breakfast owners' behaviour was comparable to the racism of the past. Yet this is surely getting things wholly out of proportion.

The baker was not persecuting homosexuals, as Hitler did. He was not saying they should be put in prison, as all Home Secretaries in Britain did until the Sixties. He was merely saying that, as a Christian, he thought marriage should be between a man and a woman, and that two chaps tying the knot were doing something rather different, which is contrary to traditional Christian teaching.

Whatever you think about this matter, the Northern Irish baker and the B&B couple were merely holding on to Christian beliefs.

I don't happen to share their views myself, and think that if two people are rash enough to promise to live together for the rest of their lives, good luck to them, whether they are gay, straight, trans or anything else. But surely you can understand both sides of this dilemma, can't you?

Well, the answer, more and more in our intolerant society, is 'No'. My concern here is not about the rights and wrongs of gay marriage, transgender rights, our colonial history, or any of the other emotive issues that are subject to endless debate in the modern age.

It is about freedom of thought and speech; freedom to disagree in a liberal society; freedom to have thoughts which are different from the current orthodoxy.

What began as our very decent desire not to be nasty to those of a different ethnicity, or sexual proclivity, from ourselves, has turned into a world as intolerant as monkish Christianity in the days of the Dark Ages, when any freedom of thought is questioned.

Tim Farron, leader of the Lib Dems during the General Election, was asked repeatedly about his views on gay marriage. As a fairly old-fashioned Christian, he did not believe it was possible - marriage should be between a man and a woman.

As the leader of a modern political party, he knew that it would be political death to admit this. He was finally forced to resign.

This was a signal to the world that if you want to succeed in modern politics, it is simply not allowed to hold views which, until a very short time ago, were the consensus among the great majority of people in the Western world.

I use the words 'not allowed' advisedly. What is sinister about living in the new Dark Ages, however, is that it is by no means clear who is doing the allowing and not allowing. In Mao's China, it was obvious: thought crimes were ideas which contradicted the supreme leader.

In Britain today, however, it seems an army of self-appointed censors - from internet trolls to angry students, lobby groups, town hall officials, craven politicians and lawyers and Establishment figures, as well as a host of other sanctimonious and often bilious busy-bodies - have taken it upon themselves to police what we can and cannot think or say.

Not believing in abortion, like not believing in gay marriage, is now, unquestionably, a thought crime. It was hardly surprising that the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg recently said he did not believe in abortion, because he is a man of conviction as well as a Roman Catholic, and this is the teaching of his Church. Yet his view was treated with incredulity and disdain by everyone from trolls and women's groups to the higher echelons of the political Establishment.

As in the case of abortion, debate is no longer allowed on transgender issues. There was a BBC2 Horizon Programme last Tuesday night called Being Transgender. The close-up shots of transgender surgery in a Californian hospital will not easily leave the mind.

We met a number of nice people who had decided for one reason or another that they were not the gender which they had once supposed. They were all undergoing some form of transformative medical treatment, either taking hormones or having surgery.

What made the programme strange as a piece of journalism was the fact that it did not contain one dissenting voice. Not one psychiatrist or doctor who said they doubted the wisdom of some of these procedures, especially in the very young.

Still less was there anyone like the redoubtable feminist and academic Dr Germaine Greer who once expressed her view that a man did not become a woman just because he had undergone transgender surgery - and was, as a result, decried from the rooftops with everything from petitions launched to stop her from speaking at university campuses to death threats.

Dr Greer had also been bold enough to say 'a great many women' shared her view, which is obviously true - a great many women do not think that transgender people have really changed sex. What has changed is that it is no longer permitted to say so.

A friend of mine who likes bathing in the women's pond on Hampstead Heath in London says that at least one person now uses the female changing rooms who is obviously in a stage of transition from man to woman, and is simply a hairy man wearing lipstick.

However uncomfortable this makes the women feel, they know that they cannot say anything.

There was an ugly incident lately at Hyde Park's Speakers' Corner, which used to be the place where anyone could go and stand on a soap-box and hold any opinion they liked.

Speakers' Corner was a symbol of British Freedom of Speech. As a schoolboy, I had a Jewish friend whose grandfather used to take us there to listen to people proclaiming that the earth was flat, preachers praising Hitler, Stalin, and others saying whatever they liked. It was the freedom to do so, said the old man who had escaped Hitler's Germany, which made the very air of Britain so refreshing to him.

What would he have thought had he witnessed the scene earlier this month at Speakers' Corner when a 60-year-old woman called Maria was smacked in the face, allegedly by a transgender fanatic, while listening to a talk on planned reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. Reforms which would allow men to 'self-identify' as female, and enter women's changing rooms or refuges unchallenged.

For Maria, as for the intimidated women of Hampstead swimming pool, and for Germaine Greer, it is by no means clear that transgender people have changed their sex.

Transgender activists have labelled women like Maria TERFS - Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. When news of the assault on her reached the internet - ie instantaneously - the trolls began baying, like the bloodthirsty mob during the guillotine-executions of the French Revolution. 'Burn in a fire, TERF'. 'I want to f*** some TERFS up, they are no better than fascists'.

The use of the word 'fascist' is commonplace in our new Dark Age for anyone with whom you happen to disagree. You hear it all the time in the Brexit arguments which rage all around us and which I dread. As it happens, I voted Remain. But I do not regard Brexiteers as 'fascists', and many of their arguments - wanting to reclaim the power to make our own laws and control our own borders - are evidently sensible.

Yet I have lost count of the number of times I have heard Remainers say that Brexiteers are fascists. As a matter of historical fact, many of the keenest supporters of a united European superstate were actual fascists.

The only British politician who campaigned on the ticket of Europe A Nation during the Fifties was Sir Oswald Mosley who was leader of the British Union of Fascists. But then, today's PC censors don't let facts get in their way of bigotry.

Branding anyone you disagree with a fascist; hitting people in the face; tweeting and blogging abuse behind the cowardly anonymity of the internet - these are the ugly weapons used to stifle any sort of debate. And it is often in the very places where ideas should be exchanged and examined that the bigotry is at its worst: our universities.

This week on the Radio 4's Today programme, we heard James Caspian, a quietly-spoken, kindly psychotherapist, describing what has become a cause celebre at Bath Spa University.

He has been working for some years with people who for one reason or another have begun the process of gender-transition, and then come to regret it.

Caspian is evidently not a judgmental man. He wanted to write a thesis on this subject from a sympathetic and dispassionate point of view.

What makes people feel so uncomfortable with their own apparent gender that they wish to undergo painful and invasive surgery to change it? What makes people then come to reassess their first idea? These are surely legitimate questions about a subject many of us can't quite comprehend.

I have two friends who started out as men, and decided in mid-life that they were really women, or wanted to become women, which is what they have done. I do not really understand what has happened to them, even though they have tried to explain it to me.

Surely a man like James Caspian, who has worked with transgender men and women, should be encouraged by a university to explain this area of medicine or psychology?

But no. The university, having initially approved of his idea for a thesis, then turned down his application. 'The fundamental reason given was that it might cause criticism of the research on social media, and criticism of the research would be criticism of the university,' he told Radio 4 listeners. 'They also added it's better not to offend people.'

This is all of a piece with students at Oxford wanting to pull down the statue of 19th century imperialist Cecil Rhodes from his old college, Oriel, on the grounds that he was racist.

Rather than having a reasoned debate weighing the evils of racist colonialism against Rhodes's benevolence, the student at the forefront of the movement - who had actually accepted a £40,000 Rhodes scholarship funded by the fortune the colonialist gave to Oxford - wanted to pull down the statue.

This is the same attitude of mind as that which led monks in the Dark Ages to destroy the statues of pagan gods and goddesses, or the Taliban to do the same to age-old Buddhist artefacts.

Reason, debate, seeing more than one side to an argument, surely these are the foundations of all that has fashioned the great values of the West since the Enlightenment started in the 18th century with an explosion of new ideas in science, philosophy, literature, and modern rational thought that ushered in the Age of Reason.

Realising that human actions and ideas are often mixtures of good and bad - isn't this what it means to have a grown-up mind? Surely we should be allowed to discuss matters without being accused of thought crime?

In universities, as at Speakers' Corner and in the public at large, there used to be the robust sense that sticks and stones may break our bones but words can never hurt us. Now, the 'hurt-feelings' card is regularly played to stifle any debate.

Little by little, we are allowing the Dark Ages of intolerance to come again. We should not be letting this happen.

We should be able to say: 'We disapprove of your views - on Europe, on Transgender Issues, on Islam, on absolutely anything, but we defend to the death your right to express them'.

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A.N. WILSON on the new dark age of intolerance

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The great French writer Voltaire famously said: 'I disapprove of what you say and would defend to the death your right to say it'. In this way, he encapsulated what it meant to be an enlightened human being - someone prepared to consider all points of view.

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Men continue to outnumber women in senior leadership roles around the world - but reports suggest this isn't the only inequality problem in the workplace.

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It's hard to believe that when she was growing up, Cindy Crawford-who stars in Vogue's latest "73 Questions" video series-was teased about the now-iconic dot above her left lip. Luckily, her mother talked her out of having it removed, and the rest is supermodel history: With the help of her million-dollar mole, the small-town beauty would soon find herself on the cover of Vogue, launching a legendary career that has spanned three decades and counting.

The inexplicable magnetism of a well-placed beauty mark, of course, has been a phenomenon throughout history. Long before a "Material Girl"-era Madonna paid homage to Marilyn Monroe with the help of her own exaggerated mark-or Edie Sedgwick confirmed the undeniable It-factor of drawn-on dots, it was Marie Antoinette who prompted legions of 18th-century courtiers to adorn their faces with moleskin or velvet mouches, which, depending on their location, conveyed anything from relationship status to a flirtatious personality.

These days, fashion favorites like Blake Lively and Kate Upton have revived the Old World glamour of the look, inspiring their fair share of followers to approximate the look with the help of an eye pencil. Here, a look at a few of the hottest spots of all time.
Cindy Crawford Sings George Michael and Tours Her Malibu Home

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The 9 Best Beauty Marks of All Time, From Cindy Crawford to Marilyn Monroe

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It's hard to believe that when she was growing up, Cindy Crawford-who stars in Vogue's latest "73 Questions" video series-was teased about the now-iconic dot above her left lip.

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More people are asking to have moles removed and it's not just because of concerns about skin cancer. Why do some people feel self-conscious about their moles, asks Hannah Sander.

The average person has around 30-40 moles. Some have as many as 600.

And yet a lot of people have a problem with these "blemishes".

The number of people in the UK asking to have a mole removed increased by 127% in the past year, according to a survey by a cosmetic surgery website. Famous faces that have become mole-free include Madonna, whose upper lip mole has long vanished from sight.
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Consultant dermatologist Dr Sasi Attili says that the majority of those asking him for mole removal are women. "Usually it is an anxious mother bringing a child, or an anxious young lady in their twenties or early thirties who has developed a new mole. Sometimes they just think their mole is ugly." Male patients are in the minority, even though Cancer Research UK has warned that men are more prone than women to die from skin cancer.

The vast majority of the time, Attili assures, moles turn out to be benign. "Most of the time people are worrying about nothing. But that doesn't mean we should stop looking."

The NHS advises people to keep an eye on their moles, and watch for any changes - particularly if a mole becomes asymmetrical.

But cancer concerns are not the only reason why people want their moles taken off. Ayden Millar, an assistant at a television company, had a large mole on her nose. "I was obsessed with it. It was like something from a Halloween witch's costume. At my high school in Glasgow some girls were nasty about it."

Millar took her mole to the doctors, who declared it benign. But she was still not satisfied and decided to have it removed privately. She thinks it was a life-changing decision.

"I wish I had done it sooner. They removed it with a scalpel, and then I had four or five stitches and a line across my nose. I was worried initially because there was a lot of swelling. And I am still a little worried about the scarring - it has been two months now, and my nose is still a bit red with marks from where the stitches were." Even so, she would recommend the operation to anyone embarrassed about a beauty spot.

Attili discourages people from having moles removed for cosmetic reasons. There are two main methods for taking one off. Flatter benign moles can be shaved away. Bigger moles, or those that might be cancerous, have to be dug out of the face with a scalpel. The mole is then sent off for a biopsy. "Scarring is unpredictable," warns Attili. "Sometimes the scar can look worse than the original mole."

A - asymmetry

B - border irregularity

C - colour change

D - diameter

E - elevated (raised) or enlarged

Source: NHS Choices
Health advice on moles

Most moles are completely harmless, but you should check your skin every few months for any new moles that develop or any changes to existing moles. A helpful way to remember what to look for is to use the ABCDE method:

People's preoccupation with facial moles is not new. In traditional Chinese culture, mole-reading or moleomancy predicted fortunes. In some parts of medieval Europe, moles were considered a sign of evil. Witches and devil-worshippers were often depicted with moles bulging out of their cheeks and nose.

And then moles became spectacularly fashionable.

Karen Hearn, honorary professor of English at University College London, is fascinated by the spread of beauty marks. As part of the National Maritime Museum's new exhibition "Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution", she is giving a talk on beauty marks.

"The fashion began in France in the 17th Century. Women were wearing patches made of silk, satin, taffeta or leather. Sometimes they were quite large pieces of cloth." The fake mole, known as a mouche, was glued on to the skin.

Diarist Samuel Pepys saw his first mouche in the Netherlands. He was visiting during huge political upheaval but still paused to make a note in his diary about Dutch beauty marks. "The obsession with beauty marks goes back to classical times," Hearn explains. "The goddess Venus was said to have had a mole. This slight defect on an otherwise perfect body made her seem even more beautiful."

Wealthy British women used fake moles to show off their pale skin. Pale skin was a sign of luxury, indicating a life without manual labour. Women sometimes glued on as many as a dozen beauty marks, covering up their spots and acne.

Pepys spotted the king's mistress, Lady Castlemaine, stealing the beauty spot from her maid's face and sticking it on her own cheek. He decided the famous courtesan must have felt a pimple coming up.

Alarmed by the new fashion for fake beauty spots, critics called society women vain and declared moles immoral. Pepys forbade his wife from wearing a beauty mark, but later changed his mind. "He found them worrying," Hearn laughs, "but he obviously also found them sexy."

By the 18th Century, fake moles came in elaborate shapes. Stars, half moons and hearts were all common. Moles were even used as political symbols. Wearing a beauty mark on the left side of the face was supposed to show you were a Tory. The right side was for Whigs. This led to embarrassing encounters in which women had to explain that their beauty mark was genuine, rather than a badge of allegiance.

Under Queen Victoria's reign, a natural mole was "absolutely a mark of disgrace", says Madeleine Marsh, author of The Compacts and Cosmetics: Beauty from Victorian Times to the Present Day. Victorian beauty standards required lily-white skin, but in the new moral climate only prostitutes and actresses wore makeup. "There were a lot of recipes for skin whiteners that would take away your freckles and moles. These were basically bleaches. We can imagine what happened."

It was not until the rise of Hollywood that moles lost their reputation as a hideous defect. "Hollywood revolutionised women's faces," Marsh reveals. "Suddenly you were seeing these HUGE women's faces, bigger than we had ever seen them before. The starlets had to wear makeup on screen, and so the beauty industry exploded."

Marilyn Monroe used makeup to accentuate her beauty mark. A mole was part of her sex appeal. Other starlets drew on moles with eyebrow pencil. And just like the women of Pepys's time, these fake moles would be moved to cover a new pimple. Marilyn's famous mark even inspired the Monroe lip piercing, a modern twist to the traditional beauty mark.

Today however, the mole - with its unpredictable bulges, bumps and dark hairs - is once again considered a defect.

Farid Haddad, managing director of BMA Models, says he has never had anyone on his books who became known for their mole. "We are open to all different looks - our books are full of different characters and we are proud of that."

But it is a world where beauty is skin deep.

"Men and women are both expected to be 'flawless' in the fashion world. Any moles or flaws are usually Photoshopped out to create the image of beauty."

Nevertheless, Haddad is optimistic that people will get over their fear of moles. "Perfection in the modelling world is still apparent. The hope is this notion will change soon, and we will embrace moles and other individual qualities."

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More people are asking to have moles removed and it's not just because of concerns about skin cancer. Why do some people feel self-conscious about their moles, asks Hannah Sander. The average person has around 30-40 moles. Some have as many as 600. And yet a lot of people have a problem with these "blemishes".

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The original style chameleon: nobody does reinvention like Madonna. Check out her hair and beauty look book.She's been a blonde, brunette, redhead, curly, straight and cropped

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Marilyn Monroe was only 36 when she died on August 5, 1962. But in her short time in the spotlight, she left endless marks on showbiz, fashion, music, and even the centerfold. Here are nine things Marilyn made famous.

1. Her name Born Norma Jeane, Marilyn selected one of the most popular names of the 1930s for her showbiz moniker and transformed what was once commonplace into a synonym for stardom. She made it legally hers in 1956, well after her ascendance to fame. By the time of her death, in 1962, far fewer moms were choosing it for their children-perhaps because of the bombshell they might have to live up to. Last year, the name ranked 426 on the Social Security's list of top baby names. But say "Marilyn," and only one woman comes to mind. Ms. Monroe owns it.

2. The white halter dress Even if you haven't seen The Seven Year Itch, you probably know its most famous scene. Marilyn stands on a subway grate, and the rush of a train going by sends a gust of air above ground-and sends her iconic white halter dress billowing all around her. The playful image from Billy Wilder's 1955 film has been burned into popular consciousness. The dress, meanwhile, wound up in a collection of Hollywood memorabilia owned by actress Debbie Reynolds. In 2011, Reynolds sold it at auction for close to $5 million.
WATCH MARILYN MONROE VIDEOS
3. Playboy magazine In 1953, a then-unknown magazine editor named Hugh Hefner came across nude photos Marilyn posed for in 1949. He purchased one for $500 and put it in the inaugural issue of his new magazine, Playboy. Marilyn became the very first Playmate of the Month. Needless to say, the magazine was a hit.

4. Ella Fitzgerald's career The "First Lady of Song" owed her career to Marilyn after the starlet stood up for her jazz-singer friend and got her a boundary-breaking gig. In the 1950s, segregation kept African-American singers out of many of the most popular clubs, including the Mocambo, a hotspot in Hollywood. But Marilyn, who was a self-professed fan of Fitzgerald, called the owner of the club and told him that if he booked Ella Fitzgerald, she would sit at a front table every night. Not one to pass up the publicity of having Marilyn front and center, he agreed. Fitzgerald broke out and was forever grateful to Marilyn. "She was an unusual woman-a little ahead of her times," Fitzgerald had said. "And she didn't know it."

5. Chanel No. 5 The French parfum was the recipient of the best free publicity any company could ever dream of. In 1952, a 26-year-old Marilyn was asked in an interview what she wore to bed. "Five drops of Chanel No. 5," she replied. A year later in a photo shoot for Modern Screen, a bottle of the elixir appeared on her nightstand in every shot, further proving her affinity for the fragrance. Reflecting on the legendary line in 1960, Marilyn spoke of her sleeping habit. "I don't want to say nude," she said, "but it's the truth."

Watch the Marilyn-Chanel ad:

6. Bottle-blonde curls Just search "Marilyn Monroe hair" and hundreds of tutorials come back. Decades after her death, her platinum curls are still a look to strive for. She was a natural brunette, but in 1948, Marilyn debuted her blonde 'do. It became the iconic style of the 1950s.

7. The beauty mark There's much debate over whether Marilyn's mole just north of her mouth was real or drawn, but there's no debating that it made the facial polka dot into a symbol of beauty. Until Cindy Crawford became the supermodel of the '80s, Marilyn had cornered the market on the beauty mark, and it is her whom young girls emulated decades later with facial piercings resembling Marilyn's mole.

8. Divorce Marilyn had three ex-husbands, two of them as famous as she was. Her high-profile splits from baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller ushered in the era of celebrity mate-watching that has only gotten more publicly tawdry in the decades since. She and DiMaggio divorced in 1954-the same year the seemingly charmed couple married. Her relationship with Miller lasted longer-five years. In the year-and-a-half after their split, she and DiMaggio were rumored to have rekindled things. But their possibly on-again romance was cut short by Marilyn's death in 1962.

9. "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" President John F. Kennedy 's got quite a present for his 45th birthday-Marilyn, in a skintight and glittering gown, singing him a sultry version of the birthday song. Her breathy delivery, which substituted "Mr. President" for his name, went down in history as the hottest way to wish a loved one a happy birthday. The performance, on May 19, 1962, was given at Madison Square Garden. After Marilyn's song, JFK walked out on stage and thanked her. "I can now retire from politics after having had 'Happy Birthday' sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way," he said.

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Marilyn Monroe was only 36 when she died on August 5, 1962. But in her short time in the spotlight, she left endless marks on showbiz, fashion, music, and even the centerfold. Here are nine things Marilyn made famous. 1.

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ad Theresa May known she was going to have a coughing fit, would she have worn a bracelet comprised of small, painted images of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo on her right wrist? Or is that precisely why she used that hand to cough into - so that we, the public, could see that in 2005, she went to a blockbuster show at Tate Modern, in London?

A kind reading suggests May is aware of Kahlo's resurgence in the cultural world. Next year the V&A will host a Kahlo retrospective. Kahlo was also cited as a muse to the designer Roland Mouret's most recent collection and featured in the Italian fashion house Etro's pre-fall collection.

As to where the bracelet came from, a gift shop springs to mind, although there's an excellent likeness on the online craft site, Etsy.

Either way, it's perhaps a surprising statement for the Tory leader, not least because Kahlo was a communist, married to artist Diego Rivera, a prominent figure in the Mexican Communist party, and a close friend of Leon Trotsky. She also spent her career concerned with the plight of the impoverished, our connectedness to self, nature and the universe, the relationship between pain and identity, and imagined, one day, we could live in a classless society.

This article was amended on 5 October 2017 to correct the spelling of Diego Rivera's surname.

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Was Theresa May's Frida Kahlo bracelet a political statement?

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ad Theresa May known she was going to have a coughing fit, would she have worn a bracelet comprised of small, painted images of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo on her right wrist? Or is that precisely why she used that hand to cough into - so that we, the public, could see that in 2005, she went to a blockbuster show at Tate Modern, in London?

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Art

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(Image: Gloucestershire Live)

In the run up to Thursday's General Election you'll be able to see the UK's leading politicians as you've never seen them before.

But fair warning: once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

Artist Russell Haines has taken the idea of political leaders tearing strips off each other to a whole new level in his latest exhibition The State of Our Nation.

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, Prime Minister Theresa May and Labour's Jeremy Corbyn are all pictured in explicit poses.

And Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson also gets the saucy treatment, reports Gloucestershire Live .

Russell, 54, said: "The election seems to be between two parties, that is why I have painted May and Corbyn.

"However, I have chosen to paint Sturgeon because of the influence she has post- Brexit and what Boris has been like throughout the Brexit campaign."

He added: "My politics aside, I have nothing against them but the way they have been conducting themselves is disgraceful.

"I am not being any more insensitive to them as what they are to us. It is my tongue in cheek reaction to the circus of the election campaign."

Russell wants people to visit his exhibition and then write what they feel about the individual politicians.

He will then create another piece of artwork composed of all of statements.

"It is my tongue in cheek reaction to the circus of the election campaign which is a freak show," he said.

"The parties in the election keep changing their mind about what they are campaigning for, it's a populist thing. They will say whatever they think the majority want to hear to get into power."

The show in Gloucester, is suitable for over-16s. It is on until Thursday from 10am each day.

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Art exhibition with incredibly rude portraits of Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn

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In the run up to Thursday's General Election you'll be able to see the UK's leading politicians as you've never seen them before. But fair warning: once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. Artist Russell Haines has taken the idea of political leaders tearing strips off each other to a whole new level in his latest exhibition The State of Our Nation.

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A Scottish artist's painting of Donald Trump as King Kong has been shared thousands of times online after postings by singer Madonna.

Michael Forbes' art portrays the US President-elect and also Madonna, who is shown as the Statue of Liberty.

Black Isle-based Forbes created the piece this week.

Madonna, who opposed Trump's election campaign, has posted an image of the painting on her Facebook and Instagram pages.

Her post to Facebook has had more than 57,000 "likes" and her Instagram post more than 40,000.

Pop surrealist artist Forbes is part of the Tripping Up Trump movement which protested against the building of Trump's golf resort at the Menie Estate in Aberdeenshire.

The artist painted a mural on a barn of a farmer, also called Michael Forbes, who refused to sell land to Trump for the golf course.

Artist Forbes has a gallery in New York and his work in Scotland includes posters for the Highlands' Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival, created his painting of Trump this week.

Among the latest Trump piece's references are the US election's popular vote won by Hillary Clinton. She lost the election due to the electoral college system.

American comic book superhero and pop culture icon, Superman, also appears in Forbes' piece.

Madonna features because of her views on Trump and also Forbes' admiration of her activities in the gay community in the US.

The artist, who in his youth worked as an assistant to British Pop artist Gerald Laing, has been amused and pleased with the reaction to his Trump painting.

He said: "After Madonna posted it on Instagram my phone has been ringing repeatedly with people telling me about it."

President-elect Trump takes the oath of office on Friday with an estimated 900,000 people expected to gather in Washington for the induction and related activities.

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A Scottish artist's painting of Donald Trump as King Kong has been shared thousands of times online after postings by singer Madonna. Michael Forbes' art portrays the US President-elect and also Madonna, who is shown as the Statue of Liberty. Black Isle-based Forbes created the piece this week.

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The regal titles pop stars are given aren't often decided with the beneficial effects of science. But what if, in the absence of a reigning king of pop since Michael Jackson passed away, we used statistics to try and work out who most deserves to be crowned? What if we picked some categories, did a bit of research, made some playing cards in homage to the classic game and then proclaimed an outright winner at the end? Would Madonna still be queen in 2016?

Well, that is exactly what has happened. Every notable pop star around today has been subjected to trial by five categories (figures were taken up to 12 October):

Streams - a combination of all YouTube and Spotify plays (source: Kworb)
Followers - combining Twitter and Instagram followers, to assess the size of social media fanbase
Weeks at No.1 - a true test of pop regality, and a combined figure from both US and UK singles charts
Album sales - global sales since 2010 (source: United World Chart)
Personal fortune - including princely revenues from ticket sales and branding opportunities (source: TheRichest)

We then disregarded all but the top five women and men ( Ed Sheeran, Lady Gaga and Kanye all dropped out at this point), and ranked our Top 10 by giving them marks according to their position in each category - 10 for first place, 9 for second and so on. The monarch is the one with the greatest cumulative score by the end.

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Pop Trumps: Who is the current king or queen of pop?

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The regal titles pop stars are given aren't often decided with the beneficial effects of science. But what if, in the absence of a reigning king of pop since Michael Jackson passed away, we used statistics to try and work out who most deserves to be crowned?

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Madonna, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, The Runaways, Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Beyoncé, Debbie Harry, Katy Perry, Kylie Minogue, Lily Allen and more

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A new NME poll, to celebrate the magazibne's 60th birthday, asked readers to name the top 60 rock icons and 60,000 responded. Here are the top 10 but for details of the top 60 see http://www.nme.com.

