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Dior’s Blockbuster

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Dior is one of the few shows where the models walk the way people imagine
fashion models walk—all attitude, like Derek Zoolander. I
watched with surprise as the big name girls, usually so cool on the
catwalk, strutted and pranced. Each one put her own bit of flair into
her final pose for the photogs—a coquettish popped shoulder here, an
arm sliding from hip to thigh there…

Shoes in Lincoln Square

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A Shoe In

The Dressing Room Shoes (4657 N. Lincoln Ave.; 773-878-7400, thedressingroomchicago.com), the recently opened specialty outpost from the same owners of three-year-old Lincoln Square shop The Dressing Room, is located just down the street from its sister store and carries both affordable and swanky kicks. On the casual side, find mom-friendly Crocs and adorable lace-up rain boots from Dav ($80.50), as well as…

Who’s Ready for Paris Fashion Week?

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If you’re like me and have been following fashion weeks in London and Milan on the Web, well, it’s been an interesting juxtaposition, hasn’t it? Extravagant fashion shows happening at the same time as political drama and a tanking economy.

As headlines told of collapse on Wall Street, the models in Milan were toppling, too—because the shoes were so high and monstrously large. Anyway, now we’re in Paris, and things seem to be…

Adidas Arrives at Water Tower

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Need a Kick?

Sometimes adidas (845 N. Michigan Ave., 4th fl.; 312-867-1640) actually makes shoes for athletes. Whereas the adidas Originals store on Rush Street stocks the brand’s fashion and retro heritage shoes, the new Water Tower store is the first athletic-shoe shop for the brand in the Midwest, carrying sports gear and shoes for tennis, running, basketball, soccer, and golf. The real draw is…

It’s Over: Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Vera Wang, Zac Posen, and more

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The song "I Want Candy" was used on a handful of runways this season, most often in the 80s incarnation by the group Bow Wow Wow. I’m sure it’s popular because it’s upbeat and girly, but the fact that designers are repeatedly using a song released more than 20 years ago (and was used quite recently, and to memorable effect in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette) seems indicative of the biggest problem at the New York shows: a please-everyone mentality…

A New Stop for Denim

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Tracing Jeaneology

The Lincoln Park shop DNA 2050 (2122 N. Halsted St.; 773-525-8004) stocks a mix of established and emerging brands for men and women in casual and dressy styles. Find pajama-soft tops from Sportmax Code, separates from Just Cavalli, dresses from Bread and Butter, among others. For women, we loved the William Rast pea coat ($409), a silk chiffon halter dress ($399) from Julie Haus, and a yellow cashmere sweater from Knitwit ($145). For men, there is a mix of preppy, work-appropriate attire such as…

Doo.Ri, Devi Kroell, and Anna Sui

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Fashion week is strange. Months and months of work go into a show that happens once and lasts 15 minutes. (After Calvin Klein, I saw some PR girls dramatically collapsing into each other, saying, “It’s over, it’s really over.”). Seeing celebrities starts to feel quite natural, and the fashion people you see every day start to feel like family—albeit a strange sort of family that follows you around every day but rarely speaks to you…

A Man Walks into a Noir

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Poor old Hamlet may not have been the picture of stability, but then again, neither was crime-fiction writer Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled hero Sam Spade. Put them together, and you’ve got one tongue-twister of a nod toward the dark and the stormy: Dashiell Hamlet, a new play cowritten by the 84-year-old stage and screen vet…

Brian Reyes, Michael Kors, Malo, Richard Chai, and the Must-Have Item for Spring

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Sitting in close proximity with strangers on bleachers for several
hours a day, you overhear things while waiting for a show to start.
Yesterday, I overheard one retailer, who was perhaps in her 50s,
talking about how fashion has changed so much since she began in the
business. "There just isn’t that one defining look of the season that
you have to have now," she said…