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It's hard to believe that when she was growing up, Cindy Crawford-who stars in Vogue's latest "73 Questions" video series-was teased about the now-iconic dot above her left lip. Luckily, her mother talked her out of having it removed, and the rest is supermodel history: With the help of her million-dollar mole, the small-town beauty would soon find herself on the cover of Vogue, launching a legendary career that has spanned three decades and counting.

The inexplicable magnetism of a well-placed beauty mark, of course, has been a phenomenon throughout history. Long before a "Material Girl"-era Madonna paid homage to Marilyn Monroe with the help of her own exaggerated mark-or Edie Sedgwick confirmed the undeniable It-factor of drawn-on dots, it was Marie Antoinette who prompted legions of 18th-century courtiers to adorn their faces with moleskin or velvet mouches, which, depending on their location, conveyed anything from relationship status to a flirtatious personality.

These days, fashion favorites like Blake Lively and Kate Upton have revived the Old World glamour of the look, inspiring their fair share of followers to approximate the look with the help of an eye pencil. Here, a look at a few of the hottest spots of all time.
Cindy Crawford Sings George Michael and Tours Her Malibu Home

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The 9 Best Beauty Marks of All Time, From Cindy Crawford to Marilyn Monroe

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It's hard to believe that when she was growing up, Cindy Crawford-who stars in Vogue's latest "73 Questions" video series-was teased about the now-iconic dot above her left lip.

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Alistair O'Neill is Senior Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins and runs the Fashion History & Theory pathway of BA Fashion

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FILM

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Believing fashion to be intrinsically political, from December 2007 through summer 2008 Nick Knight staged a multi-level film and essay project, encouraging creatives to use the medium of fashion to convey their political beliefs, agendas and thoughts. Contributors include Beth Ditto, Gareth Pugh, Naomi Campbell, Steven Klein, Vanessa Friedman and Vivienne Westwood.

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BOOK AListair O Neill

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history / europe / great britain / general

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"London: After a Fashion" argues that fashion is central to the experience of modernity in late nineteenth and twentieth century London. Understanding fashionable consumption not only as a pleasurable aspect of metropolitan life, but as fundamental to the evolution of modern sensibilities, Alista...

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BOOK

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british fashion design: rag trade or image industry?

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business & economics / international / general

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business & economics : industries - general

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British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry?

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British Fashion Design explores the tensions between fashion as art form, and the demands of a ruthlessly commercial industry. Based on interviews and research conducted over a number of years, Angela McRobbie charts the flow of art school fashion graduates into the industry; their attempts to re...

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BOOK

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a portrait of fashion: six centuries of dress at the national portrait gallery

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clothing and dress - great britain - history

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national portrait gallery (great britain)

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health & fitness/beauty & grooming - general

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photography / subjects & themes / fashion

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A Portrait of Fashion: Six Centuries of Dress at the National Portrait Gallery

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Costume, portraiture and the presentation of the individual have been intimately linked throughout the history of art. While the face of the person portrayed is often still directly accessible to us, the details and significance of their dress can be less easy to comprehend. Lavishly illustrated ...

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BOOK

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the culture of fashion: a new history of fashionable dress (studies in design and material culture)

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The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Studies in Design and Material Culture)

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Buy The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Studies in Design and Material Culture) UK ed. by Christopher Breward (ISBN: 9780719041259) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

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Whether in reference to the students or the tutors, Central Saint Martins is "about the people that are there". That's the view of Alistair O'Neill, tutor of Fashion History and Theory, among myriad other roles, but ask anyone at 1 Granary, the magazine and the building, and it's a sentiment that holds.
You may not be familiar with the Fashion History and Theory pathway, with its academic leaning in a college celebrated for its applied arts, but you'll have no doubt seen Alistair's recent projects proliferate your Twitter feeds, followed by #BlowExhibition or #Valentino hash tags. Perhaps you've experienced them in person at London's Somerset House.

Valentino: Master of Couture and Fashion Galore, a celebration of the life and legacy of Isabella Blow, were exhibitions with Alistair at the helm and, uniquely, a Saint Martins presence in the opportunities he provided for his students, who contributed to each show. "I'm both a writer and curator", but beyond that, an engaging mentor, whose inconceivably vast knowledge of fashion, photography and film had us questioning as a class how you would even begin to acquire that sort of knowledge. So, in order to find out, we asked.

"I find fashion very, very rich material in which to try and understand recent history."

We will admit to searching online to try and find out more about you, but it's actually quite hard to find anything about your background before you started your MA at the Royal College of Art. What were you doing before that?
I did a foundation course in Art and Design at Kingston College, and I wanted to pursue fine art, so I went on to do quite an unusual course for its time at the University of Brighton. If you wanted to study fine art, you had four options; you could study painting, sculpture, print- making, or something which they then called Alternative Practice.

It's quite strange to think back on it now, and reflect that you had to do that kind of course if you wanted to do work which was installation-based, about both still and moving image, and sound, so it was quite an experimental course. A lot of my work was motivated by issues of taste and style, and also, in a funny way now that I think about it, articulations of history.

So what motivated you to move from something practical to the History of Design (MA) at the RCA?
By that point, I'd already become very disillusioned with the idea of wanting to become an artist... I met a very inspirational tutor called Alison Clarke, and she really helped me appreciate that there was a design discourse alongside an art one, and it's from there that I started to become interested in museums. One of my first roles was in acting as a student voice for the 20th century gallery at the V&A, and it's from there that I really got to learn about the MA course that they run with the RCA.
When did the focus of your studies shift onto fashion?
I've always been interested in fashion, I just never really found a focus for it, and then I suppose it just really developed in relation to what I was teaching, and the kinds of things I started to first write about.

"I think constraints are always creative if approached the right way."

Was teaching something that you'd considered as a career quite early on?
When I was at the RCA, I taught at Camberwell Art College on some of the part-time courses... but I never thought that I was going to have a career in it; I never thought that I would have a career as a researcher. I had interests, and I wanted to pursue them, and I suppose that that's what has defined my career to-date, that I've been honourable to the things that motivate me, and I'm still fascinated by them. I'm not tired of them yet.
What is it that keeps you fascinated?
I find fashion very, very rich material in which to try and understand recent history... and I think that the Isabella Blow project is a good example of how you can use an exhibition to call to question recent history. With 'Fashion Galore!' it's not just about one woman's wardrobe. It's about using the exhibition as an opportunity to actually examine and represent what that was about, and I find it fascinating that you can point to the contribution British fashion made to international fashion at that point through the effects of someone's wardrobe. And it's not just located in dress; a lot of my work has been about looking at representations of dress, particularly through photography, and seeing what that can tell us about sensibilities, and ideas of appearance and identity.

With there being such "rich material", whether photography or dress, how do you begin filtering that information, and deciding what's important to include?
First and foremost, it's about the material available to you - or not. That can sometimes be a filter, but... it always returns me to that thing that I used to do when I composed lectures, which was going to the slide library and pulling out slides, and then asking, how can you make a lecture out of twenty images? I tend to think visually first, and then I use that to structure what I want to say.

With an exhibition, it's not really that different, it's just that instead of them being slides, they might be objects, or they could be images, or there might be sound clips, etc. In terms of how you approach filtering contemporary fashion, and making judgements with which you can say, "that was important", it's much trickier. I think that the recent sessions I've done with the 2nd years about 21st- century chronology, and how you define the last thirteen years is a case in point.

"Curation is about being able to articulate a point of difference from what's been widely understood to-date about your subject matter."

That was difficult without there being much distance between then and now. How do you overcome constraints like that when someone asks you to curate an exhibition?
I think constraints are always creative if approached the right way. I also think curation is about being able to articulate a point of difference from what's been widely understood to-date about your subject matter. For instance, when it came to doing the Valentino exhibition, there had been a retrospective in Rome and in Paris, and essentially we were working with the same objects. We felt that if we were going to do that, we had to be able to articulate a point of difference. In that instance, it was about demonstrating how Italian couture differs from the French model, and the next part of that was actually trying to unpack what Italian couture techniques are. Some of the fundamental principles of why you are trying to do something from the outset are not necessarily that apparent in the final product, but I think what's interesting about exhibitions is that you always want to structure them so that a number of different kinds of visitors can come and take something from it.

The number of visitors seems to be growing, with people saying that fashion exhibitions have become a huge "draw card" for museums in the past five years. Why do you think that is?
I think an exhibition visitor wanting to see a show like Fashion Galore! is motivated by the fact that they can get closer to an industry that they're normally excluded from. They're motivated by what they see in broader popular culture about fashion, and they want to learn more about it.

I think one of the reasons why Savage Beauty [an exhibition of Alexander McQueen's work, held in 2011 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York] was such a success in the States is that most American exhibition visitors had never seen anything like it before. It wasn't just about the power the clothes had, and their authority, it was about their craftsmanship; it was the fact that you could get up close and you could see it. They might well have seen these things as images, but they'd never seen it in the flesh before.
Do you think the growing popularity of the fashion exhibition might also be because of that - the amount of static, 2D imagery available to us online? That maybe going out and engaging with an exhibition can be seen as a point-of- difference from our everyday experience of fashion on the internet?
Fashion exhibitions are tangible, physical environments with things in, and so it's very different from reacting to something through a digital portal, and I think people really like that. It's also something that you can do by yourself, or with other people, and in that sense, it's a way of filling time, or spending your leisure time that's not that different from going to the cinema... I think that's what people are responding to.

There's whole swathes of VHS-led fashion journalism that's just not really around anymore, and I think that one of the problems with the net is that people think it's all out there, and it's all available, and it's not."

Has today's digital culture affected how you approach your own work, and the things you take into consideration?
Well, I suppose what's interesting about this exhibition, Fashion Galore! is the way in which a lot of the audio-visual material is analogue, so it's pre-digital, and it's amazing how little of it you can access through digital libraries and collections. It really surprised me that so much just wasn't there any more... there's whole swathes of VHS-led fashion journalism that's just not really around anymore, and I think that one of the problems with the net is that people think it's all out there, and it's all available, and it's not.
It's quite hard to find images of whole collections from before 2000/2001 online. Do you engage much with fashion online in your own time?
RSS feed has been my saviour. It's helped me de-clutter my inbox... So, I choose when I want to connect, rather than it reminding me of what I'm missing. I think the opportunities of what you can interact with out there are really wonderful, but the kind of sites that I really like are few and far between. For instance, there's a blog called Little Augury, which I love; The Cutting Class, I really like... and Garmento. I subscribe to The New York Times, as well as The Guardian. I obviously read academic journals too, so I'll look at those through our college e-library.
Do you think that there are other ways of engaging with digital that could change the way work is exhibited? The MA course for Creative Practice for Narrative Environments at the college has been looking at how 3D printing could shape the future of curation by enabling visitors to touch displayed objects, and also have them appear in different parts of the world at the same time. Do you think there is a future in that?
I think that the advent of 3D printing is going to have an unbelievable effect on the culture of exhibitions, and I think that we haven't even started to predict what that's going to be like. Fashion curation has been rather slow in responding to the possibilities of digital space. People could start to develop a critical space for fashion exhibitions online, because it does allow you to think through some of the challenges of curating a physical space; it allows you to rehearse it certainly. However, I think the price-point of 3D printing needs to come down a little bit more before it becomes really accessible.

"The advent of 3D printing is going to have an unbelievable effect on the culture of exhibitions."

How do you see your role as a tutor fit into the context of your own curatorial work and research?

I've always felt that it is important to use your work to reflect back on what it is that you're delivering to you students, and what I've been able to do more recently, and what I'm really pleased about, is to be able to involve my students to a certain extent in the projects I'm working on. I think that if you can offer those kinds of opportunities, it makes a big difference, and I think for students, it means that they see the subject as a live concern. It's not something that's purely studied and detached from its industrial sense.
Is there anything about being at Central Saint Martins in particular that affects how you approach your work?
Yes, absolutely. The reason why I enjoy being there is because it allows me to appreciate the relationship between theory and practice. So, for me, writing in an academic way about fashion has to be necessarily influenced by being in an environment where the practice of making it is all around you. You can't help but pick up on that. What I think is unique about the course in terms of being in Central Saint Martins, and the reason why I want to be there, is the people who are there.
Having taught and studied at some of London's best art and fashion colleges, and having written London: After a Fashion, you seem well placed to ask what makes this city unique in its contribution to the creative arts. It'd be reductive to ask someone to formally unpack what makes London exciting, but what makes London exciting for you?
Samuel Johnson said a very long time ago that "a man who is tired of London is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford". I really passionately believe in that, because there is an embarrassment of riches in London. It's amazing. I love the museums and galleries; the collections and the archives and libraries; its vibrant culture of exhibitions. I love its restaurant and food scene, and just walking in London, and the fact that it's a truly global city.

In terms of how you can think about fashion's contribution to the city, it's not just about catwalk fashion. I think street fashion is still very important to a history of London fashion, and that London's fashion education is really important from that art school tradition.

Also, I enjoy the kinds of sources that you're able to draw upon, whether Kerry Taylor, as a good example of how to be a great auctioneer of surviving dress, or amazing collections like the Clothworkers' Centre, or November Books, and Claire de Rouen Books. I find the richness of its offer really inspiring.
Interview by Sara McAlpine Photography by Hanna Moon Get a copy of Issue 2 here!

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Whether in reference to the students or the tutors, Central Saint Martins is "about the people that are there". That's the view of Alistair O'Neill, tutor of Fashion History and Theory, among myriad other roles, but ask anyone at 1 Granary, the magazine and the building, and it's a sentiment that holds.

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ESSAY

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Movies about "aliens", beings from other worlds, are generally seen as good box office. Here, in complete reversal, this programme looks at the work of four quite diverse directors who dared to turn the camera on that sub-species of "fashion aliens" who exist within our own society.

Covering everything from high glamour to lowlife, and cult to couture, each film integrates into its storyline a completely different fashion strand of its day, whilst also clearly illustrating in retrospect how fashion in its extreme still sits uncomfortably in the real world.

Of the four films featured in this programme only Liquid Sky is pure science fiction, while the other three, Paris is Burning, The Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield and True Stories, subtly explore worlds that could easily verge into the realms of science fiction. All four could also be categorised as parody, with each in its way setting about seducing the viewer into considering the unacceptable and maybe even believing the unbelievable.

These observations are most clearly depicted in True Stories (1986), a work of pure fiction yet firmly based in reality. Here, director David Byrne of Talking Heads fame, personally escorts us into the heartland of contemporary "Middle American" mall life, in the mythical Texas town of Virgil. Renowned for his deep love of irony, Byrne paints a picture of an idealistic, familiar place, where everyone conforms to regular society, but displays their own unique brand of individuality.

The movie - which in many ways is like a musical - has no real plot, but rather meanders through the streets of Virgil exploring the lives of the townsfolk as they prepare to celebrate "150 Years of Specialness." Along the way we meet the main character, shy bachelor Lewis Fyne played by John Goodman, and we follow his hysterical exploits as he goes in search of a wife. Ever fashion conscious, in his extensive range of co-coordinated polyester suits and caps, Lewis places an advert on TV and confesses that he just wants to be loved, but applicants must be prepared to accept his teddy-bear figure!

As the camera travels along the vast aisles of Vigil's shopping mall, we quickly get the impression that to be fashionable is very important here; it makes a statement about who we are and where we belong. Although by today's standards the styles we see in the film appear very dated, the costume designer - Byrne's wife - has carefully selected marvellous examples of fashionable leisurewear from previous decades to throw into the mix, giving the movie a somewhat timeless look. She has not styled her costumes on the wearer as some latest designer fad, in an ephemeral manner. Instead we get the impression they have evolved steadily over the years in a considered, acceptable way, like much mainstream American fashion.

However, we soon learn what differentiates this place from any other stereotypical US community; this town's inhabitants, although playing familiar roles, such as civic leaders, factory workers and shoppers, are a little strange. Many, like the 50 sets of twins, a lawnmower brigade and a chapter of Shriners, driving their miniature Corvettes, are quite eccentric. Some, such as the woman who stays in bed all day watching TV surrounded by automated contraptions, and the "lying woman", who among other things claims to have written the lyrics for Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", appear so disturbed they could even be aliens.

Here, True Stories raises the question: 'Is truth stranger than fiction?" It certainly could be the case in this part of America, and Byrne deliberately sets about testing our preconceptions of its society. Do these kinds of people really exist? Anyone who has spent time in the Midwest may testify that characters of this extremity are pretty prevalent in those parts. But what is unusual about this movie is that Byrne magnifies his character observations to the point of obsession, allowing nothing to be hidden; everyone's personal traits and eccentricities are examined and celebrated, in effect giving star treatment to the entire cast. "When I see a place for the first time, I notice everything - the color of the paper, the sky, the way people walk, doorknobs, every detail," says Byrne. Similarly, with the clothes, the camera often lingers so long on the acres of polyester that one can almost feel the static.

This bizarre scenario and vision of over-indulgence leaves the viewer sensing a slight air of unease, in much the same way as the films of David Lynch. But it's ok, because Byrne counter-balances the weirdness by playing up the humour with familiar feel-good themes, and before we know it, another comforting wave of self-assurance washes over us, persuading even the sceptics to smile through it all. So, when a surreal "family catalogue style" fashion show is thrown into the mix, we are well primed to accept that the mall audience, rather than be embarrassed, would happily go out and wear these outrageous creations. Throughout True Stories Byrne subtly delivers the point that people really want to "fit in" to this kind of community, and this is reaffirmed when Lewis, bursts into the song, "People Like Us".

Like True Stories, with The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield (1968) a documentary, we have a highly visible celebrity guide and host. Mansfield, complete with her pet Chihuahua, personally introduces us to a darker, generally hidden side of humanity, taking us on a fantastical journey deep into the underbelly of the American and European sex trade. And, in a similar way to David Byrne in mall world, she appears totally at ease mingling with these various low-life communities.

One minute we are observing attractive young prostitutes of both sexes, practising openly on the streets of European cities - attracting their salubrious clientele by wearing the latest chic styles usually reserved for the fashion set - and the next, she takes us behind the closed doors of assorted sex parlours where a seedy glamorous dress style is the norm. Then, like True Stories, we are witness to a surreal fashion show, this time with the designer's bizarre creations displayed by semi-naked girls - one featured girl wears a tent complete with camping equipment and all its trappings, while another who is made up to resemble an oil painting, sports little more than a large gilt frame. Within the context of this environment, the costumes seem completely acceptable and well received by the audience. But, one questions, would anybody dare to wear such incredible garments outside of these four walls?

Also based in the underworld but some 14 years later on, Paris is Burning (1982) director Jennie Livingstone documents an infamous ensemble of African-American and Hispanic young men, who live out their high fashion female fantasies and obsessions by mimicking catwalk supermodels. These highly competitive rituals are carried out on the dance floor of Brooklyn nightclubs. Adopting the names of famous Parisian couture houses, these exotic creatures wear their own ostentatious creations mixed with bootleg fashions, and have created their own unique dance style called "voguing". Here again these spectacles are carried on in virtual exclusivity behind closed doors, far away from the prying eyes of the general public. One is left with the feeling that these young men are somehow victims of a blinkered society that excludes fashions that challenge and differentiate from the norm. It is therefore somewhat ironic that it took the female pop icon Madonna to later appropriate and popularize "voguing" as an acceptable genre.

With the cult feature film Liquid Sky (1982), we are presented with the only work that truly falls into the science fiction genre, so it is immediately labelled as make-believe. However, what director Slava Tsukerman has cleverly done here, is lend plausibility to his fictitious characters by basing their stylish futuristic outfits on a genuine fashion - labelled "New Wave" - that was prevalent in the New York underground scene at the time of making the film. He goes further with the film's storyline, by featuring a crowd of genuine Lower East Side fashionistas and exhibitionists in a nightclub and a spectacular fashion show, whilst also capturing the elitist mood, drug preferences, and sexual activities of that same hedonist scene.

As a genre, movies with contemporary fashion themes are virtually untouched by today's filmmakers, and as with this selection, generally left to the low-budget independents. It takes a rare breed of producer to bankroll a movie that ventures into this territory, unless the subject is used as pastiche. Film moguls now demand shelf life for their product and not something that will be dated even before its release.

Interestingly, when the films in this programme came out, each in its own way was quite influential in the fashion world, though none, in movie terms, were a financial success. However, what they did achieve was surely something every director secretly strives for - instant cult status - and thereby, ironically, an everlasting shelf life. Sadly, cult status can sometimes be the kiss of death, as none of these clearly talented directors have done anything as adventurous since!

© Roger K Burton 2006

View all essays from Between Stigma and Enigma

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new york’s museum of the moving image and tribeca grand

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Fashion in Film is an exhibition, research and education project based at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Since its foundation in 2005, the Fashion in Film Festival (FFF) has become a leading showcase for the common ground shared by fashion and film.

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marlies | dekkers magazine - fall | winter 2017

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All my work as a feminist designer is inspired by muses. Powerful female icons from past and present. Although women have been marginalised for centuries, archetypes of female power have always been there. Trough my designs, I bring them to you. To help us shape the world of modern day feminism.

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Madonna & Katy Perry Talk the Power of Pop

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JOURNAL

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BIAS: Journal of Dress Practice Issue 2 - Fashion + Politics

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A journal produced by the Dress Practice Collective which explores the intersection of visual culture, fashion theory, design studies and personal practice pertaining to the topic: Fashion + Politics. Released in conjunction with The New School Fashion + Politics Symposium: Fashion Praxis, the journal explores such issues as performative dress practices, sartorial activism, national identity formation, and prominent public figures.

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BOOK

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Issuu is a digital publishing platform that makes it simple to publish magazines, catalogs, newspapers, books, and more online. Easily share your publications and get them in front of Issuu's millions of monthly readers.

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World's Most Beautiful: See Who Else Made the 2017 List!

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Award winners and influencers, pioneers and pop stars - the unforgettable beauties of the year

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shoes

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'If June Swann doesn't know what a shoe is, nobody does,' said Jill Spanner at the Museum of London's costume collection. 'She's the world's leading authority on historic shoes.'

I first heard of Ms Swann while visiting Erddig, the great, romantic country house in North Wales. Jeremy Cragg, the National Trust's head steward, was showing me a pair of flattened, exhausted black leather shoes he had found walled up in a chimney there. Did the shoes belong to the master or a servant? When were they put there and what was a shoe doing in the chimney anyway? 'I must call June Swann,' he said. 'She's the doyenne of footwear.'

Five years ago Ms Swann retired as keeper of the shoe and boot collection at the Central Museum and Art Gallery in Northampton, a town known for its footwear industry. However, she is still extremely busy as a footwear detective. When I rang she had just returned from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she is cataloguing a shoe collection, and soon she will be heading for Toronto. Yes, she would be coming to London, but cases to solve at the V & A would take all her time. We arranged a meeting at her former perch in Northampton.

Ms Swann has the confidence of an expert. Within minutes of saying hello we were looking at what was on view out of the more than 4,000 items in the boot and shoe collection. Along two walls stood huge cast-iron examples of early shoe manufacturing machinery. A long, low casing contained one of the world's best collections of shoe buckles.

'One day in the Seventies I had this phone call,' Ms Swann recalled, standing in front of the rows of glittering buckles. 'It was from Mrs Hull Grundy. 'I'm dying,' she said. 'Would you like my shoe buckle collection?' '

In fact, it was eight years before Anne Hull Grundy, one of this country's most discerning collectors of jewellery, did die, but the buckles came to the Central Museum straight away.

Without having to consult a label or a note (though aware of every label that had vanished since she retired, every accessory that had disappeared, every boot incorrectly displayed), Ms Swann began talking about the amazing variety of shoes and boots that filled the tall, old-fashioned wood-framed cases.

'I think footwear gives more away about people's attitudes to society than clothes,' she said as she darted between the cases. I began to understand what she meant: social history, finance, craftsmanship, fashion, the politics of museum financing, superstition, trade secrets, sexual politics and patriotism all found their way into her conversation. It was clear that by focusing on shoes she had seen into a rich world.

Asked about the shoes I had been shown at Erddig, Mrs Swann said: 'It's a common superstition.' More than 900 examples of shoes that had been hidden away have been sent to Northampton for identification. 'Children's shoes were found walled up in Ely cathedral. Rather 'tarty' shoes in a chapel. There have been shoes found under the roofs in houses, in orphanages, schools. . . .

'By the 15th century this walling-in of shoes was used as a protection. The shoe stands in for the person, so it guards all the entry points - the doors, windows, chimneys, roof.'

But why shoes? Why not, say, a shirt, or a scarf? 'The shoe is the only garment you wear that retains your shape and your personality,' Ms Swann explained. 'You take off your clothes, they're just a heap of rags on the floor. But the shoe is moulded to your foot. It's got the essence of the wearer in it. You catch sight of your shoes in the distance, it can give you a nasty shock.'

Though most of the shoes on view are English, there is one case of foreign specimens. A floppy item looking more like a crude hairnet than a shoe was particularly unnerving. This Australian aboriginal specimen was in fact made of emu feathers and hair - human hair, possibly mixed with human blood. It played a part in revenge killing. 'You can't tell which way the footprints are going,' Ms Swann pointed out, 'so the wearer can't be followed.'

The same case holds several fine examples of North American moccasins. 'Don't let anyone tell you that the American Indians were savages,' Ms Swann declared. 'That embroidery is as exquisite as anything being done in Europe at the time.'

She added: 'My anthropologist friends over there tell me that the Indians never ever copied European styles, but they bloody well did.'

The Indians even sold the uppers to European women, who had them made up into shoes in London and Paris.

Making moccasins was squaws' work. But it is not only in the tepee that women have played their part in shoe-making. To this day it is women who stitch the uppers in shoe factories. Traditionally, they have earned less than the men, who stitch the lowers - the tougher material on the rest of the shoe.

We looked at delicate shoes covered in star-studded silks, petit point and softest kid. The flat, beribboned white slippers worn by Queen Victoria on her wedding day are on view in a royal display. 'English women were notorious for their plain, sensible shoes,' Ms Swann noted. But not by the Roaring Nineties: these glace kid tasselled boots have 6 1/2 in heels.

'This is the period when the gentleman always gives you his arm,' Ms Swann observed, 'and your parasol is very tall. I'm sure that's the only way you stood up in these things.'

Being big-footed myself, I noted that there had been others of my ilk in the 19th century. 'Yes, they get big in the 1880s and 1890s. We're talking about votes for women,' Ms Swann explained. 'Some of them are extremely big in the 1790s, too,' she continued. 'Liberty, equality, big feet.'

When freedom for their gender and their limbs was not in fashion, women stuffed their feet into shoes too small for them. Or worse. 'Round about 1867, when anaesthetics were first developed,' Ms Swann said, 'fashionable women would have the odd toe or two amputated.'

(This grisly marriage of masochism and vanity continues. Not long ago I met an otherwise canny businesswoman who had had her toes 'shortened' so she could wear prettier shoes.)

One of the most beautiful shoes in the collection was also one of the plainest: flat, soft black leather with a square toe and an elasticised gusset. The workmanship was superb: both the hand-sewn soles and uppers have 44 stitches to the inch.

'It was made by a lad in 1830,' Ms Swann said. He lived not far from where we were standing and had just completed his apprenticeship. This 'occasioning' shoe had been made to show manufacturers the very best he could produce. 'It's the only one that I know for certain has survived,' Ms Swann said. 'And it's got the earliest surviving use of latex I know of.'

Two hours had passed and we were only part way through the collection. We decided to break for lunch.

Was it an Imelda Marcos-like passion for shoes that had led Ms Swann to her life's work? No, not at all, she said. It was chance. And necessity. When she left college as a geography graduate in 1949 she couldn't find a job. 'I was getting desperate,' she recalled. When she heard there was an opening at the museum, she applied. 'I thought, 'Oh well, it will do to be going on with.' '

She started work in 1950 and stayed for 38 years. Ms Swann was hooked.

'One of the first jobs I did was reorganising the stores and starting to catalogue the shoes. I realised none of the books in print were any use.'

Ms Swann began studying paintings and novels, every source she could think of that would give her insight and information about shoes and boots. When in the late Sixties Christie's began its costume auctions she started buying historic shoes for the museum. Her knowledge and the collection's importance developed in tandem. 'I eventually realised I was working with what had become the world's best collection of footwear. There's nowhere else you can go,' she observed ruefully.

Though she is enormously proud of the achievements of Northampton's shoemakers and manufacturers, she notes that the town's shoe collection has struggled without the financial support she believes it deserves as 'a national treasure'. For 36 of the years June Swann laboured at the museum, she had to do what she called 'an impossible job' of conservation, acquisition, cataloguing and display.

Corporate sponsorship was not a possibility. Northampton's shoe industry has not exactly flourished in the second half of the 20th century. 'I didn't have the heart to ask,' Ms Swann said.

Now there are signs that the collection is deteriorating. Items are missing from shoes and boots, labels are gone and the room itself is windowless and unattractive. There had been two other rooms as well. One was set up in 1913 as a model of a workplace by four men who had used the shoe-making machines on view. 'It looked absolutely beautiful,' she said. 'It was full of

atmosphere.'

Ms Swann has written a book, Shoes, and is now at work on a dictionary of 700 words connected with shoes and shoe-making. 'I'm trying to find the history of each word. Some go back to Saxon times and change their meaning as the object they describe changes its shape.'

She is including contemporary quotations and illustrations. Some of her references predate any in the OED. 'I learn something new about shoes every day,' said Ms Swann.

'Shoes' by June Swann is published by B T Batsford at pounds 14.95.

(Photograph omitted)

Reuse content

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You are what you wear on your feet: For June Swann, a boot is a clue

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'If June Swann doesn't know what a shoe is, nobody does,' said Jill Spanner at the Museum of London's costume collection. 'She's the world's leading authority on historic shoes.' I first heard of Ms Swann while visiting Erddig, the great, romantic country house in North Wales.

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history of footwear

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History of Footwear in Norway, Sweden and Finland: Prehistory to 1950 - Google Search

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www.dailymotion.com/video/x4e8ef9 History of Footwear in Norway Sweden and Finland: Prehistory to 1950 Read ...

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Abstract

In the wake of modernity, women's sexuality was positioned in a way that created a beauty/narcissism double bind that is still with us today. My concern in this article is that the subject position of "fashion model" serves as a constant reminder of this split, which is directed at all women and weakens the generalized woman's political agency. Fashion models themselves experience harassment and humiliation as well as pleasure and desire in their work as fashion models. However, the small portion of feminist work that has engaged explicitly with the fashion-model business sees it mainly as an enterprise that is alienating and hostile to women. Although I do not entirely disagree with this analysis, it neglects the meaning of beauty and what beauty does to us with regard to creativity and pleasure. I wish to explore how some of the work experience of fashion models intersects with and challenges the beauty/narcissism double bind. I suggest that rather than grounding our understanding of the subject position "fashion model" and the fashion business solely in their reinforcement of the beauty/narcissism double bind, we should pay attention to the importance of what beauty and aspects of narcissism may mean.

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A Dangerous Subject: The Fashion Model and the Beauty/Narcissism Double Bind

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In the wake of modernity, women's sexuality was positioned in a way that created a beauty/narcissism double bind that is still with us today. My concern in this article is that the subject position of "fashion model" serves as a constant reminder of this split, which is directed at all women and weakens the generalized woman's political agency.

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older women used on catwalk got massive ovation

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older women used on catwalk got massive ovation

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I have a private theory, too. Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and the most powerful woman - or thing - in fashion, is ageing, too. At the age of 60, she is more than capable of stroking a mirror and saying: "The next big thing is me..."

Even so, this inclusiveness enchants me, even though applauding fashion for being inclusive is like applauding water for being wet - for me, at least, that is its job; because age-equals-beauty makes me ponder my grandmother, who is still the only person I have ever seen who could wear a mink coat and a turban and not look like a heart-broken transvestite. She is my argument that the old can look wonderful and, had you met her, you would realise I need no other. She once wore an armless red satin cheongsam at 70, like the Empress Wu transported to Croydon. Wherever she walked, was a catwalk.

Which brings me to an influential blog called Advanced Style, which has more than a million followers. Its creator, the New York photographer and artist Ari Seth Cohen, 28, strolls around the fashion capitals of the world with a camera, taking pictures of older men and women, and posting them online for his armies of young, fashion-munching devotees. He is the most visible of a gaggle of internet artists who celebrate the beauty of age.

I looked at Advanced Style this morning and found a 98-year-old woman in a grey trouser suit and golden gipsy earrings walking down Madison Avenue with a stick. She looked very cool, as if she was about to hit toddlers. Then came an old man dressed in an orange suit and cowboy boots, laughing and holding a pocket watch, even though I sensed time is not something he cares about. Then there was a woman in a wondrous sort of hat, which looked like a jewelled colander with blue ears. The final woman, in fur and leather breastplate, looked like a follower of Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon, but slightly more ruthless.

I stared at the photographs and wondered why these people do not look ridiculous, as very styled people often do. And I decided - it is because they are not models. Models, in one of the many paradoxes of fashion that I note but do not really understand, do not actually look that good in the clothes, because they do not look very human in them. They look neither easy nor joyous. This is partly because looking contemptuous and unreachable is part of the model manifesto - like hostages, models must never smile. It is also because all models, when not on the catwalk, wear T-shirts and shorts. In their heads, it seems, they are always in Ibiza.

Cohen moved to New York from Seattle and one day, he says, he saw a documentary about an actress called Mimi Weddell, who died last year. She was addicted to wearing hats, and her style credentials were so shimmering she even appeared as a homophobic grandmother in Sex and the City. "She was so stylish and elegant in her early nineties," Cohen says. "She had a sense of personal style and freedom."

The word freedom, I sense, is the key. "Older people wear their clothes with confidence because they no longer have anyone to impress," he says. "I see more beauty in them. These pictures are not just images. Each one tells a story." I agree with him. No one, for me, looks more like a woman than an old woman. Cohen's images have appeared in British Grazia, Italian Elle, and on the walls of that temple to the cult of being 16, Selfridges.

So, could it be that fashion is becoming human, even loveable? I speak to Brenda Polan, director of programmes at the London College of Fashion. Why, I ask, is the older woman becoming a style icon? Polan giggles gently and then points out that some designers - Issey Miyake and Vivienne Westwood, for instance - have always sent older women down the catwalk. "In the 1980s, Bodymap used to send their mums on," she says, "usually with a fag hanging out of their mouths."

But mainstream fashion will always worship the young, she says, because it believes that the young are sexy, and sexy sells product. "There is a public relations element to using older models, to bucking the trend," she says. "With Tom Ford's New York Fashion Week show, there was an element of 'Yes, let's grab the headlines'.

"But Ford also really does admire women with character," Polan concedes, "and there are advantages to maturity. It is not just wrinkles and a bit of sag. Your mind gets more interesting and it shows in the face. But fashion needs novelty. So fashion likes gimmicks."

So, is this a proper change, this cult of age? "No," she says, and laughs again. "But it will come around again."

And I laugh, too.

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London Fashion Week: On trend... after a fashion

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I have a private theory, too. Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and the most powerful woman - or thing - in fashion, is ageing, too. At the age of 60, she is more than capable of stroking a mirror and saying: "The next big thing is me..."

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With her long, platinum-blonde hair, pouting lips, seductive lisp, awe-inspiring 41-inch breasts and 18-inch waist, the young Sabrina was hailed as Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.

In her early appearances on TV and film as a classic dumb blonde, she remained exactly that - dumb - rarely uttering a single word.

And yet, she vividly captured the public imagination, swiftly becoming one of the best-known and most popular personalities of the Fifties and Sixties, with a bust famously insured for £100,000.

But Sabrina, whose death aged 80 has just been announced, was also a refreshing realist and the first to admit that she had none of the talent of the iconic sex symbols with whom she was compared.

Many decades later, when asked about her fame, she said: 'It made me a sex symbol, which I'm not. And it made me a household name, like Tide, which I am - a clean girl from the sticks.

'People seem to forget that I was, at one time, the junior breaststroke champion of Manchester.'

Indeed, she was.

Norma Ann Sykes - her real name - was born in a modest terrace house in Heaviley, Stockport, on May 19, 1936, the daughter of a factory mechanic, Walter Sykes, and his wife, Annie, a seamstress.

She proved herself a talented schoolgirl swimmer with ambitions to swim the Channel, and by the age of nine, she was swimming a mile a day at the local YWCA, beating girls of 15.

But her dreams were thwarted when, at 14, she contracted rheumatic fever and polio and spent two years in and out of hospitals. An operation on her leg almost led to amputation, leaving her with a scarred ankle and a dependency on calipers, at times, to walk.

Doctors prescribed exercises to develop her leg muscles during her convalescence, and she would spend hours each day swimming in a heated pool, and then working through body-building sequences. It was to these strenuous workouts that her prodigious bust was attributed.

At the age of 16, and realising that her incredible 41-18-36 figure was her best asset,

Sabrina left Blackpool where her mother was running a hotel and moved to London, where she worked as a waitress and housemaid, before turning to 'glamour modelling', posing nude for pictures used on the backs of playing cards, and for various magazines.

The turning point in her life came in 1955 at the age of 18.

The comedian Arthur Askey, casting around for a gimmick for his BBC television series, Before Your Very Eyes, claimed to have had a nightmare following a late supper of cold roast beef and pickled onions in which the 5ft 2in tall comic saw himself confronted by a pair of huge bosoms.

With the launch of the commercial channel ITV imminent, Askey's producer, Bill Ward, saw the publicity potential of his star's 'vision'.

In these politically correct times, it seems incredible, but a nationwide hunt was launched and thousands of photographs of well-endowed young beauties sent in to the BBC - but none could rival the shot of Norma Sykes sent in by a modelling agent.

Even then, Askey had his doubts. 'She had a lovely face and figure,' he later recalled, 'but could not act, sing, dance, or even walk properly . . . Anyway, she was exactly what we wanted.' Askey and Ward renamed her Sabrina, after the 1954 film Sabrina Fair starring Audrey Hepburn, and an elocution coach was hired to work on eradicating her Lancashire accent.

'You will have to take my word that I did not engage her on the size of her bust,' Askey wrote in his autobiography. 'I knew she was "well built", but had no idea how big she really was until the BBC wardrobe mistress told me she couldn't get Sabrina into a medieval costume on account of her enormous chest. I realised then that I had unknowingly struck "gold in them thar hills"!'

The BBC had also struck gold. The reaction of viewers to her first appearance was so enthusiastic that she was moved centre-stage for the next episode. Within months, she was receiving 1,000 fan letters a week and was hugely in demand for shop openings and personal appearances.

Often, her public activities descended into near-riots. A crowd of 4,000 turned up to watch her opening a shop in Sheffield, for which her fee was £100 - at a time when the average weekly wage was £7.50.

Her clothing was regularly torn off by fans, and everything she did was photographed, including being politely ejected from the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

She had entered without a ticket and with a plunging cleavage that was deemed 'inappropriate' in front of the Queen and Queen Mother.

After her sensational debut with Askey, she featured in another BBC TV series, Fast And Loose, with Bob Monkhouse and June Whitfield, followed by her first film, Stock Car, in which she had a few lines - although they appeared to have been dubbed by a Cockney actress.

In her second film, Ramsbottom Rides Again (alongside Askey, comedians Sid James and Frankie Vaughan), she uttered barely a word, and in Blue Murder At St Trinian's, in which she shared star billing with Alastair Sim and Terry-Thomas, she was seen in bed with a book and never spoke.

Sabrina then took to the stage in a West End revue, Plaisirs De Paris, billed as 'The Fabulous Sabrina'.

To other West End divas, Sabrina and her assets were less than fabulous. Appearing in an all-star gala, she fell foul of top-of-the-bill singer Dorothy Squires, then married to Roger Moore.

Squires, never one to mince her words, lambasted her, yelling: 'Don't you know anything at all about this f***ing business, you big-titted twit?'

Sabrina's earning power by now was considerable and she was represented by a Svengali-type agent, Joe Matthews, who insured her breasts (she was entitled to £2,500 for every inch of deflation, but Lloyd's of London excluded claims occasioned by civil war, invasion or nationalisation), and bought her a yellow and white Chevrolet with the registration number S41 (her bust measurement).

Matthews also drummed up press interest in her romance with an American film star, Steve Cochran, and speculation about whether she would meet him on his arrival at Heathrow Airport once relegated a mining disaster from the front pages.

She was also romanced by the singer David Whitfield and circus playboy Billy Smart.

In 1958, after being awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Leeds, Sabrina took her cabaret act first to Australia and then headed to Hollywood, where she told a journalist: 'I've got eight minks. They cost me three years' work and I paid for them all myself.'

Known as the 'British Bosom Lady', her film work in America was less than distinguished.

In the 1962 sexploitation movie Satan In High Heels, she sang two songs, but it was refused a licence by the British censors.

This was followed by House Of The Black Death, a farrago about warlocks, witches and a horned Satanist with a cloven hoof, in which she played a blonde belly dancer. It was so dire that its release in the U.S. was delayed by 34 years until 1999.

She appeared in the TV series Tarzan, alongside Broadway legend Ethel Merman, while one of her last films was The Ice House, which had been intended for Jayne Mansfield, but who had meanwhile died in a car accident.

Sabrina had, to some extent, blighted her U.S. career by visiting Cuba as a guest of Fidel Castro's new revolutionary government, something for which the American press never forgave her.

In 1967, she gave up on showbusiness and married an affluent LA gynaecologist, Dr Harold Melsheimer. They set up home in a mansion in the exclusive Woodland Hills (where her Doberman Pinscher had its own bedroom and bathroom), and partied with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Dick Van Dyke. Sabrina had her own 40ft yacht and went shopping with Lucille Ball.

When the marriage ended in divorce in 1977, her decline into obscurity, ill-health and hardship began. She moved to a small, shabby house in North Hollywood, where she became a virtual recluse and a paraplegic, ill for long periods as a result of unsuccessful back surgery, for which she sued her surgeon.

In 1990, her elderly mother moved from the UK to care for her, but died five years later.

In recent years, she depended on a live-in lodger. She died, as she had been born, in obscurity - in November 2016 from respiratory failure, but her death has only just been announced.

The unexpected fame of the girl from Stockport did not seem to bring her happiness.

A journalist once described her sitting forlornly at a white baby grand at 3am in her barely furnished apartment near Sunset Boulevard when her career was dwindling.

'You know, when I finally do go back to London, I'm going back big,' she told him. 'I'll make those people who laughed at me laugh on the other side of their faces. For a long time I didn't know what it was I wanted. Now I know . . . Just a little respect. It goes a long way. Respect.'

Sadly, you can't but feel it's the one thing she never achieved.

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Sabrina, Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe

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With her long, platinum-blonde hair, pouting lips, seductive lisp, awe-inspiring 41-inch breasts and 18-inch waist, the young Sabrina was hailed as Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. In her early appearances on TV and film as a classic dumb blonde, she remained exactly that - dumb - rarely uttering a single word.

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Nick is Associate Style Editor of British GQ

When it comes to clothing, there's a fundamental difference between "fashion" and "style" - and the key to dressing in your 40s is to favour the latter. In short, it's time to finesse everything you've learned over the past two decades (and filter out some of the more questionable purchases).

What's important this decade to to pay real attention to fit. Unless you're hitting the gym every day, you're probably going to have to relax your fits slightly from those drainpipe shapes you wore in your 20s and 30s. That said, don't immediately assume a bigger size is what's necessary (remember how good Steve Carrell's baggy, 40-something character looked when Ryan Gosling's character dressed him up right in Crazy Stupid Love?). There's no need to go overboard when you go shopping; simply make it your default to go to straight leg jeans instead of the slim ones - and for god's sake don't buy stonewash rinses.

Also make sure you really invest in the details this decade. As your style settles down and you find yourself wearing more of a uniform both causally and professionally, it's your accessories that will really add personality. Choose a palette of colours that work for you and keep it in mind when you're shopping.

And while you might not be able to bust out the full-on print shirts without looking a little try-hard, don't be afraid of deploying patterns in small bursts with your ties, pocket squares and scarves. Also think of the accessories you might have had little need to spend money on in younger years: really good leather gloves, a selection of smart hats, jewellery, and matching luggage that doesn't fall apart when it gets thrown in the hold.

Finally, if you haven't done so yet, now's the time to start that watch collection.

You've spent your 30s getting to where you are; this new decade is all about celebrating that success - and what better place to start than with your wardrobe? Here's GQ's pointers for how to dress in your 40s...
Read all our guides on how to dress your age (at any age).
Well-dressed British men in their 40s

Idris Elba, 42

Daniel Craig, 47

Patrick Grant, 43

Jude Law, 42

David Beckham, 40

How to dress in your 40s: 5 golden rules
1) Edit (and upgrade) your wardrobe
You have spent 20 years building up a solid armoury of attire, so it's understandable if some of those items have fallen out of regular rotation. If you haven't worn something for a few years, give it to a charity shop. If you find you wear one item a lot, perhaps invest in a couple of alternatives for it so it gets a rest once in a while. And take stock of any gaps that might need plugging. Also take the opportunity to upgrade not only the items in your wardrobe, but also the wardrobe itself. Buy a wardrobe that's big enough to store all your things so they don't crumple up against each other and, if you haven't done so already, invest in wooden coat hangers, fabric suit bags and plastic boxes for your shoes ( Muji make very good ones).
2) Don't assume you need a bigger size (but DO adjust your fits)
You're not 20 anymore (thank God), so chances are those clothes you used to wear when you were 20 are not appropriate any longer.

However, don't assume that means you should start going for the next size up! Usually this will only mean that the seams of your suits need letting out ever so slightly (a minor alteration that can make all the difference), or that you need to choose a straight leg selvedge rather than a slim fit (no bootcut, please).
3) Approach sportswear with caution
Sportswear is dominating menswear right now - and while injecting a dose of it into your wardrobe can freshen up your downtime attire, investing in this look too heavily in your 40s can end up giving off a bit of a PE teacher vibe. If you want to do it right, eschew the baseball hats and backpacks and invest in cool designer trainers from the likes of Valentino, Lanvin or Mr Hare in pared-down colours, worn with a loopback or cashmere jumper and indigo jeans on the weekend.
4) Perfect your wrist action
You might have one or two watches in your repertoire, but now's the time to take it to the next level. If you haven't done so already, your 40th birthday is a great time to treat yourself to your first high-end watch - and by that we mean the sort that you can pass down to your son one day (see some superb examples in the GQ Watch Guide 2015). Also invest in jewellery that complements it, whatever you're into - whether that be a ring or a small stack of bracelets that you can wear on your downtime which feature subtle stones or highly-polished beads and metals.
5) Settle on your haircut
No more mohawks - the days of experimenting are behind you. When it comes to your haircut, decide on what works best for your hair type and face shape, and find a barber who gets it right every time. That's one less thing to worry about.

Style Shrink says...

"You no longer need to be adventurous and now is the time to look the same every day, not different, so pick a colour that works for you and stick to it." Robert Johnston,GQ Style Director

Items you should buy in your 40s
Formal trousers
You've spent most of your life so far in jeans, and while we're not suggesting phrasing them out of your wardrobe completely, it's worth investing in some grown-up alternatives. While corduroy is a young man's material these days (in your 40s it can get a bit GCSE Geography teacher), get a wide array of trim chinos in your repertoire. Beige and navy blue are great starter colours, but it's also worth investing in a couple of colours that will match nicely with a blue blazer or grey jumper on the weekend, such as dark red or forest green.

GQ recommends:

A true man of the world looks on-point whatever mode of transport he's taking - and a key starting point for this is getting your luggage game up to scratch. It's time to finally get rid of that beaten-up bag you bought on your gap year, find a quality luggage-maker that produces a shape you like and invest in a slick set that looks just as good together as it does apart. A good start would be a wheelie, cabin-sized carry-on, a larger suitcase for a week away and a smart tote bag for hand luggage. Extras include a leather suit-carrier or a mid-size wheeled weekend bag.

GQ recommends:

If your 40s are about celebrating your success in the workplace, why not buy yourself something that you can wear there? When it comes to suiting, Savile Row is the pinnacle in bespoke tailoring - and you'll never have a suit that fits you better every time you slip it on (or gets you more compliments). Plus you've got a tailor for life, should you need any adjustments over the coming years.

GQ recommends:

You could get away with heavily-logoed boxer shorts in your 20s, but now it's time to upgrade your after-hours attire. If you're more traditional go for matching pyjamas, or for something sleeker buy yourself a selection of soft, white T-shirts in both long and short sleeves and wear with light lounge trousers or thigh-length shorts. And make sure you have a decent dressing gown for the morning after (one in towelling or jersey for the winter and one in cotton for the summer).

GQ recommends:

Workout gear that actually looks good

Those rugby socks and ripped T-shirts are no longer acceptable in your 40s. Whatever sporting activity you're into, look good doing it with an army of separates that match - as well as fresh trainers and compression garments that encourage blood flow. Also, if you tend to spend time in the gym, invest in your headphones - your session is gruelling enough without poor sound quality compounding it.

GQ recommends:

You already started using your anti-ageing moisturiser in your 30s, now's the time to throw an eye cream into your grooming routine to ensure any bags or crows feet don't take root. A helpful hint if you're new to eye cream: dab it on until it is absorbed, don't rub it in like you would with a moisturiser.
Read the GQ guide to how to dress your age in your 20s. Read the GQ guide to how to dress your age in your 30s.
[i]Read the GQ guide to how to dress your age in your 50s.[/i]

[i][i][i][i][i]Read the GQ guide to how to dress your age in your 60s and beyond.[/i][/i][/i]

[/i][/i]

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Nick is Associate Style Editor of British GQ When it comes to clothing, there's a fundamental difference between "fashion" and "style" - and the key to dressing in your 40s is to favour the latter. In short, it's time to finesse everything you've learned over the past two decades (and filter out some of the more questionable purchases).

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David Abraham - who earns almost £1m a year - remarked on presenter's shoes

Miss Newman, 43, shot back that her footwear came from Zara and cost £19.99

Staff who attended the meeting accused chief executive Mr Abraham of sexism

The boss of Channel 4 told news anchor Cathy Newman she must be paid well - because she had nice shoes.

As part of a discussion that included the gender pay gap, David Abraham - who earns almost £1million a year - told the presenter: 'Look at the shoes, they're not cheap.'

Miss Newman, 43, shot back that her footwear came from the high street fashion retailer Zara. Her elegant four-inch heels, in petrol blue velvet, cost just £19.99.

Staff who attended the meeting later accused chief executive Mr Abraham of sexism - especially at a time when the TV industry's yawning gender pay gap has become such a contentious issue.

A source said: 'It's totally inappropriate. Channel 4 goes on about boosting diversity, but then he goes and does something like that. It makes it sound like women only need money for fripperies.'

Mr Abraham's remarks were particularly tactless given he is paid so much himself, insiders added.

The 54-year-old has one of the biggest pay packets in the public sector - including a £256,000 bonus in 2016, on top of his £560,000 salary and £140,000 in pension contributions.

At that rate, he earned twice the amount the boss of the BBC took home, and more than six times the salary of the prime minister.

The incident took place in front of Channel 4 staff during a 45-minute 'exit interview' between Miss Newman and Mr Abraham, who is leaving the broadcaster next month.

When Miss Newman asked him whether Channel 4 had been right to pay a reported £75million for three series of The Great British Bake Off, Mr Abraham defended the move - saying the financial rewards from the hit baking series would help 'to pay for Channel 4 News'. Miss Newman responded: 'Very well spent. That's worth every penny.'

At that point, Mr Abraham indicated that the audience should look at Miss Newman's footwear, saying: 'And look at the shoes. They're not cheap.'

Later in the session, she asked Mr Abraham to reveal Channel 4's gender pay gap.

The Channel 4 boss declined to do so until next year, when the broadcaster will be forced to do so along with all large companies.

The figure is unlikely to be flattering. Channel 4 has a higher proportion of female staff than any other major British broadcaster - with women accounting for 59 per cent of the workforce.

However, they tend to occupy lower-paid positions. Just 36 per cent of Channel 4's senior executives are women, putting the organisation behind the BBC, ITV and Channel 5's owner Viacom. Only Sky's record is poorer.

But Channel 4's numbers will get a boost next year by the appointment of Alex Mahon, who is set to replace Mr Abraham as chief executive next month. She is expected to get a similar pay package to Mr Abraham's.

Mr Abraham - who used to work in advertising - is leaving to set up a new, undisclosed company of his own. A Channel 4 spokesman said last night: 'This was a clearly light-hearted exchange.'

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Katherine Rushton, Media And Technology Editor For The Daily Mail

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Cathy Newman and a sexism row over her £19.99 Zara heels

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David Abraham - who earns almost £1m a year - remarked on presenter's shoes Miss Newman, 43, shot back that her footwear came from Zara and cost £19.99 Staff who attended the meeting accused chief executive Mr Abraham of sexism The boss of Channel 4 told news anchor Cathy Newman she must be paid well - because she had nice shoes.

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When Joan Collins was 21, Marilyn Monroe poured out a cautionary tale of sexual harassment she and other actresses endured from 'the wolves in this town'

Just days after Marilyn's warning, the actress was propositioned by Darryl Zanuck, the vice-president of production at 20th Century Fox

The meteoric descent of Harvey Weinstein has brought back memories for her

Shortly after arriving in Hollywood aged 21, under contract to 20th Century Fox, I attended a party at Gene Kelly's house.

The star of An American In Paris and Singin' In The Rain hosted a weekly gathering for an eclectic group of movie industry power-brokers, A-list actors and actresses, intellectuals and his friends. It was where I first met Marilyn Monroe.

At first I didn't recognise the blonde sitting alone at the bar until she turned to me and said rather ruefully: 'They wanted me for the lead in Red Velvet Swing, but I'm too old.'

The part of Evelyn Nesbit in The Girl In The Red Velvet Swing was one of my first lead roles in Hollywood, but I knew it had originally been intended for Monroe.

Suddenly, it dawned on me that the woman in front of me was the legendary figure herself.

We started chatting and after a couple of martinis, Marilyn poured out a cautionary tale of sexual harassment she and other actresses endured from 'the wolves in this town'.

I replied that I was well used to 'wolves' after a few years in the British film industry.

As a 17-year-old straight out of RADA and playing my first leading role, I'd experienced a torrent of sexual harassment and the kind of behaviour that today is classed as abuse.

When I confided in an older actress on set at Ealing Studios, she told me to 'like it or get out of the business'.

'That's the way it is. I know they didn't teach you about it at drama school but you'll just have to put up with it, I'm afraid . . .'

I decided it definitely wasn't something I'd put up with. I told Marilyn I was well prepared to deal with men patting my bottom, leering down my cleavage and whatever else.

She shook her head. 'There's nothing like the power of the studio bosses here, honey. If they don't get what they want, they'll drop you. It's happened to lots of gals.

'Specially watch out for Zanuck. If he doesn't get what he wants, honey, he'll drop your contract.'

It was a timely warning, because days later, Darryl Zanuck, vice-president of production at 20th Century Fox, pounced.

Breathing cigar fumes over me, he hissed: 'You haven't had anyone until you've had me, baby. I'm the biggest and the best and I can go all night.' I was so shocked I couldn't speak, so I just wriggled free of his groping hands and ran back to the set.

Later, I was glad that I'd said nothing. I heard that a starlet he'd tried to seduce had recently been fired because when he began his spiel with: 'Baby, I'm the biggest in the business . . .' etc, she'd fired back saying: 'You better be, honey, 'cause you're only five foot-two!'

And I can confirm that it wasn't just the stuff of legend that he had a golden replica of his manhood on his desk as a paperweight. I saw it - ugh!

Now the events of the past week - the meteoric descent of Harvey Weinstein from the pinnacle of power in Tinseltown to his humiliating exile into rehab for his so-called 'sex addiction' - has brought back these memories.

Then, as now, a conspiracy of silence hung over the casting couch, and the bullying and sexual assaults young actresses were routinely subjected to. Speak out and your career was often over before it had begun.

My first encounter with the casting couch was in the early Fifties.

I had been signed by the Rank Organisation and was testing for a juvenile lead role in a film called I Believe In You.

I dodged one producer's advances by hiding in a wardrobe in the costume department, helped by sympathetic dressers, and waiting until he left the studio before taking the bus and Tube home. But after my third test he trapped me and persuaded me to get a lift home in his flashy car.

On the way, he grabbed my hand and put it on his open fly. I screamed in horror and yanked my hand away. I'd never seen a naked man before, let alone touched one.

'What's the matter? Don't you want the part?' he leered.

'Not this much,' I said, then burst into tears as I realised I'd ruined my chances. Luckily, he was overruled by the director, so I got the role despite the threats.

However, he continued to pursue me, and when I told him I wasn't interested and was still a virgin, he called me a 'frigid little b****'.

And when I went to the U.S. I discovered that it was just as Marilyn had warned me.

Hollywood studio bosses considered it their due to b*** all the good-looking women who came their way and were notorious for it. Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures, for example, had no qualms about firing any starlet who rejected him. He was totally amoral.

When his leading contractee, Kim Novak, had an affair with Sammy Davis Jr. - who had recently lost an eye in a car crash - Cohn threatened to have 'the other eye taken out' if he didn't stop seeing her. Cohn was so powerful that Sammy did stop and hurriedly married someone else.

At Warner Brothers, the president of the studios, Jack Warner, fancied himself an attractive bon vivant. A snappy dresser and massive flirt, he threw glittering parties where one night he propositioned me, openly bragging about his conquests, which seemed to include every actress on the Warner lot and many from MGM, too. He was amazed when I didn't submit.

When I was in New York, my agent secured me an interview with a famous producer for a role I really wanted.

I dutifully went to his office at 6pm, and as I arrived, his secretary was just leaving. 'He's in there,' she pointed to a back room. 'He's waiting for you.'

I found myself in a bedroom, then a voice called: 'Come on in,' from another room. I walked in and there he was in the bath without even bubbles to cover his embarrassment - with which he was tinkering. 'Sit down,' he commanded, gesturing to the end of the bath.

'Oh, I'm OK, I'll stand,' I replied.

'Come on in,' he grinned. 'The water's fine.'

'Oh, ah, no thanks,' I replied weakly. I tried not to shudder and tried not to notice what he was doing to himself.

After a few minutes' chat about the role, which I argued was right for me as she was an English girl, he agreed I would be perfect.

Then he again insisted I share his bath. 'I must go - I've got a date with my boyfriend,' I stammered, aware there was no way I'd get the part now. 'Who's your boyfriend?' he asked.

'You wouldn't know him. He's a young actor - Warren Beatty.'

'What are you doing wasting your time with unknown actors for?' he said irritably.

'I'm an important man, we can have some fun. By the way, how old are you?' 'Twenty-five,' I muttered. 'Twenty-five, huh? That's not young in this business any more, sweetie.' I stared at his ugly 55-year-old face, turned and left.

He called after me: 'You won't get much further in this business, kid, if you're going to be so high-hat!'

Another role I coveted was that of Cleopatra. The head of 20th Century Fox at the time, Buddy Adler, and the chairman of the board - a Greek gentleman old enough to be my grandfather - bombarded me with propositions and promises that the role was mine if I would be 'nice' to them.

It was a euphemism prevalent in Hollywood. I couldn't and I wouldn't - the very thought of these old men was utterly repugnant. So, I dodged and I dived, and hid from them around the lot and made excuses while undergoing endless screen tests for the role of Egypt's Queen.

At one point, Mr Adler told me at a party that I would have 'the pick of the scripts' after Cleopatra and he would set me up in an apartment he would pay for as long as he could come to visit me three or four times a week.

Running out of excuses, I blurted out: 'Mr Adler, I came here with my agent, Jay Kanter. Why don't we discuss the deal with him?'

'Honey, you have quite a sense of humour,' he spluttered.

'And a sense of humour is all you'll ever get from me,' I murmured as I left. In due course, Elizabeth Taylor got the role.

But it wasn't just studio bosses and producers who were predatory. Many actors I worked with considered it their divine right to have sex with their leading lady.

During my early days in Hollywood, I repeatedly said 'no' to the handsome, if short, Irish-born actor Richard Todd.

One night he followed my car and when I stopped at the studio exit gate, he shouted at the top of his lungs: 'You stupid cow - you'll be washed up by the time you're 23!" I ignored him. I was under contract and on a good salary, so I felt reasonably safe until I hit 27 - widely deemed by studio bosses to be the age when women lost their sexual attraction.

Richard Burton was another actor with designs on his female co-stars. While on location in Jamaica together for the 1957 film Sea Wife, Richard told me that if I didn't go to bed with him, I would 'break his record'.

"What's that?" I asked.

'I've slept with all my leading ladies,' he bragged.

'Well, I'm not going to be another notch on your well-punched belt, so I guess I'm going to break your record!' He barely spoke to me for the rest of filming.

George Peppard, who had starred with Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At Tiffany's, dished out similar treatment. In 1969 we were making the spy thriller, The Executioner, and after attending a party to celebrate the start of filming he offered to drop me home - then tried to grab me at my front door.

When I pushed him away, telling him I was married and had two small children, he accused me of being 'totally square'.

Like Burton before him, he didn't speak to me for the rest of the movie, and since I had to do a couple of topless scenes with him, it was embarrassing to say the least.

Another actor whose ego out-paced his talent was Gene Barry, who had starred in The War Of The Worlds. In one kissing scene, he tried the old tongue routine, which I wouldn't permit.

'Are you frigid?' he hissed.

It wasn't the first time I had been called that by men who thought that because they were rich and powerful, women were just their playthings. I've also been called a c**k-teaser, a shameless flirt and a cold, heartless b****.

Anyone naive enough to believe the era of the casting couch had been consigned to history will have been shocked by the Weinstein scandal and the predatory institutional sexism of Hollywood power brokers it has revealed.

But it's not just the film industry that's been complicit in sanctioning this appalling behaviour, and it's not just actresses subjected to it. It may occur in any business dominated by powerful, ruthless and misogynistic men, and it's women (sometimes men) in subservient positions who are unfortunate enough to have to deal with them.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As my late sister, Jackie, a Hollywood observer and insider, once said: 'Most men in this town have their brains in their d***s.'

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Joan Collins: Why I lost my part as Cleopatra to Liz Taylor

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When Joan Collins was 21, Marilyn Monroe poured out a cautionary tale of sexual harassment she and other actresses endured from 'the wolves in this town' Just days after Marilyn's warning, the actress was propositioned by Darryl Zanuck, the vice-president of production at 20th Century Fox The meteoric descent of Harvey Weinstein has brought back memories for her Shortly after arriving in Hollywood aged 21, under contract to 20th Century Fox, I attended a party at Gene Kelly's house.

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She is pushing sixty.

But Madonna still knows how to rock lingerie, as she proved once again on Friday.

The singer shared a series of raunchy shots on Instagram to promote her new skincare line.

'If Friday is giving you a headache... massage temples with leather gloves!' she joked of one close-up shot of her doing just that.

'Then put on your favorite lingerie... and indulge yourself with my luxurious new skin care line @mdnaskin,' she captioned a sexy second snap, as she reclined on a couch in leather lingerie and suspenders.

In a third pic, she slipped into a corset and lacy briefs, donning a veil to pose beside a crucified Jesus.

'And don't forget to say your prayers!' she added.

The Like A Virgin singer is enjoying being a new European, having moved to Portugal over the summer.

The mom-of-six upped sticks made the decision to up sticks after her 12-year-old son David Banda, who she adopted from Malawi in 2006, joined the Benfica club team.

The soccer mom bought a house in Sintra for $8million, which she then had renovated.

As David she raises daughter Lourdes, 20, with ex Carlos Leon, 51, son Rocco, 17, with ex-husband Guy Ritchie, 49, and daughter Mercy, 11, who she also adopted from Malawi.

In March, the singer confirmed she had adopted another two children from Malawi, twins Stella and Esther, five.

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Madonna, 59, dons lingerie to hawk her new skincare line

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She is pushing sixty. But Madonna still knows how to rock lingerie, as she proved once again on Friday. The singer shared a series of raunchy shots on Instagram to promote her new skincare line. 'If Friday is giving you a headache... massage temples with leather gloves!'

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Scrapes with capes aside, Madonna - the long-reigning queen of reinvention and image-driven pop - has a well-documented history of stealing the limelight, as somebody who's always had an innate understanding of the marketing power of character dressing. No-one who grew up in the '80s can have failed to observe the atomic impact each new incarnation had on youth culture, as the singer's attire (and attitude) fearlessly challenged long-held conventions regarding sexuality, gender, religion and, of late, age-appropriateness.

As a child, Madonna wanted to be either a film star or a nun when she grew up. She's extensively explored both roles through clothes ever since, with both Marilyn Monroe and Catholic iconography being key inspirations behind her expansive back catalogue of looks, from 1950s glamour girl (Material Girl) to penitent sinner (Like a Prayer) and spiritual entity (Ray of Light). The most defining image of her career arguably remains the wedding dress worn on the cover of second album Like a Virgin, with its white bustier, long lace gloves, crucifix jewellery and Boy Toy belt. Madonna's long-time personal stylist, Arianne Phillips, described the bright-white bridal juxtaposition as "one of the most shocking, liberating and influential moments in pop culture/fashion history", adding that "fashion has never been the same".

Madonna Louise Ciccone saw clothes as a tool of rebellion from early on. The impact of losing her mother to breast cancer when she was only five years old is well-known; in an interview with Vanity Fair she once described her younger self as a "lonely girl who was searching for something". In Madonna: A Biography, author Mary Cross describes how the eldest daughter in a brood of eight refused to wear the identical outfits in which housekeeper-turned-stepmother Joan Gustafson liked to dress the Ciccone girls, so she "deliberately wore mismatched socks and clothes". Of her teenage phase, she insists "I wasn't rebellious in a certain way. I cared about being good at something. I didn't shave my underarms and I didn't wear make-up like normal girls do. But I studied and I got good grades... I wanted to be somebody." As a dance major at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance in the 1970s, the Bay City native showed up for class wearing torn tights held together with safety pins and "cultivated that deliberate déshabillé look", according to Cross.

Combining crop-tops, mini-skirts over Capri pants, punk-rock studded cuffs and belts with fishnets, the young Madonna formulated a street-meets-flea market vibe with now iconic, then edgy accessories like lace gloves, tangles of pearls and rosary beads, stacked rubber bracelets and crucifix jewellery by cult NYC-based French designer, stylist and artist Maripol. (In an interview with The New York Times, the singer's publicist Liz Rosenberg recalled Madonna first walking into her office in 1983, an unknown singer and 'dance artist' from the Lower East Side club scene who'd been signed by Warner Brothers for two singles, in "a black outfit with a hundred rubber bracelets on each wrist".) Crowning the deceptively complex look were ribbons tied in roughly bleached blonde hair and strong make-up: bushy eyebrows, heavily defined eyes, a Marilyn-style beauty mark and a bold lip shade.
Agent provocateur
When it comes to her image, Madonna has always been well supported, with fellow provocateur Jean Paul Gaultier the brains behind the bras on her 1990 Blond Ambition world tour. "The quintessential rock star-fashion designer relationship is Madonna and Jean Paul Gaultier... a mutually beneficial connection, I think they understood each other brilliantly," said Tim Blanks, Editor at Large of Style.com, in a video about the singer's turn on Gaultier's Spring 1995 catwalk, pushing a puppy in a pram. "He gave her a look which people will always associate with her and she gave him a profile which he's never ever lost. When you think about the '90s, Madonna in her Gaultier cone bra is one of the most unforgettable images of the entire decade." Gaultier was also behind the Memoirs of a Geisha-inspired kimono costumes featured in the Nothing Really Matters video and Drowned World tour, and worn by the singer at the 1999 Grammys, where Ray of Light won four awards.

Red-carpet theatrics are a popular sport for Madonna, who likes to part the sea of ubiquitous mermaid gowns with attention-grabbing ensembles. She wore a sari with bare feet to collect the first ever Versace Award at the VH1 Fashion Awards in 1998. "She's outrageous, she's provocative, she's inscrutable and over the years we've all been witness to her evolution from street-smart kid sister to virgin bride, from a sex goddess to yogini," said Sting, who co-presented the award with Donatella Versace. "Her mind is as celebrated as her body, she's as feared as she is desired. She leads while others follow." The most recent Grammy Awards saw her sporting thigh boots and a matador-inspired Givenchy Couture bodysuit, cheekily flipping its jet-encrusted skirt to bare her fishnetted derriere to the paps. "Be perfectly content to be who you are, someone unique and rare and fearless," she announced before her performance of new single Living For Love.
Rebel heart
Despite now being in her sixth decade, the provocateur queen of pop - whose latest album, Rebel Heart, is released this month, its cover showing Madonna's face lashed with S&M-style black cords - hasn't kicked her habit of exposing body parts. She first posed nude as an unknown, then in her all-star Sex book and on Gaultier's catwalk in 1992. The button-pushing performer showed a nipple during a concert in Istanbul on her 2012 MDNA world tour, days later flashing her bottom at a concert in Rome. Commentators have thus become more concerned with the age-appropriateness of her actions and garb than any political correctness. "She looks like she's done 10th grade 48 times," quipped the late Joan Rivers apropos her cheerleader-style Super Bowl half-time show outfit on a 2012 episode of Fashion Police. "(Her ever-youthful style has always been fodder for comics, with Jennifer Saunders notably spoofing the singer's Hung Up combination of retro leotard and Farrah Fawcett hair flicks.)

"Is there a rule? Are people just supposed to die when they're 40?" she asked in a 1992 interview with Jonathan Ross at the tender age of 34. In a recent Q&A with Rolling Stone, for whose cover she struck a Marilyn pin-up pose, she takes on ageism in pop culture and beyond. "It's still the one area where you can totally discriminate against somebody," she notes. "[Regarding] my age - anybody and everybody would say something degrading to me. And I always think to myself, why is that accepted? What's the difference between that and racism, or any discrimination? They're judging me by my age. I don't understand. I'm trying to get my head around it. Because women, generally, when they reach a certain age, have accepted that they're not allowed to behave a certain way. But I don't follow the rules. I never did, and I'm not going to start."

"When I did my Sex book, it wasn't the average," she adds. "When I performed Like a Virgin on the MTV Awards and my dress went up and my ass was showing, it was considered a total scandal. It was never the average, and now it's the average. When I did Truth or Dare [aka In Bed with Madonna] and the cameras followed me around, it was not the average. So if I have to be the person who opens the door for women to believe and understand and embrace the idea that they can be sexual and look good and be as relevant in their fifties or their sixties or whatever as they were in their twenties, then so be it."

Yet for all her own rule-flouting, she's surprisingly conservative when it comes to her elder daughter's outfits. "I always have two reactions when Lola comes into my room with an outfit on. One is, 'Oh my god, she looks amazing, what incredible style' and then my second reaction is, 'She's dressed completely inappropriately for school'," she said during a presentation of her Material Girl line for Macy's. "I have to think with two brains. I usually tell her to take off her three-inch or six-inch platforms and pull her skirt down just a little bit, and take off some of the black eye make-up from around her eyes... I am the typical mother where I say, 'Oh my god, you can't go to school dressed like that'."

But Lola (born Lourdes in 1996) gives as good as she gets. During a Rebel Heart special, Madonna tells Jonathan Ross that "If no-one's around she will definitely give me the once over and say, 'Oh, mum, you are not leaving the house like that!'" And as for the Grammy flash? "She did take a picture of my butt sticking out and sent it back to me and said, 'Mom, really?' and I said 'It was a wardrobe malfunction. I swear'." It wasn't her first and it's hard to believe it'll be her last.
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Scrapes with capes aside, Madonna - the long-reigning queen of reinvention and image-driven pop - has a well-documented history of stealing the limelight, as somebody who's always had an innate understanding of the marketing power of character dressing.

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If you've never heard of Maripol, you will definitely have seen her work. The stylist, who also counts herself as a photographer, designer and film producer, was responsible for creating Madonna's look during her bangle-tastic bridesmaid Like a Virgin era. She also influenced the style of Grace Jones, Debbie Harry and Cher, as well as being art director for the Italian fashion brand Fiorucci in the early 1980s.

Now, Dundee Contemporary Arts is showing the first major UK exhibition of her work, from a selection of the thousands of Polaroids that document her life to her fashion designs, including her rubber bracelets and jumpsuits. "It's a very small-scale retrospective," the 60-year-old says from her home in New York, where she moved from her native France in the 1970s. After moving downtown with her boyfriend, the photographer Edo Bertoglio (whom she had moved from Paris to be with), the pair found a run-down loft space and started to throw parties and photograph friends there. Maripol would style them with jewellery she had designed herself because she was unable to find anything she liked. These friends included Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and, of course, Madonna, whom she met on a night out at Roxy - Madonna had admired her bra.

It sounds blissful, a too-good-to-be-true time when a creative couple could have a studio in the centre of a city and hang out with art stars. How does it make her feel that New York and London, once the creative capitals of the world, are now too expensive for young artists? "I am so glad you've brought this up. It makes me mad. Kids today are being pushed further and further from the city - artists are being made to move out of areas they've regenerated."

As someone who has influenced popular culture immensely, but without their own name becoming mainstream, it is clearly a topic close to her heart. So how does she feel now that underground ideas can turn mainstream in a matter of moments? She laughs. "Andy Warhol said that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, but with social media, everyone is famous all of the time. Especially on Instagram!" Is she on it? "I resisted for many years," she sighs, "but my son convinced me to go on it. Then he shouts at me for putting up too many pictures and says that's for Facebook. But I am not going to let anyone dictate what my life is about."

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Grace Jones, photographed in New York, 1985. Photograph: Maripol

Maripol practically invented the selfie, using her Polaroid camera. "I would take Polaroid selfies to express myself: my sorrows, my joys, my sexiness, my love. I didn't scan them for 30 years. No one ever saw them for that long." Most recently, her Polaroids have been referenced on the cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 album, released last year - although Swift used a modern photograph edited to look like a Polaroid. Polaroid film can be hard to find, and although Maripol has her own source, "the colours and the emulsions aren't the same".

Does she still take photographs as actively as ever? "In 2000, I did a series of portraits, maybe 160. They have never been shown. All black and white - I called in my address book. Debbie Harry came back, 20 years after the first time I shot her. People gathered in my studio, people who hadn't seen each other for years. No hair, no makeup, there was just a pile of clothes in case someone needed something."

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Debbie Harry in the loft, 1980. Photograph: Maripol

She is probably best known for working with Madonna, and some say she discovered her. "She wouldn't like that! Let's put it like this: she discovered me," she laughs. "She would come over when she was doing Desperately Seeking Susan and say she didn't like the costumes. I would say: 'You're a singer! You have to look like you.' I insisted she keep her jewellery, the crosses and stuff. That's what she was projecting as an image at that moment." They stopped working together after her Like A Virgin look.

After a brief bankruptcy spell, she started to work with Cher, who had come to her loft to buy some jewellery. She was the art director on the video for Cher's 1995 hit, Walking In Memphis. So which discipline does she prefer - jewellery, styling or photography? "That's such an existential question. I went back to jewellery a few years ago - I like doing things where my intellect meets my hand, something manual. But I love taking Polaroids and I like making films. I made one a few years ago called The Message about Keith Haring - I love going back and interviewing people."

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Taylor Swift's 1989 cover, thought to be influenced by Maripol's work. Photograph: AP

In the 1980s she produced Downtown 81, documenting the downtown scene, and particularly focusing on Basquiat. It was written by Warhol Factory member and founding editor of Interview magazine Glenn O'Brien, and, due to money issues, was only released in 2001. "It's becoming a cult film, you know, so many kids want to know about the generations before them. When I was growing up in the 1970s, I wanted to know about the 1960s. The 1960s were important; they brought the TV into everyone's homes. You had the first music videos, and all these amazing women: Cher, Tina Turner and Diana Ross."

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The Maripolitan gallery store in 1984. Photograph: Maripol

As someone who has inspired and shaped the creative identity of so many women over the past 30 years, how does she feel about today's identikit pop stars? "Everything is homogenised," she complains. "Neighbourhoods, music, styling. Everything is sterilised. That's not what we had. We didn't have fancy fashion houses, Chanel didn't have Karl Lagerfeld, Gucci and Chanel were for rich old women on Madison Avenue. We did with what we had."

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Maripol: 'Did I discover Madonna? She discovered me!'

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If you've never heard of Maripol, you will definitely have seen her work. The stylist, who also counts herself as a photographer, designer and film producer, was responsible for creating Madonna's look during her bangle-tastic bridesmaid Like a Virgin era.

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While the fashion industry continues to introduce us to new styles every season, the industry would not be where it is today without the help of influential fashion icons. Nowadays, celebrities are able to take pictures of their outfit and share it with friends, family, and fans on social media. However, many of the women who invented these iconic styles didn't have the same influential opportunities, so the fact that we still consider them fashion icons means they must have known what they were doing!

Although today's celebrities are criticized for what they wear on the red carpet, to the grocery store, and out to dinner, this wasn't the case for previous generations of stars. Instead, these celebrities whatever they wanted, which is why so many unique trends surfaced during this time. The following 10 fashion icons not only had successful careers, but they also used their keen fashion senses to catapult them into stardom. Here are some of the most influential fashionistas and the trends they made famous:
1. Audrey Hepburn: The Little Black Dress
Some could argue that Audrey Hepburn is the reason for fashion's obsession with the Little Black Dress. Her classic Holly Golightly look from Breakfast at Tiffany's is one of the most iconic 'Old Hollywood' photos out there. The simple Givenchy column gown, 3-strand pearl necklace, large tortoiseshell sunglasses, sleek updo, diamond earrings, and long cigarette holder will forever be known as an Audrey Hepburn-inspired look!
2. Diana Ross: Maximalist
Although Diana Ross' style changed over the course of her career, Motown would not be what it is today without her influence. From extravagant wigs to embellished gowns, Diana shed a positive light on the term 'diva' and blurred the line between costume and everyday wear.
3. Elizabeth Taylor: Queen of Diamonds
Elizabeth Taylor's fashion sense can only be described as fearless. She gave off a hint of glamour everywhere she went with her plunging necklines, fur wraps, feather boas, and eye-catching headpieces that would likely be considered over-the-top next to today's styles. Still, Elizabeth Taylor's love for glitz and glam resonated with her at all times, and her impact on the fashion industry is still evident.
4. Grace Kelly: The Preppy Princess
Grace Kelly's classic, sophisticated style was always impeccable. Her iconic feminine dresses and tailored ensembles made her one of the most influential fashion icons of her time. In fact, Hermès renamed one of their purse designs, the Kelly Bag, after the actress was spotted toting one on numerous occasions.
5. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: Chic Simple
Jackie Kennedy grabbed the public's attention with her chic, yet simple fashion sense. From boxy Chanel suits to Halston pillbox hats, she reshaped fashion's view of conservative clothes and left a noteworthy fashion legacy behind.
6. Katharine Hepburn: The First Lady of Menswear
Katharine Hepburn was one of the most idolized actresses of her generation. On-screen, Katharine fashioned her very own personal style that embodied the American look, whereas her off screen wardrobe favored sportswear. Still, the costumes she wore for her movies are what shaped the Hepburn look into what it is today.
7. Lauren Bacall: Princess of Prints
Lauren Bacall's seductiveness in combination with her effortless glamour is what makes her one of fashion's most iconic actresses. From silk blouses, to blazers, to pencil skirts, and even to pleated trousers, Lauren transformed professional attire into a simplistically glamourous style.
8. Madonna: Costume Couture
Madonna is the pop diva of fashion. Although she originally adopted a casual tomboy look in the 80s, she quickly evolved into one of the most influential fashion gurus in the industry. In fact, concerts wouldn't be as extravagant as they are today if it weren't for Madonna's on-stage fashion choices that changed the way people view artists.
9. Marilyn Monroe: Dangerous Curves
Marilyn Monroe introduced sex appeal into the fashion industry. From high waisted bikinis to her classic The Seven Year Itch look, Marilyn paved the way for Hollywood luxurious trends and created a legacy that continues to be impersonated on a regular basis.
10. Twiggy: The Mod Model
Twiggy quickly rose to stardom after being photographed with drawn-on lashes, which was a trend that had yet to be explored. Once she had established herself as an 'it' girl, she became a notable fashion icon known for her daring and trendsetting 60s styles!

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10 Fashion Icons and the Trends They Made Famous

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While the fashion industry continues to introduce us to new styles every season, the industry would not be where it is today without the help of influential fashion icons. Nowadays, celebrities are able to take pictures of their outfit and share it with friends, family, and fans on social media.

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From Jean-Paul Gaultier corsets to Prada tea dresses, VOGUE.COM charts the many fashion faces of Madonna

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untypical girls: a visual survey of women in independent rock

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social science / feminism & feminist theory

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social science/feminism & feminist theory

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social science/popular culture - general

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Untypical Girls: A visual survey of women in independent rock

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Buy Untypical Girls: A visual survey of women in independent rock by Sam Knee (ISBN: 9781908714459) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

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the bag i'm in: underground music and fashion in britain 1960-1990

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social science/popular culture - general

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The Bag I'm In: Underground Music and Fashion in Britain 1960-1990

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Youth subculture in 20th Century Britain is a unique phenomenon. Throughout the decades, young people sought to define themselves sartorially, reflecting their identity in terms of regionalism, class and crucially, musical taste, through their clothes. This book is a comprehensive survey of over ...

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architecture & photography / photography

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photography / subjects & themes / portraits & selfies

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photography / individual photographers / monographs

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photography/subjects & themes - portraits & selfies

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Taken in the streets, clubs, basements and bars of London between 1978 and 1987, this new book brings together an incredible series of images from the British photographer Derek Ridgers. People dressing up and going out have always been central to Derek's work from the first days of punk through ...

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Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the power political couple of the 1980s.

He was a skilled communicator and a celebrity, she was strong-willed and shared his disdain for big government.

Now a similar pairing is emerging three decades later in President Trump and Prime Minister Theresa May, who are sdcheduled to meet at the White House on Friday.

Read more: Holyrood will have vote on Great Repeal Bill for Brexit, says Mundell

Mrs May arrives in Washington as the first foreign leader to meet Trump as president. Before their sitdown, she will have the rare privilege of addressing congressional Republicans in Philadelphia on Thursday.

The two leaders are expected to discuss terrorism, ending Syria's civil war, relations with Russia, NATO cooperation and a bilateral trade deal once the United Kingdomleaves the European Union, probably by 2019. Trade between the two countries is worth about $187 billion (£148bn), and the United States is the largest single investor in the U.K.

For the British Government, the symbolism of the visit matters more than the substance because of the UK's long-standing "special relationship" with its former colony.

Trump spoke to nine other world leaders in the 24-hours after his election before conversing with May. The trip helps put to rest concerns within Mrs May's Conservative Party that former Ukip leader Nigel Farage could get in the way of a strong relationship between the Prime Minister and Trump.

Read more: Labour tell Nicola Sturgeon: end the games on independence

Trump had suggested shortly after his election that the anti-establishment, anti-immigration Farage should become Britain's US ambassador, an idea quickly rejected by Mrs May.

More recently, Trump and Mrs May have vowed to revive the closeness of their countries during the Reagan-Thatcher years.

"We have always had a strong relationship with the United States, but under the last president (Barack Obama) there's been a sense over here that it wasn't as strong as it could be," said Iain Duncan Smith.

"Obama appeared to spend the first four years in office forging relationships with everyone else. Now we have an opportunity to reinstate what we once had," he added.

Read more: Theresa May trying to 'muzzle' MPs by rushing Brexit Bill through Commons, says Labour MP

Reagan and Thatcher were ideologically and personally closer than any U.S. and British leaders since Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during the Second World War.

They were free-market, anti-Communist skeptics of government bureaucracies with good chemistry when dealing with the issues ranging from the Soviet Union to Northern Ireland.

Anthony Scaramucci, a senior adviser to Trump, said he expected the president and Mrs May to "get along very well."

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Are Donald Trump and Theresa May the 2017 version of 80s power couple Reagan and Thatcher?

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Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the power political couple of the 1980s. He was a skilled communicator and a celebrity, she was strong-willed and shared his disdain for big government. Now a similar pairing is emerging three decades later in President Trump and Prime Minister Theresa May, who are sdcheduled to meet at the White House on Friday.

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To anyone who started out in politics supporting Margaret Thatcher against irresponsible union leaders, Russian aggression and a Labour leader barely distinguishable from a Marxist, the end of 2016 has a horribly familiar feel to it. It would not have been remotely surprising to wake up in 1981 to the news that rail workers were on yet another strike, Moscow was backing parties friendly to it in a French election, and that the Leader of the Opposition believed we should do away with our nuclear deterrent.

Growing up in South Yorkshire, I remember well the nakedly political purpose behind Arthur Scargill's manoeuvres. In the absence of much hope for the election of a Labour government, the talk in the local pubs was of how the power of the miners would halt the Thatcher government in its tracks. The comments of the president of the RMT, reported at the weekend, that his union's objective...

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Just like in the 1980s, Theresa May faces chaos from militant unions. And just like Margaret Thatcher, she must not flinch

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To anyone who started out in politics supporting Margaret Thatcher against irresponsible union leaders, Russian aggression and a Labour leader barely distinguishable from a Marxist, the end of 2016 has a horribly familiar feel to it.

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Theresa May: A Political Life In Pictures

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In the week that the prime minister appears on television with Jeremy Paxman for the live debate, we chart the political life of Theresa May in pictures.

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Federico Solmi | The Beloved Trickster (2017) | Available for Sale | Artsy

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Available for sale from Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Federico Solmi, The Beloved Trickster (2017), Hand painted 6 ft x 4 ft frame with acrylic paint, silver leaf, and gold leaf on plexiglass, LED screen...

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Louise Bourgeois - 203 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy

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Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Louise Bourgeois. Beginning her artistic practice in her native Paris, Louise Bourgeois was origin...

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Bettina Hubby - 129 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy

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Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Bettina Hubby. "I'd rather have something break if it means getting to the breakthrough," says Hu...

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The 1980s was a decade of meteoric growth, both for the global economic system and for the art world that swung in its orbit. Cocaine, MTV, the personal computer, the collapse of state-sponsored socialism: these were heady times for the neoliberal regimes installed in Deng Xiaoping's China, Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain, and Ronald Reagan's United States.

In this atmosphere of accelerating modernization, everything began to serve the interest of profit. Whether the modernism peddled by art critic Clement Greenberg was dead or just demoded remained a topic of debate, but imagery of any kind could now be repurposed for the auction block. In his landmark 1984 text Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, American critic Frederic Jameson neatly summarized the spirit of the age. So long, grand historical narratives, his text announced; hello, consumerist desire.

As one of the most desirable and symbolic commodities, art slid easily into bed with business. Galleries multiplied in the established centers of Basel, New York, Paris, Cologne, and Düsseldorf, while new art fairs and biennials blossomed in Chicago, Stockholm, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, and Milan.

Artistic strategies to navigating this new marketplace, however, were more ambivalent. They can be slotted into two primary positions: Neo-Conceptualism, which grew from Minimalism and Conceptualism to embrace techniques of photography and appropriation; and Neo-Expressionism, which exhumed the traditional notions of painting that had been stamped out by Modernism-only to represent them as a corpse.

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How Artists of the 1980s Changed the Course of Contemporary Art

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The 1980s was a decade of meteoric growth, both for the global economic system and for the art world that swung in its orbit. Cocaine, MTV, the personal computer, the collapse of state-sponsored socialism: these were heady times for the neoliberal regimes installed in Deng Xiaoping's China, Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain, and Ronald Reagan's United States.

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The Grime and the Glamour | Barbican Blog

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A repressed Midwestern girl drawn into a seamy life of voyeuristic adult cinema. The failing artist with nothing but a record player, a mattress and a passion for jazz. A legendary cabaret chanteuse, friends with the good and the great. In the wild nights and the city streets, you never know who you might find.

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The first female artist to create a statue for Parliament Square in central London has unveiled the final design.

Gillian Wearing, who will produce a sculpture of Millicent Fawcett, the suffragist leader, revealed her design on Tuesday, shortly before its construction application was granted conditional approval by Westminster city council.

A detailed model of the monument shows Fawcett holding a sign that reads "Courage calls to courage everywhere", taken from a speech she gave after the death of fellow campaigner Emily Wilding Davison at the 1913 Epsom Derby.

Wearing also incorporated one of Fawcett's brooches into the design, borrowing the original from the Fawcett Society so it could be scanned and cast into bronze.

The Turner prize-winning artist will be the first person to produce a statue of a female subject for the square.

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has been working closely with the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, to ensure the statue can be unveiled for the centenary of the Representation of the Peoples Act 1918 in February, which granted some women over 30 the vote for the first time.

Wearing was named as the artist behind the statue in April, after a campaign in May last year by Caroline Criado-Perez, who attracted 85,000 signatures to an online petition that called for a statue of a woman to be erected in the square.

This year, the government announced that the monument would be paid for from a £5m fund to celebrate the centenary of women's suffrage.

Khan said: "As a proud feminist at City Hall, I have given Caroline's inspired campaign my full support and am delighted that we have been given the go-ahead to bring the first ever statue of a woman to the centre of British democracy in Parliament Square - something which is long overdue.

"Next year marks a century since the start of women's suffrage in the UK - one of our country's most pivotal moments - and our mission now is to ensure that we can begin the centenary celebrations with the unveiling of this landmark piece.

"This will be one of the most momentous and significant statues of our time and I know that Gillian Wearing's exceptional talent and unique insight will do great justice to the movement and Millicent Fawcett's legacy.

"We want this statue to depict the strength and determination of the women who dedicated their lives to the fight for women's suffrage and to inspire many generations to come - and I know Gillian's creation will do just that."

Wearing said: "I am really delighted that planning has been granted. Now Millicent Fawcett's statue can stand as an equal among male statues in Parliament Square."

Javid also welcomed the news: "Aged just 22, Millicent Fawcett gave her first speech on women's suffrage and then campaigned relentlessly for nearly 50 years before the vote was finally given to women.

"I am proud that this beautifully designed statue of Fawcett in Parliament Square will inspire a new generation to champion her struggle for equality and women's rights."

* This article was amended on 20 September 2017. The original referred to Millicent Fawcett as a suffragette. Although she worked alongside suffragettes, who employed different, and more militant tactics in their campaign, Fawcett herself is more accurately described as a suffragist. This has been corrected.

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Artist unveils design for Parliament Square suffragist statue

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The first female artist to create a statue for Parliament Square in central London has unveiled the final design. Gillian Wearing, who will produce a sculpture of Millicent Fawcett, the suffragist leader, revealed her design on Tuesday, shortly before its construction application was granted conditional approval by Westminster city council.

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Thursdays at Chicago's Green Mill are every bit as special as the jazz buffs say. An oak-lined time capsule, it is one of the last surviving jazz age bars. Established in 1907, it was once the space where Jewish and Italian Americans gathered to listen to a very particular kind of jazz created from a cultural hybridity that stood in tension with the segregated world that surrounded it.

Standing at the bar in the Green Mill last week, it was hard not to feel some of that history in the ambience. The ideas that shaped its programme a century ago were part of a shift in thinking that was bigger than music. The music foresaw a political and cultural agenda that is still playing itself out. When Barack Obama writes about building a new political landscape by rediscovering hope, it is the hope of the sociology that the jazz moment suggested was possible; multiple discrete narratives woven together into something truly culturally coherent and inspiring.

Culture is, and always will be, the natural arena of inventive discourse and critical thinking, but it has also become the space where political ideas and social cohesion are increasingly negotiated. In the absence of real political alternatives people are increasingly looking to culture for social enfranchisement.

Last year I was asked by Channel 4's Big Art Project to join a team of public art specialists for a period of intensive travel around Britain. Initially I thought it wasn't my kind of thing. But the brief was an intriguing one. Thousands of places were proposed by tens of thousands of ordinary people, from the Isle of Mull to the Isle of Wight, from Burnley to Belfast. These were to be reduced to six sites for art projects, with the help of an expert panel. The Big Art Project then promised to follow the development of commissions for the sites over two years.

That might mean Angels of the North, West, East and South or perhaps film, performance, light pieces or a myriad of public art possibilities. The key criteria for judging suitable applications were quality of the proposal and local buy-in.

Of course I said yes, and over the past year, as one of a panel, I have travelled thousands of miles up and down the country teasing out issues behind the proposals and getting a sense of Britain in the 21st century.

What I have found has surprised me. The process of bringing communities together to think about how they might curate shared spaces to the benefit of their locality has thrown up all sorts of issues and potential; issues that one might think transcend art and culture and are the traditional realm of politics. Members of the panel were on more than one occasion reduced to tears, working with a community of Burnley-based teenagers, some of South Asian Muslim descent, some white working class, who shared a local school but who were divided in all else.

Where politics had only exploited and exacerbated difference, the opportunity to create public art in their community offered a mechanism for inter-ethnic cohesion and social integration that the best local politicians could only have dreamed of.

Culture, or perhaps even the arts, is a space where we can come together to create a coherence of disparate narratives and allow people to build alliances and associations that are more dynamic than the political constituency or the electoral ward.

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You want social integration? Look to art not politics

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Thursdays at Chicago's Green Mill are every bit as special as the jazz buffs say. An oak-lined time capsule, it is one of the last surviving jazz age bars. Established in 1907, it was once the space where Jewish and Italian Americans gathered to listen to a very particular kind of jazz created from a cultural hybridity that stood in tension with the segregated world that surrounded it.

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Augustus Casely-Hayford is a Curator and cultural historian and Executive Director, Arts Strategy, of Arts Council England. He has directed and produced arts programmes for the BBC and Channel 4 and is a member of Tate Britainуs Council and a Clore Fellow. Gus has lectured at the Royal College of Art, Sothebyуs Institute of Art and Goldsmiths College.

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Curator and Cultural istorian

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I still find it difficult not to keep benchmarking my summers against 1976. My great memory of that summer was Ladbroke Grove, in west London, on the evening of the Notting Hill Carnival riot. I stood on a porch and watched pink paraffin Molotov cocktails tumble out of the air and decant burning streams of kerosene down the road toward the police lines. Every time a bottle burst on the road, a cheer would go up. It was in a strange way very beautiful.

I watched for what felt like a long time. I was just about to become a teenager and I was mesmerised with both fear and excitement. But, I felt it made a kind of sense. The riot may have been spontaneous, but the anger was borne out of years of building resentment. The local population were simply tired of being scared and marginalised. The silo walls of multicultural London were smouldering; it would not be contained.

The following week in the final Test match of one of the greatest West Indian tours, Michael Holding single-handedly destroyed England with a devastating display of imperious bowling. I didn't know how it would change, but I knew this bit of the world could never be quite the same.

Thirty years on, so much has changed. The Notting Hill Carnival "Europe's biggest street party", has become almost mainstream. The surrounding area is now the home of bankers, shadow cabinet ministers and fleets of Chelsea Tractors. And the big cricket series of the summer - before the very un-cricket unravelling of the final Test and perhaps cricket itself - gave us the boys' own dream debuts of two Englishmen, Monty Panesar and Sajid Mahmood, who devastated the Pakistani batting with hypnotically wily bowling.

To have a Sikh and a Muslim as the twin spearheads of an English victory in Britain's most conservative sport is wonderful. I would love to see the Norman Tebbit cricket test re-applied today to his white Chingford kin. I think they, as much as anyone, must have begun to be aware that the underpinning narrative and values of contemporary Britain have subtly, but profoundly, altered.

It is increasingly untenable to see the culture of minorities as the constantly shifting beach-line and the traditional mainstream as Britain's bedrock and hinterland. The idea of a stable mainstream founded upon a fixed core set of ideals and beliefs against which everything else is measured and accommodated, must be seen as an old-fashioned comforting delusion. I hope we now accept that our society is and always has been much more complex.

Embracing, not just accommodating, that complexity has to be part of our future - we almost have no choice. Diversity, at least the kind of cultural diversity policy that grounds all of those action plans we are writing, is never going to solve the problem. That way of engaging with societal complexity has become deeply damaged. We need to find a new infrastructure, an integrated mechanism for thinking about how demographic changes alter the way metropolitan Britons engage with the world around them. We have to begin to accept that generating formalised ways to accommodate "other" people and then not resourcing or embracing the complexity of that responsibility can actually exacerbate the problem.

If we are to convince young people that they can make a meaningful contribution to the soul of contemporary Britain, we might need to give up a little more of what we value. We cannot afford to give birth to another generation of alien-natives; young people who feel closer to cultures on the other side of earth than the one into which they are born. This is a generation that understandably is not going to be satisfied with defining their cultural practise within the margins.

We know that the loss of trust after the 7/7 tube bombings will take decades to play out and the ramifications of this year's airport chaos may change flying forever, but we will pay a price for not building upon the hard-fought years of pigeon-step gains that have made Panesar and Mahmood possible. Watching the cricketing world polarise into predictable camps underwritten by racial suspicion is deeply sad. But it is an analogue of a broader global paranoia. As a nation we have a history of building real possibility from fragile hope.

I hope to see you at the Notting Hill Carnival this bank holiday. I know after 30 years of carnivals it is a weekend which feels like it is owned by everyone, where even old blokes like me can feel comfortable. I will be the one dancing badly with the William Hague baseball hat - do come over to say hello.

The writer is the director of the Institute of International Visual Arts

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Augustus Casely-Hayford: We all need to change our ways

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I still find it difficult not to keep benchmarking my summers against 1976. My great memory of that summer was Ladbroke Grove, in west London, on the evening of the Notting Hill Carnival riot. I stood on a porch and watched pink paraffin Molotov cocktails tumble out of the air and decant burning streams of kerosene down the road toward the police lines.

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Cultural historian Augustus Casely-Hayford discusses the explosive impact of Jean-Michel Basquiat ahead of our exhibition, Basquiat: Boom For Real.

'The clock ticks down, the flint sparks, the fuse burns short - the tart and fleeting tang of electricity on the tongue - and then ... BOOM - Boom for real...

In little more than a decade, Jean-Michel Basquiat triggered a series of intellectual and artistic explosions that reconfigured many of the creative spheres that he touched. Ripping through the late seventies and eighties his prolific and thrilling output eviscerated orthodoxy, fusing the esoteric and the conventional. He sent waves of creative innovation accelerating across traditional culture until once caste-iron categories dissolved, until his own imagination detonated in a cataclysmic paroxysm that looked backward with such ferocity that it became the future. And Basquiat left behind a cultural arena that was transformed by his brief, but brilliant presence.

He sent waves of creative innovation accelerating across traditional culture

Although he died at 27, in his short life Basquiat made a telling contribution to the cultural world, helping to normalise a particular kind of challenge to the intellectual status quo. Graffiti artist, painter, poet, DJ, philosopher, musician - Basquiat took on creative disciplines with a sure-footed mastery and left each altered. Ultimately however, they were fodder to further his greater project of dissecting the way that we perceive, categorise and give value.

Whilst recuperating after being hit by a car, his mother bought the young Basquiat a copy of Gray's Anatomy. This Victorian exploration of the mechanics of the human body left him obsessed with ideas of dissection and reconfiguration. Throughout his career he nurtured a forensic interest in forcing us to think about how we might pull apart and remake intellectual disciplines. He looked at history as a cadaver that could be deconstructed and reanimated to suit us. Searching beyond traditional western sources of artistic inspiration, Basquiat found an alternative plane upon which to build his art, borrowing and refashioning punk, rap, ancient Egyptian history and traditional African art. From this other world he conjured a magnificent theatre of alternate possibilities, simultaneously beautiful and shocking, both thrillingly nascent and yet ancient. It beguiled with its flamboyant brilliance and stunned with its difference. This was perhaps his Grand Project, the forced re-evaluation of worth, the reconsideration of the things that we might value and deem worthy of serious consideration.

Basquiat found an alternative plane upon which to build his art

Basquiat understood value - he escaped homelessness to become an internationally acclaimed artist in a handful of years. Perhaps driven by memories of his difficult childhood, by a hope that those early years would not define his adult life, he approached his career with a pathological application. Blessed with a defining talent he rapidly found success, while the residual pain of childhood lingered as an important catalyst for his practice. He understood the tension between his race and his gift, he knew what his talent meant, what his Blackness, his Haitian, his Puerto Rican and once African ancestry could connote to the art-world, and how this ethnicity could be used to limit his progress - but he also knew how he might deploy his identity for optimum impact. These gifts made him attractive to many of the most interesting figures of the time, collaborating with Warhol, Bowie, Grand Master Flash and Blondie, amongst many others.

During his early years of success, Basquiat's volcanic talent was more than a counterbalance to his demons, but those anxieties intensified until ultimately, like many of his contemporaries, he was consumed by his own ghosts. Whilst there have been other artists who have reconfigured the creative metric of their time, few did so with the explosive style of Jean-Michel Basquiat.'

Written by Augustus Casely-Hayford.

Basquiat: Boom For Real takes place from 21 September-28 January 2018.

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Cultural historian Augustus Casely-Hayford discusses the explosive impact of Jean-Michel Basquiat ahead of our exhibition, Basquiat: Boom For Real. 'The clock ticks down, the flint sparks, the fuse burns short - the tart and fleeting tang of electricity on the tongue - and then ... BOOM - Boom for real...

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Exhibition hire bie

The first large-scale exhibition in the UK of the work of American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)

Discover the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the pioneering prodigy of the 1980s downtown New York art scene. This unprecedented exhibition brought together an outstanding selection of more than 100 works from international museums and private collections. Visitors could engage in the explosive creativity of Basquiat who worked with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Blondie, among others.

Featuring rare film, photography and archive material, the show captured the spirit of this self-taught artist, poet, DJ and musician whose influence, since his death at 27 in 1988, has been enormous.
Large Print Exhibition Guide Exhibition Interview Transcript

'An exhilarating glimpse behind the myth'

Listen: On Basquiat's Playlist

Music was integral to Basquiat's creative process, seeping into the canvas itself as more than just something to listen to in the studio.

From Prince to David Byrne, Donna Summer to Bach, listen to the music that might have been on his playlist.

With thanks

Public programme support

Location
The Art Gallery is located on Level 3 and can be accessed by stairs and lifts from Level G or via the Sculpture Court if coming from outside.

Address
Barbican Centre
Silk Street, London
EC2Y 8DS

Public transport
The Barbican is widely accessible by bus, tube, train and by foot or bicycle. Plan your journey and find more route information in ' Your Visit' or book your car parking space in advance.

We've plenty of places for you to relax and replenish, from coffee and cake to wood-fired pizzas and full pre-theatre menus

Access
Doors normally in open position during exhibition hours. Ticket desk 98cm with a drop section of 76cm. Step-free access on each floor of the Art Gallery.

Mobility
The Art Gallery has two levels, linked by a flight of 24 stairs with an intermediate landing. A passengeroperated lift (76 x 110cm) connects the two floors. If you need assistance, staff will be happy to help.

Assistance dogs
Assistance dogs are welcome. If you prefer, you may leave your dog with a member of the gallery staff during your visit.

Large-print exhibition information
To request a large print copy, please call the Art Gallery on 020 7382 2382 before your visit.

For more access information, please visit our Accessibility section.

Enhanced security measures are currently in place at the Barbican.

As part of these measures only one reasonably-sized bag (no larger than 32cm L x 18cm W x 22cm H) per person may be taken inside our venues and all bags may be searched by a member of our team.

We ask that, where possible, visitors avoid bringing large bags to the Centre. If you do need to check bags into our free cloakrooms, we suggest arriving early. All bags deposited will be subject to search and random bag searches are also in operation.

Please also remember that belongings should not be left unattended at any time.

Thank you for your understanding - we look forward to welcoming you to the Barbican.

Listen: On Basquiat's Playlist

Music was integral to Basquiat's creative process, seeping into the canvas itself as more than just something to listen to in the studio.

From Prince to David Byrne, Donna Summer to Bach, listen to the music that might have been on his playlist.

Location
The Art Gallery is located on Level 3 and can be accessed by stairs and lifts from Level G or via the Sculpture Court if coming from outside.

Address
Barbican Centre
Silk Street, London
EC2Y 8DS

Public transport
The Barbican is widely accessible by bus, tube, train and by foot or bicycle. Plan your journey and find more route information in ' Your Visit' or book your car parking space in advance.

We've plenty of places for you to relax and replenish, from coffee and cake to wood-fired pizzas and full pre-theatre menus

Access
Doors normally in open position during exhibition hours. Ticket desk 98cm with a drop section of 76cm. Step-free access on each floor of the Art Gallery.

Mobility
The Art Gallery has two levels, linked by a flight of 24 stairs with an intermediate landing. A passengeroperated lift (76 x 110cm) connects the two floors. If you need assistance, staff will be happy to help.

Assistance dogs
Assistance dogs are welcome. If you prefer, you may leave your dog with a member of the gallery staff during your visit.

Large-print exhibition information
To request a large print copy, please call the Art Gallery on 020 7382 2382 before your visit.

For more access information, please visit our Accessibility section.

Enhanced security measures are currently in place at the Barbican.

As part of these measures only one reasonably-sized bag (no larger than 32cm L x 18cm W x 22cm H) per person may be taken inside our venues and all bags may be searched by a member of our team.

We ask that, where possible, visitors avoid bringing large bags to the Centre. If you do need to check bags into our free cloakrooms, we suggest arriving early. All bags deposited will be subject to search and random bag searches are also in operation.

Please also remember that belongings should not be left unattended at any time.

Thank you for your understanding - we look forward to welcoming you to the Barbican.

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Exhibition hire bie The first large-scale exhibition in the UK of the work of American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) Discover the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the pioneering prodigy of the 1980s downtown New York art scene. This unprecedented exhibition brought together an outstanding selection of more than 100 works from international museums and private collections.

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Retro beauty is making a comeback as retro products fly off the shelves

Sarah Rainey experimented with the subtle shifts in beauty over the era's

She was transformed by make-up artist Oonagh Connor and stylist Natasha Hall

From electric blue eyeshadow and hot pink blush to bushy brows and frosted lips . . . is it any wonder some trends from the past 100 years failed to stand the test of time?

Make-up and hairstyles have changed drastically down the generations, with our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers sporting looks that now seem unflattering or bizarre.

But retro beauty is making a comeback. Max Factor, Charlotte Tilbury and Bobbi Brown are selling products popular in the Forties and Fifties, from pan stick foundation to block mascara - and they're flying off the shelves.

Meanwhile, vintage beauty tutorials are racking up millions of views online, with how-to videos showing us simple ways of recreating the hair and make-up of style icons from history, including Marilyn Monroe, Farrah Fawcett and Brigitte Bardot.

'These classic looks still make women beautiful, rather than just being passing fads,' says Louise Young, a leading make-up artist and author of new book Timeless: A Century Of Iconic Looks, which details classic beauty techniques from the 1890s to the present day and how you can recreate them.

'The old Hollywood looks are quite simple and can be adapted to any face shape or complexion,' she adds. 'Thanks to social media such as YouTube and Instagram, where experts can share their tips and techniques, women are feeling more adventurous.'

Louise does advise finding real images of the era you are recreating, as many social media tutorials are inaccurate.

So, what can we learn from the beauty trends of the past? Could techniques dating from 30, 40 or even 100 years ago be the secret to fuller lips, contoured cheeks and long, fluttering eyelashes?

With the help of celebrity make-up artist Oonagh Connor and vintage hair stylist Natasha Hall, I took a walk down memory lane -with surprising (and, at times, strangely familiar) results . . .

With their high collars, severe expressions and hair piled up in a sort of upside-down mushroom, Victorian beauty ideals were distinctive, to say the least.

Women wore minimal make-up: light grey shading on the eyes and brows, the palest foundation (a porcelain complexion was said to show the difference between a lady and a woman of lower class, who was more likely to spend her days outdoors) and just a hint of a red stain on the lips.

The hairdo of the era was the 'pompadour' - named after Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV - where the hair was turned up from the forehead and around the face in a roll.

As a Downton Abbey devotee, I can't wait to try this look. Oonagh uses pale ivory foundation and lots of white powder to get my skin tone right, followed by soft rose blusher, grey shadow around my eyes and plum lipstick, which she blots to make it look faded.

Natasha curls my hair in wide rollers, before using plenty of hairspray to fix it on top of my head. To that, she adds a curled hairpiece, which gives my 'do volume and height.

The hair is heavy, but I love the subtle, less-is-more make-up. I feel elegant, but haughty, like the Dowager Countess of Grantham.

The Roaring Twenties, a decade epitomised by bobbed hair and cupid's bow lips, were a stark contrast to the austere looks of the past.

Max Factor brought make-up to the masses, and Maybelline mascara - named after the inventor's sister, Mabel, who used to coat her lashes with Vaseline - was invented in 1915.

Women wore white and pink-tinged face powder, usually applied with a puff made from swansdown, while blusher came in a paste or powder. One of the most striking elements favoured by Flappers was the eyebrows, which were shaved off and drawn back on.

To recreate this look, Oonagh applies a pale foundation and rings my eyes with creamy grey eyeshadow. She puts dark rose blusher on the apples of my cheeks and applies plum-coloured lipstick. Then she uses concealer to camouflage the undersides of my eyebrows.

This sharp-fringed bob was popularised by vampish starlet Clara Bow. As I'm unwilling to risk such a severe chop, Natasha ties my hair in a ponytail and tucks it in at the nape of my neck to make a bob, before adding a fake fringe (hairpieces, made from nylon stockings stuffed with hair, were common at the time, too). With my full cheeks and pale skin, I'm not sure this look is for me, especially the ultra-thin brows. I look less silent film star and more like I'm permanently surprised.

Glossy Hollywood films set the tone for beauty in the Thirties, with women coveting all the vivacious, glamorous looks of screen stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.

Eyebrows were arched, tanned skin became more fashionable (in contrast to the pallor of the Twenties) and lipsticks started to be sold in brighter colours, including coral and purple.

Younger women wore cake mascara, a solid block of make-up that was activated by water - or more often, in the absence of a tap, spit.

Magazines explained how to achieve celebrities' looks, including finger waving their hair, a delicate technique that involved pinching the hair between the fingers and combing it in alternating directions.

Oonagh uses bronzer to make my skin golden and copper-coloured eyeshadow to give my eyes a doleful appearance. She applies a touch of orange-red blusher and a fashionable red colour to my lips, not dissimilar to the shade I'd wear today.

The hair, though, is far outside my comfort zone. Natasha plaits my ponytail and fixes the braid around the top of my head like a hairband, before using heavy-duty grips and straighteners to create tight curls around my face, which she sets in place with spray. When I look in the mirror, I can barely believe my eyes: I look exactly like my grandma. I've never seen the resemblance before but, dressed like this, we could be sisters.

By now, women were embracing make-up, offering a glam, groomed image on the Home Front to boost troops' morale during World War II. A flawless complexion was desirable, with full, red lips.

Max Factor launched its Pan Stik foundation in 1948, as well as Pan-Cake, a powdered compact originally made for use on-screen, which became a bestseller.

At a time when 80 per cent of women worked in factories, hair styles were practical, with 'victory rolls' - voluminous curls that framed the face, named after the manoeuvre performed by military aircraft - commonplace.

Oonagh gives my skin a sheen with creamy foundation, then uses white kohl pencil in my inner eye corners and on the lower rims to brighten my eyes. She applies false lashes - which were sold in London from 1903, made from human hair woven through gauze - to widen them further.

My hair is curled at the back and put into a loose net to keep the ringlets in place, while the top is split into three sections and clipped on top of my head in neat, stylish rolls. This is my favourite look of the lot: I feel confident, feminine and sophisticated.

Beauty in the Fifties was simple, pared-back and elegant. The doe-eyed look, made famous by the model Jean Patchett, photographed for the cover of Vogue in 1950, marked the start of an emphasis on eyes.

Brown and lilac eyeshadows were popular and eyeliner was flicked at the corners. False eyelashes became a make-up bag essential, as did Max Factor's Creme Puff, an all-in-one cream and powder which gave women the appearance of flawless skin.

Hairstyles ranged from pageboy cuts to poodle curls, and women began colouring their hair at home, inspired by the ultimate bottle blonde, Marilyn Monroe.

Stuck with my brunette locks, Natasha scrapes my hair back into a chignon - making me look like a prim and proper Stepford Wife.

My make-up is girlie and coquettish: pink lips, lots of blusher and a flick of black liner at the outer edges of my eyes, which elongates my lashes beautifully.

These were the early days of contouring - the modern-day technique whereby different shades of foundation emphasise flattering features of the face - and it does wonders for my non-existent cheekbones.

Women really used make-up to express themselves in the Swinging Sixties, looking to icons such as Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy to set the trends of the decade.

Everything was bigger and bolder: eyeliner was heavier and flicks more pronounced, mascara was thicker, lips were glossier and hair was backcombed into bouffant beehives.

Pond's Cold Cream, recently praised by the singer Kylie Minogue, was on every bedside table up and down the country, while colours were more daring than in previous decades: lipsticks came in gold and silver, and eyeshadow in plum and bottle-green.

Oonagh recreates Twiggy's distinctive eye make-up by shading my lids and around my eyes in white, before drawing a dark grey line along my eye crease (this supposedly makes the eyes 'pop', though mine look like they're popping out!) and applying thick mascara to my bottom lashes to mimic Twiggy's deer-in-headlights look. Natasha backcombs my hair before pinning half of it up - with liberal hairspray - into the classic beehive shape and loosely curling the ends with hot tongs.

Though the effect is impressive, it's a lot of effort to create. I feel like my face is caked in make-up and my hair is stiff and sticky.

In a decade of flares, tank tops and disco, the Seventies were all about discovery in the cosmetics world. Women wanted make-up to reflect their free-spirited nature - which meant clear, roll-on lip gloss, pastel eyeshadow and bronzed cheeks.

Biba, the ubiquitous London brand, made fun products in vibrant hues for the young, while older women wore Elizabeth Arden and Estee Lauder.

Oonagh uses matte black shadow to make my eyes look sultry and rings them in black kohl. Next, she dusts bronzer all over my face to give a sunkissed glow, darkens my brows using a pencil and applies translucent gloss to my lips.

For hair, there's no more iconic look than the Farrah Flick. Natasha uses curling tongs to tease my hair into soft, tumbling waves, then uses straighteners to give each strand an exaggerated upwards flick at the end.

It's dated - I look like one of Charlie's Angels - but I feel fabulous. The make-up is natural and the hair is everything I long for: big, bouncy and head-turning.

Power-dressing dominated the Eighties - and with it came over-the-top make-up. Women clamoured to copy Princess Diana's electric blue eyeliner, and thick, dark, unplucked eyebrows - made famous by actress Brooke Shields - were everywhere.

Popular lipstick colours included fuchsia, orange and frosted pink, and there was a fad for wearing clashing eyeshadows: pink and blue, gold and green, or orange and teal. Highly pigmented blushers were used right up to the hairline, as well as being dusted on the forehead and chin.

Oonagh goes to town on my eyes, using blue, green and pink eye crayons to cover my lids in bright colour. She uses a brown pencil to make my eyebrows look bushier, then applies fluorescent pink blush to my cheeks and temples.

Big hair, often permed, was in - a look not everyone could pull off. With this make-up, however, I feel ready for anything.

Natasha curls tiny sections of my hair into tight ringlets, backcombing sections closest to my scalp, before running her fingers through it and spritzing it with spray.

I look uncannily like my mum in this era - with the fierce, self-assured stare of a teenager on her way to a school disco.

I'm not sure it's one for every day, but it's certainly glam.

Timeless: A Century Of Iconic Looks by Louise Young with Loulia Sheppard (Mitchell Beazley, £20) is out now.

Clothes from Monsoon, Phase Eight, Reiss, lindybop.co.uk and H&M.

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Which era of beauty would best flatter your looks?

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Retro beauty is making a comeback as retro products fly off the shelves Sarah Rainey experimented with the subtle shifts in beauty over the era's She was transformed by make-up artist Oonagh Connor and stylist Natasha Hall From electric blue eyeshadow and hot pink blush to bushy brows and frosted lips .

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80s Fashion Pictures

For women in the 1980s, fashion was colorful, bold, and in some cases, outrageous. Anyone who grew up in or was around in the 1980s surely remembers some of the fashion trends that emerged that decade. Some were positive, and some were gladly put into the back of closets afterward. Take a look at the good, the bad and the ugly of 1980s fads and fashions.

Women's Menswear and Work Styles

If you ever saw the TV show Dynasty, you saw some of the most massive shoulder pads ever made. Alexis Carrington and Krystle Carrington were strong, dramatic characters, and they needed clothing to match. It wasn't long before women's suits and then shirts were made with shoulder pads already inserted. Some pads were removable, but others were permanent and gave women of the day a profile to match that of any football linebacker.

Casual and Workout Apparel

Casual wear in the 80s had a look that was uniquely its own.

Mini Skirts and Leggings

While mini skirts first gained prominence in the 1960s, they came back with a vengeance in the 1980s. The difference was that where the 1960s mini was usually a dress paired with go-go boots, the 1980s mini was often made of tight, clingy material that contained spandex or was made in denim. Of course, the 1980s mini was also often worn with legwarmers or leggings.

Exercise Clothes

The aerobic exercise craze hit full force in the eighties. Any self-respecting fitness buff was outfitted in leotards, headbands, and legwarmers. Legwarmers soon left the gym when women decided these fashion accessories looked as good with jeans and mini skirts as they did with tights. Legwarmers were available in nearly every color imaginable and were seen on many legs during their heyday.

Flashdance Fashion

When Jennifer Beals sported her off-the-shoulder slouchy top on Flashdance movie posters, a new fashion trend was born. Women everywhere jumped on the Flashdace fashion bandwagon and wore their shirts off their shoulders. Of course, this was a more casual look and wasn't appropriate for the office, but at malls, schools, and anywhere else they could get away with it, shoulders were bared.

Neon

Neon colors aren't the easiest to wear, but that didn't stop girls and women from sporting these super bright colors during the 1980s. Tops, skirts and jewelry were designed in garish neon greens, yellows, pinks and blues. Some makeup lines were also designed to match the clothes, so neon ruled the day for a brief time until women decided that all those bright colors were maybe just a little too bright, after all.

Acid Washed Jeans

What could pair better with the neons than tapered acid-washed jeans, with or without the ankle zippers and bows? Those were another 1980s fashion staple.

Lingerie-Inspired and Ultra-Feminine Looks

Perhaps in direct contrast to the menswear styles and shoulder pads the women of the eighties loved to wear, there were lingerie-inspired clothing styles running rampant in the streets as well. Feminine and delicate, women's garments with lace were popular during this decade. Perhaps one of the most memorable lingerie-inspired pieces was the cone bra bustier, modeled by Madonna.

Equally feminine were the poufy dresses of the 80s. Ruffles were big, literally, and there were lots of them. Some dresses were short and puffed up all the way around the skirt while others took the slim silhouette of a work-friendly dress featuring a modest bodice and pencil skirt and added a large ruffle or two around the middle.

Preppy Style

There was more to preppy style for women than Keds and dresses made with puffy sleeves and lots of fabric, though those were important components to the preppy eighties style. There were also turtlenecks, blazers, sweaters tied around the neck, knee high socks, pencil skirts, and pullover sweaters layered over button-ups or turtlenecks. Men and women both sported the colorful polo shirt with khaki pants look. Plaid was in, and so were wrap skirts that tied or buttoned at the hip.

Accessories

80s accessories were bright, colorful, and unique.

Jewelry

When Madonna first came on the 1980s music scene, she was dripping in cheap costume jewelry. As her popularity soared, so did her following of wannabes who dressed like her, styled their hair like her and adopted the trend of wearing tons of bracelets and long, hanging necklaces, often sporting crosses.

Scrunchies

The scrunchie likewise made its appearance known during this decade. It's a perfect hair accessory for the gym; it keeps your hair out of your face and can be easily washed. When legwarmers crossed over from the gym, so did the hair scrunchie.

Gloves

Whether it was a sequined glove made popular by Michael Jackson or the lacy, fingerless gloves Madonna sported, gloves were back on the scene. They were just much different from the pristine white gloves that ladies had worn for ages.

Headbands

Another popular hair accessory was the headband. Preppy women loved them.

Fashion Influences

What movies, stars and TV shows were most influential during the 1980s, leading the fashion trends? Some of the biggest influences include:

Dynasty, a popular network prime time soap opera

Dallas, another prime time soap opera

Michael Jackson, hugely popular 1980s pop icon

Flashdance, a fitness and dance movie starring Jennifer Beals

Princess Diana, England's newly married princess

Miami Vice, the ultra-cool cop series set in Florida

Aerobics, the high-impact fitness craze of the 80s

One Memorable Decade

While not every eighties fashion for women was great, the era is definitely definable by the clothes women wore. Some of you may have photographs of your eighties fashions, whether they were good or garish. You can still look back with fondness on the trends you followed when Valley Girls, preppies and shoulder pads ruled the day.

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For women in the 1980s, fashion was colorful, bold, and in some cases, outrageous. Anyone who grew up in or was around in the 1980s surely remembers some of the fashion trends that emerged that decade. Some were positive, and some were gladly put into the back of closets afterward.

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Writer who was at the fashion textile museum, for talk.

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Katie Baron: Journalist, Author, Editor, Trends Forecaster, Consultant

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Fashion + Music: Fashion Creatives Shaping Pop Music

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Fashion and music have long shared a powerful mutual attraction: from the Sex Pistols to Madonna, Kylie Minogue to Lady Gaga, fashion has consistently amplified our understanding of the band (and in many cases the brand) - fuelling the

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History of Fashion 1980's - 1990's "Five foot ten and long-legged like her mother, it is rather as if a charming young giraffe had wondered into the royal enclosure." Vogue, May 1981 The Eighties
The eighties saw great social and economic change. 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin wall along with the cold war ending. This was due to the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact leading to the Soviet Union abandoning political hostility to the western world. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe led to each countries independence and a massive westernization of Eastern Europe. Developing countries across the world faced economic and social strife, most notably Ethiopia witnessed widespread famine resulting on the country relying on other foreign aid to provide food. This led to the famous Live Aid concert set up by Bob Geldof in 1985 to raise money for the country.

Britain saw a royal wedding in 1981 with Lady Dianna and Prince Charles marriage. Watched by 750,000,000 people, Lady Di and her 25meter long train started the meringue dress fashion trend. Most of the developed world saw the early eighties recession. The United States and Japan exited the recession early, however; unemployment was high in the countries affected. Clothing manufacturing began to move offshore to countries with cheaper labour and technological advances continued; personal computers became more readily available and the invention of the World Wide Web happened. With the western worlds introduction of maternity leave, equal pay and more women working, power dressing for women became commonplace.
Arts and Culture
During the eighties TV programmes became hugely popular. Miami Vice, Dynasty and Dallas were watched by millions of people and the classic eighties big hair styles and shoulder pads were copied and idolized. Blockbuster films were starting to be more prevalent with E.T, Back to the Future and Indiana Jones becoming cult classics. Music had a huge influence on fashion. With the rise of solo acts compared to the seventies groups, Prince was introduced with a new style of music and fashion. Michael Jackson left the Jackson 5 and created an iconic style while at the same time Madonna was becoming a huge fashion icon. All of these icons were known for their different fashion styles, as much as they were known for their music. They had begun to influence the younger generation on a global scale.
Shapes and Silhouettes
With the rise in professional women and a British female Prime Minister power dressing came to the fore front. Suits were beginning to be seen as social wear and the sharp padded shoulders were a necessity creating a strong silhouette. Bright colours and neons were seen on dresses made out of taffeta fabrics with oversized bow detailing while bold prints were used on oversized T shirts and dresses. Off the shoulder shirts, ¾ length sleeves, crop tops, rolled up sleeves, matching socks, sweaters tied on the waist were all daily trends seen on women. Tight leather pants, stonewashed jeans, Levi 501's and corduroy pants were also seen as stylish. Another trend for younger women was to have the bra exposed. Seen either though a mesh top or underneath an oversized denim jacket, the look was encouraged by Madonna. The eighties also saw Vivienne Westwood 's "The Witches" collection, which was her last collection with McLaren. The oddly shaped, cut and proportion garments were made using the draping technique. Not being cut on a table or board but on the actually body via, pulling, draping and then cutting.

Designer underwear became fashionable during the eighties with women's styles with lace trimmings, camisole with built in bras and an array of pastel colours becoming popular. It was now seen as more important to wear stylish underwear, celebrities and adverts were influencing people, for example "Back To The Future" saw Michael J Fox wearing lilac Calvin Klein briefs.

For teenagers happy pants became a trend, particularly for girls. Originating from Australia were the pants were seen as a basic, the style was of an elasticised pair of shorts, just above the knee made in a bright and bold cotton fabric. In 1986 Dolly magazine released a happy pant pattern for girls to make at home.
New Romanticism and Post 70's Punk
New Romanticism was a London club scene in the early eighties. Coming from the punk scene, the more sartorial dressers were less interested in the punk statement but more in the fashion. They were therefore looking for new ideas to draw attention to themselves. The new romanticism look was flamboyant, with historical periods influencing the dramatic look of frills and luscious fabrics. This pirate look was marketed by Vivienne Westwood. For the new romantics there was a conscious effort to look beautiful, luxuriant and attractive in a narcissistic way.

The 1980s featured a post punk gothic style carried on from the seventies that was popular in Europe and America with the 'LA Scene'. The style featured black clothing made out of unusual materials such as leather, fishnet material and lace. Women wore corsets while both sexes still saw Doc Martens as a staple. Long, back combed hair, pale skin and heavy makeup was worn. The punk style was still being seen in bands including Guns N' Roses which notably saw their jean jackets attached with safety pins, patches, buttons and odd bits of fabric.
Paninaro
The term Paninaro was used to describe the subculture in Milan in the mid eighties. The Paninaro's were a group of Italians who would hang out at fast food, sandwich bars. With their own Italian slang, two magazines called "Il Paninaro" and "El cucador", the Paninaro group were their own culture. Interested in fashion, they were seen wearing shirts and jeans rolled up to the ankle by designers including Versace, Armani and Levis 501 paired with bomber jackets and timberland boots. Ray-Bans were also popular to compliment the style. In 1986 the Pet Shop Boys commemorated the Paninaro culture with their cult song "Paninaro".
Exercise Clothing
With the emphasis on a healthy lifestyle more people were exercising and fitness videos were now available. Jane Fonda had her own videos and promoted casual clothing and gym wear. Leotards, leggings and legwarmers all became very popular and where worn with elastic headbands. The leotards boasted bright colours, stripes and polka dots. Movies helped popularize the trend with Fame and Flashdance showing ripped oversized sweatshirts with one bare shoulder exposed and oversized jumpers.

Costume jewellery became popular with the bigger the better! Huge gold or pearl earrings were worn with diamante jewellery almost every day. High heels and flats were worn with Princess Dianna setting the trend for lower heeled footwear. Towards the end of the eighties wedges or gold and metallic shoes were worn during the summer. Doc Martens were still popular from the seventies. However, girls started pairing them with floral dresses to create an edgy look. Clutch bags were hugely popular available in a variety of colours, often with matching shoes. The iconic quilted Chanel bag became widely desirable with millions buying copies of the designer bag. Swatch watches, high-tops, slap bracelets, friendship bracelets, hoop earrings and scrunchies were everyday accessories for the eighties. Coloured hair became a trend as did rainbow colours. Crimped, curled, frizzy styles with bangs, platinum blonde, side ponytails and sticking up fringes all were fashionable hair styles. Vivid makeup with light pink lips, glitter, blue eye shadows and beauty moles often partnered the hair styles.
Menswear
Men were often seen wearing suit jackets with casual T-shirts inspired by the look of the Tubbs and Crocket form the TV programme Miami Vice. Acid washed jeans and leather jackets were worn with Raybans and skinny ties. Some men even copied the MC Hammer style parachute pants. Others who wanted to give an air of chic copied the preppy look which could be seen in khaki pants and polo shirts with the collar turned up, a sweater tied around their shoulders and loafer style shoes.
The Icons
Madonna
After her release of her single Like a Virgin in 1984 Madonna was named 'Material Girl' which subsequently led to young women around the world looking to her for fashion guidance.Madge was known for her long layered strings of beads, headbands, lace ribbons, short tight lycra, leather mini skirts, cropped jackets, lace gloves and crucifixes worn in her jewellery. Her look asserted her sexuality and rejected the androgynous styles seen previously.Lady Diana
During the eighties, Diana became more confident with her clothing. She started to wear international designers including; Versace, Christian Lacroix and Chanel.
She embodied some of the iconic eighties style with big hair, shoulder pads and glitzy outfits. She wore sharp shouldered suits that showed of her toned figure and her puff ball meringue dress started out a trend.Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson had his own iconic style and his music portrayed this. His famous album and song "Thriller" showed a unique style that teenagers loved to copy. They would try to replicate Michael's Thriller style of matching leather trousers and jacket, one glove and sunglasses. Michael Jackson often wore a leather jacket which was also popularized by the film The Lost Boys. The Designers Calvin Klein

From launching his designer jeans in the seventies, by the early eighties Calvin Klein was leading the industry in offering more affordable designer jeans to the market. During the eighties his name branded underwear also became popular thanks to his use of print ads and billboards showing models almost naked in exotic poses.

Ralph Lauren

Ralph Lauren was considered to design the power suit of the eighties. His look was also popular with the preppy set, with his classic polo shirt being seen as essential. His casual yet aristocratic style created a classic look which was a popular with a wide range of social classes and age groups.

Vivienne Westwood

Vivienne Westwood had already made dresses for the punks of the seventies and because of this she was one of the main designers to influence the New Romantics style. With her first catwalk show 'Pirate' in 1981, she started the new romantic fashion of flamboyant historical clothing.

Jean Paul Gaultier

After sending of his personal designs to Piere Cardin, Jean Paul Gaultier was hired by Cardin as a design assistant. After working with Jacques Esterel and Jean Pator in 1971 he went on to design his own collection which was released in 1976. Known for mixing cultural topics with French elegance he would also gender mix, notably creating the man-skirt in 1985. His collection shown in the eighties; High Tech (1980), Dadism (1983), Barbes (1985), A Wardrobe For Two (1985), Untitled Collection (1987), The Concierge In In The Staircase (1988) featured androgynous styling, cross breeding, culture shocks, corsets and tin can jewels.

Thierry Mugler

Thierry Mugler understands the phrase 'sex sells'. Previously a ballet dancer, Mugler decided to turn to fashion instead of Swan Lake. Known for his glamour, sexiness and fetish inspired clothing, Muglerexcelled in the eighties with his exaggeration.

Fendi

Founded by Adele Casagrande in 1918, Fendi is one of the Italian fashion dynasties. Beginning as a leather goods shop, Fendi got its name via marriage of Casagrande to Eduardo Fendi in 1925. In 1965 Fendi took on Karl Lagerfeld as creative director who created the iconic double F symbol. The eighties saw a successful period for Fendi with the company launching into a sunglass and jeans collection, their first female fragrance and a sportswear and accessory collection aimed for a younger market. Following this success they also launched a male fragrance.

Gianfranco Ferre

Originally trained as an architect, Gianfranco Ferre has been famously compared with Frank Lloyd Wright. With his first show in 1974 and first collection in 1978 he followed with a menswear line in 1982. Known for his voluminous organza shirts, Ferre was appointed artistic director at Christian Diorin 1989. Being told he had only nine weeks to complete, his first collection followed in the same year. His first show for Christian Dior included Grace Jones and Princess Micheal of Kent in the front row. The show was described by vogue as 'a matter of Dior discipline and Ferre flourish'. On the final day of shows, he was awarded the Golden Thimble, Paris' highest fashion honour.

Issey Miyake

After working with Hubert de Givenry, Guy Laroche and Geoffrey Beene, Issey Miyake returned to Japan in 1970 after various stints in Paris and New York. With a new style happening in Japan as Kimonos and western clothing had mixed, Miyake saw it as the perfect opportunity to forge a new direction. With his first show shocking audiences' as a girl stripped of her Issey Miyake creation he went on to make his mark during the eighties. Launching his first male collection in 1982, it featured a shirt Miyake had been working on since 1975. In 1988 he collaborated with photographer Irving Penn to produce a book of photographs and during the eighties he staged an exhibition of black silicone models suspended and hidden in darkness.

Gianni Versace

Versace worked as a freelance designer for Genny and Callaghan during the seventies which followed on to him creating his first solo collection for Complice in 1975. In 1978 Versace created the Gianni Versace label in Milan which followed on to Versace creating their first advertising campaign with photographer Richard Avedon (which led to a long running collaboration). In 1982 he produced a collection showing metallic garments that helped trademark the company and during the late eighties he designed elaborate stage costumes for Elton John, helping cement his reputation for the future, Sadly in 1997 Gianni was murdered leaving his sister Donatella to succeed him.

Yohji Yamamoto

After opening his company in 1971, Yohji Yamamoto came to success during the eighties when he showed in Paris in 1981. Known for the way he uses voluminous garments to wrap and drape around the body in unstructured ways. He caused a furore with the press, with Vogue calling his designs 'Oblique Chic'.

Other influential designers of the eighties include Donna Karan, Armani, Moschino and John Galliano.
History of Fashion 1980's - 1990's

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History of Fashion 1980's - 1990's "Five foot ten and long-legged like her mother, it is rather as if a charming young giraffe had wondered into the royal enclosure." Vogue, May 1981 The Eighties The eighties saw great social and economic change. 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin wall along with the cold war ending.

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1980s Fashion History. Power Dressing C20Th

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1980s Fashion History. Power Dressing and Influence of Television Soap Series 'Dynasty' and 'Dallas'

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Exhibit of the Best 80’s Fabrics (Published 1990)

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Directed by Lewis Gilbert. With Pauline Collins, Tom Conti, Julia McKenzie, Alison Steadman. Shirley's a middle-aged Liverpool housewife, who finds herself talking to the wall while she prepares her husband's chip'n'egg, wondering what happened to her life. She compares scenes in her current life with what she used to be like and feels she's stagnated and in a rut.

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Fashion in the 1980s epitomised political subversion, self-expression and a hyperactive creative energy. The fashion wasn't really about the 'fashion' for its own sake, and for some designers, this ethos still holds; Vivienne Westwood's environmentally-focused show last week (15 September) at London Fashion Week was chiefly about the message - the word 'CLIMATE' was printed ostentatiously across the pieces, and Lily Cole, the poster-child for fashion-with-a-conscience, opened the show with an interpretive dance, awash with red light, a nature-child drenched in blood. After the show Westwood implored people, 'don't invest in fashion - invest in the world'.

But there is something lacklustre now, perhaps even mainstream, about the fashion industry's occasional anti-establishment pseudo-subversive acts. Even the Daily Mail praised Westwood and Cole's social responsibility, lauding Cole - albeit in a patronising way - for 'proving again that she is more than just a model'. This is what makes current shows such as the V&A's 'Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s', and the ICA's off-site 'A Journey Through London Subculture: 1980s to Now', simultaneously so engaging and so disturbing.

Both shows seem to share the same aspiration - to translate the unique energy of the 1980s for those born just on the wrong side of that illustrious decade, and to revive some of the spirit in those who experienced 1980s subculture first-hand. Most of the pieces have retained an aura of boundless energy and individuality, and continue to resonate. Christopher Nemeth's iconic 1986 Post Office sacking jacket made two noticeable appearances - on a display mannequin in the V&A, and on a guest at the opening party of 'A Journey Through Subculture'.

Katharine Hamnett's bold 'statement' t-shirts, also on display at the V&A, bear slogans that are unfortunately still relevant now - 'No More Fashion Victims' could easily refer to the tragic collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh. Although in many ways unique to the 1980s, it is unsurprising that these designs continued to pervade fashion in later decades. Henry Holland's 2006 Fashion Groupie t-shirt series was just one of many later appropriations of Hamnett's style - although these called less for environmental and social responsibility, and more for Giles Deacon to Get His Freak On.

However, these shows are so laden with nostalgia that their initial energy gives way to melancholy. This is partly due to the meticulously ordered display of a culture that thrived on chaos. The V&A organises 1980s fashion subcultures into neat sections, including 'Glam Fetish', 'Hard Times' and 'Goth', with carefully selected quotes about fashion enabling self-expression, design as 'anarchical and perverse' (courtesy of the ubiquitous Westwood) and vague references to ecstasy-fuelled happenings - descriptions of disorder and fun that are at odds with the display. The ICA has gone one step further, containing their exhibits in vitrines so that viewing them recalls peering into open-casket coffins.

This is the most poignant thing: by presenting themselves as homage, these shows unconsciously affirm that the zeitgeist of 1980s subculture is truly dead - in part due to the fact that these once subversive fashions have become normalised. Even the mainstream conservative media gives Vivienne Westwood its nod of approval. And the most shocking thing to have emerged from any of these designers since the 1980s has been strategically ignored; that is, the brutal xenophobia spewed by John Galliano.

This inflects the S/S 1986 collection 'Fallen Angels', included in 'Club to Catwalk', with more than a little irony, and an invitation for Galliano's S/S 1985 show, featuring an orientalist depiction of a menacing generic-Arab with the caption 'AFGHANISTAN REPUDIATES WESTERN IDEALS', is politely tucked into a corner at the Old Selfridges Hotel without remark. This non-recognition, although somewhat understandable in shows centred on 'carefree fun', is what ultimately establishes them as homage - or even as pop-culture hagiography. Instead, inspirational text about Galliano making ostentatious club outfits peppers the V&A's wall text. One must not speak ill of a dead decade.

The ICA' s 'A Journey Through London Subculture: 1980s to Now' is at the Old Selfridges Hotel until 20 October 2013.

'Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s' is at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 16 February 2014.

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Lost Decade: Fashion and Subculture in the 1980s | Apollo Magazine

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Fashion in the 1980s epitomised political subversion, self-expression and a hyperactive creative energy. The fashion wasn't really about the 'fashion' for its own sake, and for some designers, this ethos still holds; Vivienne Westwood's environmentally-focused show last week (15 September) at London Fashion Week was chiefly about the message - the word 'CLIMATE' was printed ostentatiously across the pieces, and Lily Cole, the poster-child for fashion-with-a-conscience, opened the show with an interpretive dance, awash with red light, a nature-child drenched in blood.

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The fashion prints of the 1980s were not for the faint-hearted, it was a decade that celebrated excess. The Cloth and Hilde Smith for Bodymap were significant in the avant-garde for textiles, as well as in fashion. In 1983, the influential American trade paper Women's Wear Daily commented in their article 'England's Fabric' on 'the humour, the willingness to take risks, the unexpectedness and the eccentricity that only the British could deliver. London offers new directions'. Textile designers explored new ways to manufacture, as digital printing was not yet an option.

(The summer 1985 collection of the design group The Cloth, displayed in the windows of the London store Liberty. Photo by Anita Corbin.)

(The Cloth created backdrops for the windows of Liberty of London as a showcase for their summer 1985 collection, 'Summer Simmitts'. The T-shirts, shirts and shorts, printed in bright colours on white cotton jersey, were displayed in the store alongside an exhibition of paintings from the group)

(An exploration of the significance and mythology of the English wooden landscape. 'The Spirit of the Forest' was designed in 1987 - a seven-colour print using acid dyes and produced in three colourways.)

Innovation in print design was spearheaded for the first time by fashion fabric designers, rather than designers of interiors. This was a result of the developing awareness of fashion's role in a newly expanding consumer culture, which led to a greater acceleration of trends.

The dramatic shapes and the adjoining vibrant colours provide an intensely abstract experience in this painterly design by Liberty.

Artwork for a Liberty print design. Geometric pieces of tissue paper are overlaid with painted and printed marks, then directly described onto the cloth by the screen-printing process.

British textile designer Hilde Smith's work, 'Cosmic Check' is a monochrome play on tartan. Designed for Bodymap's 1985 collection, 'Barbie Takes a Trip Around Nature's Cosmic Curves'.

A monoprint from Val Furphy and Ian Simpson of design studio Furphy Simpson. The base is dark brown crepe de Chine, a fabric much favoured by the design duo for the discharge printing process.

Deceptively casual mark-making within a structured grid, in this print design by Brian Bolger of The Cloth, 1985.

A single-screen print design from Vivienne Westwood's first independent range in 1981, 'Pirates'. The collection utilised a palette of African-inspired colours and a serpentine, undulating motif often seen in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A mixed-media exercise in paint, collaged paper and felt-tipped pens come together with fragmented areas of pattern in this eleven-colour screen-print design by Liberty.

Collaged tissue paper in the original artwork provides the transparency in this print by Liberty. The boundaries between the eight colours are scrupulously observed, with no overlapping of colour, and are divided by a strong, fragmented line, emphasised by the narrow white margins.

A pencil doodle was the inspiration for this colour discharge print out of black silk, for Italian label Cerruti, by Furphy Simpson.

A linocut design by Furphy Simpson, featuring a tattooed bird in the hand. Originally in black and white, it was recoloured by the American design label Williwear.

A design by Furphy Simpson used by both British designer and retailer Paul Smith and British retailer Next menswear, though in different colour ways. The design utilised the wax-resist technique.

Predating the Memphis group by a decade, the Swedish design group Tio-Gruppen displayed a post-modern attitude to pattern. This design references the Art Deco fan/sunrise motif. 'Helios' (named after the Greek personification of the sun) is from the 'Megaphone' collection and was designed in 1983 by Ingela Håkansson.

'Bongo', from the 'Signal' collection designed by Tom Hedqvist for Tio-Gruppen in 1985, is a pastiche of 1950s style.

A Furphy Simpson print design deploying a double discharge technique; brushstokes and wax drawings were enlarged on a small screen.

A half-drop repeat print by Moschino, featuring the male form in various guises - from super heroes, cowboys and Roman centurions to characters such as Harlequin, from the commedia dell'arte.

A classic rich paisley print on this dress by the American couturier Bill Blass, a favourite designer of the US president's wife, Nancy Reagan.

Emblazoned with the motifs of conspicuous consumption - credit cards, shopping malls and fashion labels - the silk dressing gown by American designer Nicole Miller illustrates all the cultural ephemera of the 1980s.

An understated printed silk design by the Italian label Gucci, the faux-tweed effect created by varying scales in rows of tiny flower heads.

Print for a tailored jacket in wool crepe by the British designer Jean Muir. Renowned for the understated simplicity and sophisticated technique of her cutting, and use of navy and black, even this most uncompromising of designers produced the essential element of every businesswoman's wardrobe, a power-shouldered jacket, here in bright red with a subtle, Japanese-inspired print.

The most recognisable logo in fashion - the overlapping double Cs of the Parisian couturière Coco Chanel - was designed by her in 1925 and remains unchanged today. The scarf is illustrated with trompe l'oeil images of jewellery. The designer set the trend for costume jewellery and precious stones in informal settings in the 1920s, an irrelevant and democratic approach to displaying wealth entirely in keeping with the excesses of the 1980s.

Hyper-real, large-scale blooms distinguish this design by Furphy Simpson.

A performance-packed print design, 'Pow', from the 'Wave' collection by Alexander Henry Fabrics.

'It's a Blast' from the 'Metro' collection by Alexander Henry Fabrics. California-based print design company Alexander Henry Fabrics was uniquely placed to catch the wave of a new generation of surfers with their textile designs.

'Moonlanding' is a design from Furphy Simpson. It was executed on paper using Omnicrom machine and printed on nylons and cotton.

Wild and domestic cats float on a turquoise velvet background in this all-over print design by Natalie Gibson.

A subdued but intense print on a wool crepe dress by the Italian-born couturier Emanuel Ungaro, a favourite designer with the cast members of the American television soap Dynasty.

The 1980s heralded a return to the popularity of the animal print: this bastardised version appeared on a dress by the American designer Diane Fres. The popularity of animal prints such as faux leopard dates from the early nineteenth century, when Napoleon returned to Paris from his expedition to North Africa with real hides. The wearing of animal skins is seen as a desire to convey the same behavioural traits as those of the animals. The spotted coat of the female leopard - the female being the fiercest fighter - is perceived as representing the archetypal femme fatale, implying killer instincts.

A simple and tonally harmonious print design on a silk blouse by the American designer Anne Pinkerton.

'Zeebak', a furnishing fabric inspired by Native American motifs, by Liberty.

'Celebration' by Timney Fowler. Classical meets modern in this clash of colours and architectural details, printed on crepe de Chine.

Fish-like shapes float across the surface of an off-white circle, in this design, 'Moonfish', by Georgina von Etzdorf.

Brightly coloured blooms flourish on a dark background in this design, 'Poppy', from an original watercolour painting by Georgina von Etzdorf.

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The fashion prints of the 1980s were not for the faint-hearted, it was a decade that celebrated excess. The Cloth and Hilde Smith for Bodymap were significant in the avant-garde for textiles, as well as in fashion.

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At noon today, President Trump evoked a nation on the brink of an abyss-a failed state mired in rampant crime, poverty, and corruption. He made you want to reach for a flak jacket. So does anyone really care what his wife wore to his swearing-in? Perhaps not, though her ice-blue ensemble by Ralph Lauren, in double-faced cashmere, was very sophisticated. The shapely tailored sheath showed off her enviable figure. The jacket had a hussar's collar and bracelet-length sleeves-the latter a signature of Jackie Kennedy, as many commentators observed. But it seemed to me that Mrs. Trump was channelling another former model with a Zoolander squint who was married to a President: Carla Bruni.

Do we care that Trump's daughters were both in white-Ivanka serenely poised in trousers under a long asymmetric jacket; vivacious Tiffany in a double-breasted coat? (Eventually, I suppose, we will be able to tell their sisters-in-law apart, but for now they are a blur of statuesque blondness.) And was Hillary Clinton reminding us, in her own white outfit, of her dazzling debate performance? She listened impassively as Trump spoke. "We are not merely transferring power," he said. "We are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people." Here one could note that white is the color of mourning in another "people's republic": China.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, an impeccable dresser, chose colors of mourning, too: the demi-deuil of the Victorians, mauve and gray. Kellyanne Conway, on the other hand, flexed her new muscle as a Presidential "counsellor" by opting for what she called "Trump revolutionary wear": a military-style greatcoat by Gucci, in red, white, and blue (with a four-digit price tag). She wasn't beating on a drum, or not literally, though the Internet pointed out her resemblance to the Nutcracker. I give her credit for an unexpected sense of humor, and, perhaps, for a sly reference to her new job.

Nobody, nobody, cares about the appearance of male politicians, but perhaps it is worth mentioning that Dick Cheney thought a Stetson was appropriate (didn't he shoot someone on a ranch in Texas?); that Rick Perry was conspicuously chewing gum (remember what they said about Gerald Ford?); and that Bernie Sanders's anorak looked as distressed as his expression. Charles Schumer, meanwhile, made a fashion statement with red hipster glasses. He used them to read a moving letter from a Civil War soldier to his wife, but he was rudely interrupted by the crowd with impatient chants of "Trump!" In a sea of blue ties (Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Paul Ryan), the new President's red neckwear stood out; it was the color of the "American carnage" he vowed to stanch, and of "the blood of patriots" we hope he won't cause to shed, but also of the meat he was throwing to his supporters.

Even apart from the snow-colored coats (Jackie Evancho, who sang the national anthem off-key, was wearing one, too), the whiteness of the occasion was striking. I couldn't discern a single brown face in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which sang "America the Beautiful"; as a friend remarked of the homogeneity, "you don't even see that in Estonia the Beautiful." Nor was much color visible in the faces of the chanting crowds.

Which brings me to gracious, queenly Michelle Obama. Eight years ago, on a much colder morning, Mrs. Obama made her début as America's first African-American First Lady-and as a fashion muse-in a lemon-yellow ensemble by Isabel Toledo, the Cuban-born couturier whose career embodies the aspirations of so many immigrants. This morning, Michelle, unaged and unbowed, looked equally regal in a burgundy ensemble by another immigrant, Jason Wu. Wu is a Taiwan native who was raised in Vancouver; his husband may be grateful, down the road, for a Canadian passport.

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Inaugural Fashion: White Is a Color of Mourning

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At noon today, President Trump evoked a nation on the brink of an abyss-a failed state mired in rampant crime, poverty, and corruption. He made you want to reach for a flak jacket. So does anyone really care what his wife wore to his swearing-in?

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Rei Kawakubo is a Japanese avant-gardist of few words, and she changed women's fashion.

Does it really matter what one wears? I sometimes think my life might have been different if I had chosen the other wedding dress. I was getting married for the second time, and until the overcast morning of the ceremony I dithered between a bland écru frock appropriate to my age and station, which I wore that once and never again, and a spooky neo-Gothic masterpiece with a swagged bustle and unravelling seams in inky crêpe de laine, which I still possess: hope and experience.

The black dress-and other strange clothes in which I feel most like myself-was designed by Rei Kawakubo. In 1981, when she brought her first collection to Paris, Kawakubo was nearly forty and preëminent in Japan but largely unknown in the West. Mugler and Versace were the harbingers of a new moment: of a giddy, truculent materialism embodied, in different guises, by Margaret Thatcher, Madonna, Princess Di, Alexis Carrington, and Jane Fonda, and by legions of newly minted executives who wore block-and-tackle power suits to the office and spandex stirrup pants to the gym. These women were tough and glitzy and on the make without apologies, and so was fashion. Then, the following year, a collection that Kawakubo called "Destroy" hit the runway. It was modelled by a cadre of dishevelled vestals in livid war paint who stomped down the catwalk to the beating of a drum, wearing the bleak and ragged uniforms of a new order. Few if any spectators were left blasé, and some went home dumbstruck with rapture, while others lobbed back at the invader what they perceived as a blast of barbarity, tagging the look "Hiroshima's revenge." Kawakubo has never quite lived down (she has at times played up) that show of audacity, whose fallout is still being absorbed by fashion's young, yet which was much more Parisian than it seemed-a piece of shock theatre in the venerable tradition of "Ubu Roi" and "The Rite of Spring."

Kawakubo works under the label Comme des Garçons ("like some boys"), though she has never wanted to be like anyone. There are few women who have exerted more influence on the history of modern fashion, and the most obvious, Chanel, is in some respects her perfect foil: the racy courtesan who invented a uniform of irreproachable chic and the gnomic shaman whose anarchic chic is a reproach to uniformity. They both started from an egalitarian premise: that a woman should derive from her clothes the ease and confidence that a man does. But Chanel formulated a few simple and lucrative principles, from which she never wavered, that changed the way women wanted to dress, while Kawakubo, who reinvents the wheel-or tries to-every season, changed the way one thinks about what dress is.

Early Comme, as devotees winsomely call it, gave comfort to the wearer and discomfort to the beholder, particularly if he was an Average Joe with a fondness for spandex stirrup pants. Kawakubo's silhouette had nothing to do with packaging a woman's body for seduction. Nearly any biped with sufficient aplomb, one thought, might have modelled the clothes, though especially, perhaps, a self-possessed kangaroo, whose narrow shoulders and well-planted, large feet are a Comme des Garçons signature. The palette was monochrome, with a little ash mixed into the soot, and one hears it said that Kawakubo "invented" black-it is one of the "objective achievements" cited by the Harvard school of design when it gave her an Excellence in Design Award, in 2000. What she objectively achieved was the revival of black's cachet as the color of refusal.

The French Old Guard, needless to say, reviled Comme des Garçons, but it immediately became popular among women of the downtown persuasion. In Kawakubo's voluminous clothes one felt provocative yet mysterious and protected. They weren't sized, and they weren't conceived on a svelte fitting model, then inflated to a sixteen. Their cut had the rigor, if not the logic, of modernist architecture, but loose flaps, queer trains, and other sometimes perplexing extrusions encouraged a client of the house to improvise her own style of wearing them. Shop assistants showed one the ropes-literally. A friend of mine who included Kawakubo in a course on critical theory suggested that these "multiple open endings" were a tactic for liberating female dress from an "omniscient male narrator."

Conventional fashion, and particularly its advertising, is a narrative genre-historical romance at one end of the spectrum and science fiction at the other, with chick lit in between-and Kawakubo doesn't have a story line, insisting, not always plausibly, that she works in a vacuum of influence and a tradition of her own creation. "I never intended to start a revolution," she told me last winter. "I only came to Paris with the intention of showing what I thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everybody else's." Yet so many entitlements were challenged by the black regime of Comme des Garçons that it is hard not to see its commandant as a Red. The hegemony of the thin was one target, and the class system that governed fabrication was another. Kawakubo ennobled poor materials and humbled rich ones, which were sent off to be reëducated in the same work camp with elasticated synthetics and bonded polyester. She crumpled her silks like paper and baked them in the sun; boiled her woollens so that they looked nappy; faded and scrubbed her cottons; bled her dyes; and picked at her threadwork. One of the most mocked pieces from 1982 was a sublimely sorry-looking sweater cratered with holes that she called (one assumes with irony, though one can't be sure) "Comme des Garçons lace."

Kawakubo's most radical challenge to the canons of Western tailoring lay in her cutting. Couturiers before her had experimented with asymmetry in the one-shouldered gown or the diagonal lapel, though they were still working from a balanced pattern with a central axis-the spine. She warped her garments like the sheet of rubber that my high-school physics teacher used to illustrate the curvature of space, and she skewed their seams or closures so that the sides no longer matched. Just because a torso has two arms, she didn't see any reason that a jacket couldn't have none or three, of uneven length-amputated and reattached elsewhere on its body. Among the many mutants that she has engineered are a pair of trousers spliced to a skirt; the upper half of a morning coat with a tail of sleazy pink nylon edged in black lace; and her notorious "Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress" collection, of 1997-"Quasimodo" to its detractors-which proposed a series of fetching, body-hugging pieces in stretch gingham that were deformed in unsettling places (the back, belly, and shoulders) with bulbous tumors of down. The historian and curator Valerie Steele sees "a kind of violence-even a brutalism-to Rei's work that made most fashion of the time look innocuous and bourgeois, and from that moment an avant-garde split from the mainstream and hurtled off in its own direction." Steele was, she adds, "an instant convert."

Yet if Kawakubo consents to call her style "rebellious" and "aggressive" it is also intensely feminine in a bittersweet way. Her clothes suggest a kinship with a long line of fictional holy terrors: Pippi Longstocking, Cathy Earnshaw, Claudine-motherless tomboys who refused to master drawing-room manners and who, when forced into a dress, hiked up their petticoats and climbed a tree. Crushed frills are a leitmotif at Comme des Garçons, as are fraying ruffles; droopy ruffs; distressed pompoms; drab roses of wilted tulle, eyelet, crinoline, and broderie anglaise; and the round collars and polka dots that Kawakubo wore as a fauvish girl. In March, she showed a Fall-Winter collection whose theme was "The Broken Bride," which was almost universally admired. (I doubt that she was entirely happy with the reviews-when everyone understands her, she seems to get depressed.) The models wore whiteface and antique veils anchored by floral crowns. The ensembles, despite their sovereign refinement, had an eerily familiar air of desperate, last-minute indecision. They were trimmed with passementerie that might have been salvaged from a Victorian steamer trunk in which the finery of an old-fashioned maidenhood had been abandoned along with its illusions. The show, in its melancholy romance, captured the tension between vigor and fragility which dominates most modern women's lives, including Kawakubo's.

Tokyo was enjoying an unseasonable warm spell when I arrived at the beginning of February, and the famous allées of cherry trees in the Aoyama cemetery had been lured into bud. In the labyrinth of paths that fret the verdant tract of incalculably expensive real estate, which is sacred to Buddhists, Shintoists, Christians, and fashion photographers, I kept running into an old man and his two whippets, all three in Hermès coats. The dogs upset the great flocks of crows- karasu-that nest in the foliage or perch insolently on the tombs and whose bitter cawing fractures the peace. A karasu was said to be the messenger of the sun goddess, Amaterasu, Japan's mythical progenitress, from whom the imperial family claimed descent. Through the millennia, this brazen and potent female deity hasn't been much of a model to her countrywomen, particularly once they marry. Of the numerous characters for "wife," the most common, okusan, means "a figure of the inner realm."

Japanese girls still tend to sow their wild fashion oats before they settle down with a mate and disappear, if not into the shadows, into a Chanel suit. But Kawakubo started out making clothes, in the seventies, she said, for a woman "who is not swayed by what her husband thinks." (She was then deep into her black period, and her devotees were known in Tokyo as "the crows.") Two decades later, and shortly after her own wedding, to Adrian Joffe-a South African-born student of Asian culture ten years her junior, who is the president of Comme des Garçons International-she told an interviewer from Elle that "one's lifestyle should not be affected by the formality of marriage."

Kawakubo owns an apartment near the cemetery, in one of the modern towers on its perimeter, not far from her headquarters and the three stores she has in the smart Aoyama shopping district. The apartment's precise location is a secret (very few friends and none of the longtime employees whom I met had ever crossed its threshold), and she lives alone there with her twenty-year-old cat, the last of five. Joffe, who is based in Paris, sees her, he says, at least once a month, and between collections they take a week to travel-generally choosing somewhere off the fashion radar screen, like Yemen or Romania. He is a slight, intense man who speaks five languages, including fluent Japanese, and he acts as his wife's interpreter. Small talk-indeed any talk-is not Kawakubo's forte. She doesn't take invisibility to theological extremes, like Martin Margiela, fashion's Pynchon, who is, with some of his fellow-alumni of the Antwerp School (Ann Demeulemeester, Walter van Beirendonck, Olivier Theyskens, and Raf Simons), one of her acolytes, though she rarely poses for a photograph or gives an interview anymore, and, several years ago, she stopped taking a bow after her shows. From the beginning of her career, she has insisted that the only way to know her is "through my clothes." Her employees, including Joffe, treat her with a gingerly deference that seems to be a mixture of awe for her talent and forbearance with her moods.

Kawakubo is now sixty-two. She is the sole owner of a company with a dozen boutiques and some two hundred franchises on four continents, which manufactures twelve lines of clothing, and grosses about a hundred and fifty million dollars annually. But, despite her wealth, her only apparent major indulgence is a vintage car, a monster Mitsubishi from the nineteen-seventies, which attracts the kind of stares in Tokyo that her clothes attract in Houston. The recreations common to designers of her prestige, such as collecting villas or art and socializing with celebrities, don't appeal to her, and the atmosphere of her office "is more monastic than commercial," as the journalist Deyan Sudjic puts it in a monograph on her career that was published in 1990. But she recently learned to swim, and on her way to work she sometimes takes a detour through the Aoyama cemetery to feed the stray cats.

Before I met Kawakubo in Paris, Joffe and I spent a day in Berlin at a Comme des Garçons "guerrilla store," which then occupied the former bookshop of the Brecht Museum, on a seedy block in the eastern sector of the city. It is part of an experiment in alternative retailing (inconspicuous consumption) which the company launched in 2004. There are now seven such outposts, most in Northern Europe, in cities like Helsinki and Ljubljana. Each of the stores is an ephemeral installation that opens without fanfare and closes after a year. Their decorating budgets are less than the price of some handbags at Gucci and Prada, and original fixtures, including raw cinder block and peeling wallpaper, are left as they are found. Brecht might have approved the poetic clothes and the proletarian mise en scène, if not the insurrectionary conceit. "But the word 'guerrilla' as Rei understands it isn't political," Joffe says. "It refers to a small group of like-minded spirits at odds with the majority. She's fascinated by the Amish, for example, and the Orthodox Jews."

Part of Joffe's role is to help make his wife intelligible whether or not she is present, and an unease sometimes creeps into his tone: the anxiety of a parent who resents the injustice yet accepts the inevitability of having to subject an antisocial prodigy to a school interview. "Are you scared of her?" I asked him bluntly over a Wiener schnitzel at the Café Einstein. "No," he said, "but she can be dictatorial, and I'm sometimes scared of the way she might treat people." Kawakubo treated me with a courtly if reticent politesse, and our conversations weren't unlike a tea ceremony: exquisitely strained. She is a tiny woman with taut cheekbones, a graying pageboy, and an aura of severity. When we were introduced in her showroom, last January, she was wearing a pair of trousers most easily described as a hybrid of a dhoti and a jodhpur, with a trim cardigan and a corsage of safety pins. Though she cultivates a reputation for being both timid and intimidating, some of her friends-among them Carla Sozzani, the Milanese retailer and gallerist, and Azzedine Alaïa, the couturier-assured me that, in private, Kawakubo can be a charming pal, congenial and even "hysterically funny." (I duly asked her what she laughs at, and she answered deadpan, "People falling down.") She patiently entertained the speculations with which I tried to prime her, and allowed that some of them "might be true." "But I'm very grateful that you haven't asked me about my 'creative process,' " she said, as I was leaving one afternoon. "I couldn't explain it to you. And, even if I could, why would I want to? Are there people who really wish to explain themselves?" [cartoon id="a10575"]

Kawakubo was born in Tokyo in 1942. She was the oldest of her parents' three children and their only daughter. (One of her brothers works as a director in the commercial department of Comme des Garçons, and the staff refers to him as Mister, to differentiate the two siblings in conversation, because there can be only one Kawakubo-san.) Their father was an administrator at Keio University, a prestigious institution founded by the great Meiji educator and reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi, a champion of Western culture and, according to Kawakubo, of women's rights. She admires Yukichi as an "enlightened man," but she has never belonged to a movement, followed a religion, subscribed to an ideology, or worshipped a hero, "because for me belief means that you have to depend on somebody."

Sudjic relates a few anodyne details about Kawakubo's girlhood (that she bunched her socks down as a revolt against the conformity of her school uniform, for example). Her home was "comfortable," he writes, and her family "a close one," and she told me that her mother made all the clothes. The trauma of war and the privations that Japan suffered in its aftermath didn't, she thought, have an appreciable effect on her. Yet however ordinary she felt her upbringing to be ("You think I'm not normal because you're looking at the clothes," she said to me somewhat plaintively when we met in Tokyo. "But I am. Can't rational people create mad work?"), her biography neglects to mention that she grew up with divorced parents. Her mother was trained as an English teacher-Kawakubo understands and speaks the language better than she lets on-and when the children were of a certain age she wanted to work. Her husband disapproved, and for almost all Japanese wives of that class and era his word would have been law. Kawakubo's mother left him, however, and got a job in a high school. "She was unlike other mothers," Kawakubo says. "I always felt like an outsider." But she also had a model of defiance and autonomy.

In 1960, Kawakubo enrolled in her father's university and took a degree in "the history of aesthetics," a major that included the study of Asian and Western art. In 1964, the year she graduated, Japan hosted the Olympics. "The postwar period of poverty, humiliation, and, until 1952, Allied occupation was finally over, and the boom years of the economic miracle had begun," Ian Buruma writes in "Inventing Japan." Kawakubo's generation discovered-and in varying degrees embraced-the counterculture of the sixties. At twenty-two, with a nod toward her mother's act of lèse-majesté, she left home "without telling my parents where I was going or what I was doing," and moved into a shared apartment in Harajuku, which was Tokyo's East Village and is still a mildly louche neighborhood of clubs and boutiques where pierced teens (most of them home by dinnertime) hang out wearing outré street fashions and trying to look ghetto. Kawakubo was never a druggie or a rebel, she says, "though in my head I liked the bohemian life style." On the other hand, she went to college with "a lot of rich people-that's who goes to élite institutions, and they are generally conservative." She found the solidity of their lives appealing, and she considers herself to have a dual character: the right half "likes tradition and history," the left "wants to break the rules." Nearly every statement Kawakubo makes about herself is hedged or negated by a contradiction, and she resists being defined even by her own words. The desire to be unique and the sense of isolation that the feeling generates are a predicament common to artistic people. What makes Kawakubo's clothes so attractive to them is precisely her genius for wrapping up the paradoxes of being a misfit and a cipher in something to wear that is magically misfitting.

Tokyo in the sixties was not yet the world's capital of luxury consumerism. Many women still made their own clothes or patronized a local tailor, and the best-known Japanese couturier, Hanae Mori, worked in a decorous Parisian mode. Kawakubo wasn't thinking of a fashion career: her only vocation was for a life of self-sufficiency She found a job "at the bottom of the ladder" in the advertising department of Asahi Kasei, a textile manufacturer. Her boss was sympathetic to her ambitions. He accepted her unusual refusal to wear the standard uniform of an office girl, and he allowed her some modest creative freedom in helping to scout props and costumes for photo shoots. After three years, one of her older colleagues, Atsuko Kozasu, who later became an influential fashion journalist and an early booster of Comme des Garçons, encouraged Kawakubo to go freelance as a stylist. When she couldn't find clothes suitable for her assignments, she began to design them, and she often says that she's grateful to have skipped fashion school or an apprenticeship because, in the end, even if she can't sew or cut a pattern, she had no preconceptions to unlearn, and no master to outgrow.

By 1969, Kawakubo's work as a stylist had become a sideline that helped finance the production of the youthful sportswear that she sold through trend-setting shops like Belle Boudoir, in the Ginza, whose communal fitting room-"just like a London boutique"-impressed her. She rented office space in a graphic-arts studio and hired a few assistants. Tsubomi Tanaka, who is Comme des Garçons' chief of production, has been with her almost from the beginning. Tanaka was then a country girl who had left home to work in a Harajuku shop and, she says, "do my own thing," and she first noticed Kawakubo on the street. "Even in those days, she had an aura," Tanaka says, "and I asked a friend if she knew her name, because I wanted to meet her."

Sudjic writes, "Kawakubo's experiences as a stylist had taught her the importance of creating a coherent identity"-a philosophy of design that is followed as strictly in the company's Christmas cards as it is in the flagship stores. But the styling of that signature is a collaborative effort that demands an almost cultish attunement among the participants, and it is one of the paradoxes of Comme des Garçons that a designer obsessed with singularity and an entrepreneur allergic to beholdenness have spun such an elaborate web of dependence. In the workplace, Kawakubo's laconic detachment-the refusal to explain herself-forces her employees, particularly the pattern cutters, to look inward, rather than to her, for a revelation of the all-important "something new." Tanaka says, "The work is very hard, and I have to delve deep into my own understanding because her words are so few. But there's always some give to the tautness. And I'm still moved by the collections. That's why I've been here for so long." [cartoon id="a9785"]

Comme des Garçons' chief patterner, Yoneko Kikuchi, a thirty-year veteran of the firm, describes the arduous, if not mildly perverse, esoteric groping in the dark through which a collection comes into focus. It begins with a vision, or perhaps just an intuition, about a key garment that Kawakubo hints at with a sort of koan. She gives the patterners a set of clues that might take the form of a scribble, a crumpled piece of paper, or an enigmatic phrase such as "inside-out pillowcase," which they translate, as best they can, into a muslin-the three-dimensional blueprint of a garment. Their first drafts are inevitably too concrete. "She always asks us to break down the literalness," Kikuchi says. The quest proceeds behind closed doors, like a papal election, and successive meditations on the koan produce more or less adequate results. The staff calls the process by a deceptively playful English word, "catchball," though as the deadline for a collection approaches, and Kawakubo is still dissatisfied, the "anguish and anger" mount in the cutting room. "We all want to please her," Kikuchi explains, "and it's sometimes hard for patterners who have come from other companies, because they just want you to tell them how wide the collar is supposed to be. But you can't teach people to let go, and some end up leaving." ("They make it sound more interesting than it is," Kawakubo says, dryly. "The ideas aren't as abstract as they used to be.")

The business flourished, and was incorporated in 1973. By 1980, Comme des Garçons had a hundred and fifty franchised shops across Japan, eighty employees, and annual revenues of thirty million dollars. Fans of the house had none of the designer's scruples about hero worship: they went on camping weekends together organized by the franchisees, and there was talk of a Comme des Garçons restaurant where the faithful could meet. The clothes they loved were inspired by the loose and rustic garb of Japanese fishermen and peasants. When I asked Kawakubo what those early designs looked like (she hasn't kept many pictures in her archives), she answered after a long, perhaps embarrassed, pause, "Denim apron skirt. Very popular. I made different versions of it." Their chicest detail may have been the Comme des Garçons label, typeset in a font created by Kawakubo, with a star for the cedilla, which hasn't changed. It isn't obvious how she made her evolutionary leap, but it occurred in the early eighties, when she abandoned representational fashion and introduced the notion of clothing as wearable abstraction.

Most people naturally assume that Comme des Garçons is not just a logo but a slogan, and when Kawakubo was still giving interviews she compared her work with menswear, in its ideals of comfort and discretion, although she has denied that there was any message to the three words: she had just liked their French lilt. They mean what they mean, however, and there are few women who personify the ideals of seventies feminism with greater fidelity. The phrase comes, with a slight tweak, from the refrain of a pop song, by Françoise Hardy, in which a wistful teen-age girl enviously watches happy couples walking "hand in hand" and wonders if the day will come when-" comme les garçons et les filles de mon age "-she will find someone to love her. One may have such yearnings at any age, and Kawakubo was into her thirties when she met the love of her youth, Yohji Yamamoto. There was something pharaonic about their glamour as a couple, that of two regal and feline siblings with a priestly aura, and they shared the regency of a new generation in Japanese design. Both are alumni of Keio University (Yamamoto was two years behind her) and children of enterprising single mothers-his a widow who owned a dress shop. Yet, as the eloquent idiosyncrasy of their work suggests, a match between equals is rarely a balanced pattern whose cuts and edges align.

Like Kawakubo, Yamamoto is an anomaly in the fashion world on a number of counts, his proclivities among them. He married young and fathered two children. A different union produced a third child six years ago. For some years in between, he and Kawakubo were "travelling companions," as Kiyokazu Washida coyly puts it in an essay he contributed to Yamamoto's book, "Talking to Myself," a sumptuous pictorial chronicle of the designer's career which was published in 2002. Malcolm McLaren remembers Kawakubo and Yamamoto as a petite, stylish couple of "excellent customers" (he didn't yet know they were designers) who, in the seventies, turned up at Sex, the mother of all guerrilla shops, an outpost of seditionary music and fashion that he and his partner, Vivienne Westwood, had opened at World's End, in London. (Decades later, Westwood told Kawakubo that she considered her a "punk at heart.") They made their Paris débuts the same year, and were invariably linked, or lumped, together as part of an emerging Tokyo school that was challenging the conventions of Western couture, and of which Issey Miyake was the doyen. Kawakubo bridled at the group portraits. "I'm not very happy to be classified as another Japanese designer," she told Women's Wear Daily in 1983. "There is no one characteristic that all Japanese designers have."

Yamamoto was unavailable for an interview, but his friend and associate Irène Silvagni, a former fashion journalist, speaks of "the enormous competition between Rei and Yohji that she, I think, needed and thrived on." As far as Silvagni knows, they never collaborated, but "they both wanted to break the rules, and Yohji likes to say that 'perfection is the devil,' which I think is true for Rei. Japanese temples were always left unfinished for that reason." It is her perception that "they admire each other deeply, but there's a lot of baggage between them." She referred me to the baggage depot at the end of "Talking to Myself," in which Yamamoto sets down some fragmentary aperçus on a variety of existential subjects, including alcohol, gambling, insomnia, and women. "I'm always assuming that if she's my girlfriend she won't create a scandal," he writes of a nameless consort. "I'm sure of this even if it's unfounded."

The relationship ended in the early nineties. When a childless single woman nearing fifty suddenly starts to do her best work, she often has a broken heart. Joffe had joined Comme des Garçons in 1987, and on July 4, 1992, he and Kawakubo were married at the city hall in Paris. The bride wore a black skirt and a plain white shirt. That winter, she showed a hauntingly lovely collection that is still a favorite. It was composed of ethereal chiffon layers yoked to cone-shaped knitted turtlenecks that masked the face from the nose down, worn over flowing shifts with sorcerer's sleeves. Their color was nightshade, and their inspiration the myth of Lilith-a female demon of Jewish folklore, whom God created of "filth and sediment" when Adam, like the girl in the Hardy song, complained that he was the only creature on the planet without a mate. In Robert Graves's version, Adam and his first wife "never found peace together," because she rebelled at "the recumbent posture he demanded." When he "tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage . . . rose into the air and left him." So much for girlfriends who don't create scandals. [cartoon id="a10515"]

Lilith's heretical divorce was a juncture for Kawakubo, too. She was tiring of black (but she tires of anything once it catches on, and being avant-garde, she said recently, has become a cliché). She began to play with the opulent fabrics she had once disdained: damask, brocade, and velvet; with brilliant, sometimes lurid colors; and even with the staples of drag and bimbohood-sheer lingerie (worn with winkle pickers) and campy bustiers (layered over bulky topcoats). For commercial reasons, she says, she started sizing the clothes and narrowing the gap between dress and body. She edited the guest lists for her shows to a sympathetic coterie of editors and buyers, in part, as Amy Spindler wrote in the Times, because "multiplying the attendance figures . . . only serves to increase the number of people who don't get it." But Spindler also noted that Kawakubo "typically throws a bone to those who still believe clothes are for wearing outside fashion focus groups without being gawked at." Her easier-to-wear subsidiary lines, particularly Robe de Chambre (now called Comme des Garçons Comme des Garçons)-a microcosm of her own wardrobe-streamline the runway concepts to reach a broader public. "I'm not an artist, I'm a businesswoman," Kawakubo says. "Well, maybe an artist/businesswoman."

Despite the relative accessibility of "The Broken Bride," Kawakubo denies vehemently that she has mellowed ("I am still as aggressive as I've always been"), and every few years she reasserts her militance by exploding another bomb on the Paris stage. In 1995, the presentation of her menswear collection, which included a series of baggy striped pajamas reminiscent to some critics of the prison uniforms at Auschwitz, happened to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the camp's liberation. Kawakubo apologized for any offense she might, unintentionally, have given, and Jewish organizations who reviewed the videos were satisfied that no sacrilege had been committed. But she was perfectly conscious of the storm she conjured two seasons later with "Dress Meets Body." (Her own staff loved the sexy and salable silhouette, but there were worries about its bulges, and Kawakubo ultimately decided to make the troubling wads removable, though she wore them herself, and adapted them as costumes for a dance by Merce Cunningham. On perfect bodies in motion, they transcend their morbidity.) The collection was inspired, Joffe says, "by Rei's anger at seeing a Gap window filled with banal black clothes." Kawakubo concedes, with an ambiguous grimace that might just be a grin, "I may have been especially angry at the time, but I'm more or less always angry anyway."

Early one morning in Paris, the cobblestones of the Place Vendôme were varnished by a drizzle, and a row of limousines idled in front of the Ritz, waiting for clients in town for the menswear shows. The couture had just finished, and, in the terribly chic restaurants where fashion people eat their tiny portions of mediocre food, they were complaining that the couture was finished. Only eight designers had bothered to mount a show, and there was a sense that a once festive, feudal tournament of virtuosity had become a Renaissance fair with demonstrations of spinning and horseshoeing in period costume. But no one had informed Armani, a couture débutant. In Le Figaro, he discoursed with a quaint gravity on les tendances de la mode and affirmed his belief in "simplified lines that are easy to understand," because "true success means pleasing everyone"-a succinct résumé of everything in fashion that Kawakubo doesn't stand for, in both senses.

Across the square, in a narrow courtyard adjacent to the showroom of Comme des Garçons, the company's Paris staff, joined by a contingent from the Aoyama headquarters, who were groggy with jet lag, assembled for the morning salutation-a monastic ritual of solidarity performed daily in Tokyo. They formed a circle, shivering a little, and waited in silence for Kawakubo. Her protégé Junya Watanabe, who has a wrestler's physique and a cherub's face, squeezed in near Mister, who looked, in his business suit, a little like the hired mourner at a rocker's funeral. Joffe was surprised at his wife's delay ("She's a stickler for punctuality"), but she arrived at her habitual gait-the anxious scuttle of a sparrow with a broken wing-and took her place.

Kawakubo was sporting her favorite accessory: a dour expression. A collection, she says, is never not "an exercise in suffering," and she "starts from zero every time," destitute of confidence. It is ironic to her, she said at our last meeting in Tokyo, that a career she undertook "with one objective: to be free as a woman," has become a Spartan life of self-imposed servitude. But sympathy and compliments both annoy her, perhaps because they rub salt into the incurable and necessary wound of her discontent. The only consolation she can imagine "is an hour to spend with animals."

When she wants to, however, Kawakubo smiles through her clothes. That morning, she had chosen a black sweater strategically appliquéd with two white circles and a triangle that one could read either as a face or two breasts and a pubis, and which was meant as an homage to Rudi Gernreich's bikini and its muse, Peggy Moffitt. On her way to the rehearsal of her menswear defile, Kawakubo threw on one of her cheeky biker jackets from Spring, 2005: a crudely sutured leather blouson bred to an unbroken-in catcher's mitt, then taught some charm by a vintage couture bolero with a standaway collar. "Balenciaga on steroids," as an assistant put it.

Cristobal Balenciaga, who died in 1972, was a chivalric holdout from a courtlier age whose passing he lamented. If anyone "invented" black, he did. The ecclesiastic lines of his sculptural couture liberated women from the tyranny of the wasp-waisted New Look, and later from the ruthlessness of the miniskirt. His clients were the kind of grandes bourgeoises at whom Parisian spectacles of shock theatre have always been aimed, but Balenciaga himself might have recognized Kawakubo as a kindred spirit. They are both idealists whose work devoutly affirms that it matters what one wears-something pure in its distinction-and in that sense they have a common ancestor. He was an aging and spindly Spanish samurai who, like Kawakubo in her faintly obscene trompe-l'oeil bikini, was never afraid to cut an absurd yet heroic figure in a cynical world: the ridiculous made sublime.♦

Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000. She is the author of "Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller."
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Does it really matter what one wears? I sometimes think my life might have been different if I had chosen the other wedding dress.

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Beauty always helps, but it can get you only so far. Funnily enough, this is as true of modelling as it is of everything else in life. Of the endless gorgeous young women in the agency rank and file at any one time, only one or two will capture the imagination of the public, and so transform making a living into making a fortune. A supermodel is more than just a pretty face. Pretty faces are two a penny, after all; supermodels are worth their weight in gold.

Every supermodel gets the era it deserves

What's more, sometimes they reflect those attitudes before we know they even exist. Fashion is often about the expression of desires as yet acknowledged. (Just ask Miuccia Prada, whose clothes derive their power from her ability to get inside the contemporary female psyche, and make pieces that you didn't know you wanted and yet realise you very, very much do, so that it feels like a sartorial deja vu.) Supermodels, as the faces of fashion, are part of that.

This is why, far from being carried to fame on a popular vote, many supermodels appear to crash-land in our culture; it is only later that we begin to understand how we wished them into being. Writing in the New York Times about Twiggy's arrival in New York in 1967, Susan Cheever says that she was "the negative image of everything a woman was supposed to look like. She was so skinny it was hard to tell she was a woman at all. Instead of standing as if she were balancing a book on her head, she was knock-knee and coltishly awkward. She was everything unfeminine in a way that seemed, mysteriously, totally girlish. The power of her appeal redefined femininity. Though she was only a 91lb teenager, she cast a gargantuan shadow over the image of the American housewife - a lovable species that would soon become extinct." (Fast-forward 26 years to 1993, and note the similarity to how Corinne Day's first Vogue shoots with a 19-year-old Kate Moss were received.)

In the 1980s, between Twiggy and Moss, came the "Supers" themselves. Naomi, Cindy, Linda, Christy and Tatjana were at the height of their fame in 1990, when they appeared together on the cover of Vogue and in the video for George Michael's Freedom. Each of the Supers was a personality in her own right: like the Spice Girls later on, their group dynamic emphasised the individual character of each. The Supers were people-as-brands, before the rest of us understood what that meant. Cindy Crawford, as luck would have it, was born with the perfect brand name for a supermodel, with the double Cs referencing Coco Chanel (fashion) and Coca-Cola (Americana) and the ideal yin-yang balance of the doll-like first name with the business-like surname. Only now, 25 years later, are we living in the future the Supers foretold. Individual brand-building has become part of everyday life, from the social media personalities of ordinary people up to the level of the Kardashians.

The enduring appeal of Moss represents how her generation have rejected the traditional trajectory of ageing

There are conduits between the zeitgeist and its woman. As Hallett points out, it is no coincidence that the supermodel phenomenon took off in the 1980s, the first period in which professional hair and makeup artists collaborated on the image-making, rather than models doing their own, "so those talents and visions came together with these great individual beauties, to create something extraordinary". And celebrity itself generates a snowball effect: the more we feel we know someone, the more we care about them. Creative director Robin Derrick points out that we are hardwired to feel we "know" a face when it becomes familiar. So when we see the same model a thousand times in magazines and on billboards, "we start to feel connected to her". Derrick worked with Moss many times during the 17 years he spent at British Vogue, and points out that, "Kate has this incredible back story. This is a girl who went out with Johnny Depp, who was painted by Lucian Freud. She has a life that links all these iconic people of our age - and at the same time, she is always Kate. She has that thing that great models have, where they walk on to any set, with any photographer, and turn into themselves."

There has not, arguably, been a bona fide supermodel to emerge since Moss. There was a moment when Gisele, with her extraordinary combination of bouncing breasts and needle-thin legs, encapsulated something about the increasing impossibility of the aspirational female form. Lara Stone, with her gapped teeth and womanly curves, was seized upon for a few seasons by a fashion industry which, having filled the catwalks with an identikit army of stick-thin beauties, found itself to be craving a hit of reality. And at the height of the yummy mummy cult of the noughties, there came a point at which the young women who were making Vogue covers were eclipsed for glamour and celebrity by an obsession with semi-retired models such as Elle Macpherson and Claudia Schiffer, who enjoyed a renaissance of their fame as icons of school-run chic, until the zeitgeist moved on and the paparazzi melted from the school gates.

Recently the feisty London-born Jourdan Dunn - our cover star and interviewee, see right - has emerged as a star of the catwalk, with over 100,000 followers on Twitter and the healthy appetite for an online spat. But 2013's hottest contender, Cara Delevingne, has not only scored Vogue covers and advertising campaigns, but - crucially - captured the imagination of the world beyond fashion. She has close to a million Twitter followers; if she gets a new tattoo, the tabloids have a field day. At a time when we are governed by Etonians and when the Duchess of Cambridge has given our royal family a more fashionable tint than at any time since the 1980s, Delevingne is an aristocrat. She is 21, and applies the typical attitude of her generation to social media - sharing holiday snaps on Instagram, conducting friendships on Twitter - to a life lived side-of-stage at Glastonbury and on fashion designers' yachts, creating a world simultaneously glamorous and accessible.

But what makes Cara compelling - what, arguably, makes her a supermodel - is not how much she reflects the world around her, but how she challenges it. On any gossip website you will find an almost endless roll call of female celebrities whose aesthetic seems to derive from pornography. They are blank of expression, waxed of all texture. The raison d'être of their beach holidays is not to have fun but to be photographed looking pretty. And into this mix steps Delevingne, with the thick, bushy eyebrows that are her most recognisable feature, the goofy faces that are her trademark, and her tendency to be photographed guffawing or dancing on tables. "She's young, she's got money, she's not scared," is how Hallett puts it. "People are attracted to that idea of abandonment." If this is where our culture is going next, then let me be the first to say it: thank goodness for supermodels.

"I don't think before I tweet," Dunn tells me from beneath her wide-brimmed cap. "I say what's on my mind." We're in a room within a room, an air-conditioned pod inside the offices of her agents, Storm, whose walls are papered with model cards. A thousand symmetrical faces are watching us. "Sometimes when I tweet, my agency have been on the phone saying, 'Jourdan, delete it!'" And does she? "Nah! I don't listen. It's already out there." She understands more about the way we talk now, about the digital imprint of a deleted comment, than her older colleagues. And it's partly because of this and partly because of the things she says, that people know not just her face, but her name.

"I want to talk about what goes on. A lot of people are scared to speak up. People think it's all glamorous and good and that all models get treated the same, but there is still a lot of BS that happens. I speak up."

Fashion is beautiful and exciting and inspiring, Dunn's Twitter and Instagram suggests, but while fashion changes with the seasons many of its attitudes appear stuck. It looks forward with one eye, while closing the other. Dunn has been vocal about this throughout her career. Particularly about what she thinks of the lack of black faces in the industry.

With the fashion show tweet, she says, "I wanted to make a point, but not a dig. Girls get cancelled last minute all the time, but at least it wasn't because of my skin tone. Which I often get in Paris."

Dunn takes a swig of Coca-Cola. "I feel like the people who should be talking about it, and who can make a difference, aren't. All I can do is talk. The people higher than me - the stylists, the designers, the casting directors - they're the ones with the power to change this. That's where the conversation needs to happen - at big-dog level. The people who control the industry. They say if you have a black face on a magazine cover it won't sell, but there's no real evidence for that. It's lazy. You always hear 'there aren't enough black models', which is BS. It's all about these dead excuses."

Video shot by photographer Mary McCartney on set at The Guardian's Jourdan Dunn fashion shoot

Dunn has little time for industry excuses. She has little time for anything, actually, she says. She works in New York (a city she has only just started to enjoy), but calls London home. She lives with her three-year-old son, Riley; her career was just taking off when, at Heathrow on the way to a family holiday, she discovered she was pregnant. "I was thinking about Mum's reaction, my job, letting people down. Then I stopped and thought: what do I want? I knew I had to make it work. If the career fell down, then so be it. I can't live for other people."

But she's happy now. Happy with her son (she's in talks to design a line of "downtown, street kidswear") and with herself. It's taken a while. Growing up she suffered panic attacks. "I was self-conscious of being so lanky, of being me. I'd keep my head down, make excuses not to go out. I'd look in the mirror and hate myself. I thought I was disgusting. I cried constantly from 11 to 16." It's difficult to imagine how women who are paid for their beauty took time to grow into it. It's good to be reminded of how the qualities we prize are arbitrary, extremes. "Modelling helped, funnily enough.

I was always told I should be a model because of my height and my weight, but those were the things I hated most about myself. Modelling made me embrace it - see these things as positives. Now I'm used to people talking about me. You go to a shoot and they look at you for a long time, saying things like, 'I don't like her hair.' I'm just thinking 'lunch'."

Food is important to Jourdan Dunn. She hosts a cooking show on Jay Z's Life &Times digital TV channel. It's meant to combat the idea that models don't eat. Instead it's a screamy, entertaining race through recipes, starring Dunn's best friends, fellow models Karlie Kloss and Cara Delevingne. "When I started modelling, I hated those fake relationships you see people have in the industry - I wanted something real. I met Cara, this little girl, rapping on a beach. I could relate to her. It was a relief, because I hate the 'kiss this person, picture with that person' thing. When I complained, my mum explained you have to kiss arse before you can kick it."

Delevingne, 21, is of the same generation as Dunn, girls who aren't afraid to speak out on Twitter, to shape their own brand through drunken photos taken by friends and unedited thoughts that bring their fans closer. "With social media everything has changed," agrees Dunn. "Some clients book models from their follower numbers now, which makes sense. It's taken over. It's great, especially for models who want to be listened to. When Kate etc started you just saw them, you didn't hear them. You didn't get a sense of who they were. Now models feel more real, relatable." She swallows a small burp, excusing herself.

Outside, a woman waits with her teenage daughter, a tall, blonde, aspiring model, who exclaims when she sees Dunn through the glass. "Shh!" the mother says. Opposite me, finishing her Coke, Dunn is looking for the right words. What she wants to say. Her message. "It's important, I think... It's important to have a voice."

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From Twiggy to Cara Delevingne: 25 years of supermodels

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Beauty always helps, but it can get you only so far. Funnily enough, this is as true of modelling as it is of everything else in life. Of the endless gorgeous young women in the agency rank and file at any one time, only one or two will capture the imagination of the public, and so transform making a living into making a fortune.

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Top 10 Hottest Supermodels of the 1980s Subscribe http://goo.gl/Q2kKrD In the 80s these incredibly beautiful women set the stage for the world of supermodels and blew everyone away. WatchMojo picks the ten most memorable and sexy supermodels of the eighties. List Entries and Rank: #10. Frederique van der Wal #9.