International Players

As the street style scene grows more event-centred and less an expression of creative and stylish people going about their daily lives, the ensembles we see outside of international fashion weeks have also become more monotonous, less inventive, and just another way for the wealthy elite to show off what their money and influence can buy/borrow.

Yawn.

More and more, I look to farther, less-touched-by-Anna-Dello-Russo locales for street style inspiration. Forget New York, Paris, Milan. I’m more interested in how fashion editors from Australia, Japan, and South Korea choose to express themselves with their clothes. With recent fashion weeks taking place in Seoul, Tokyo, and now Sydney, I was excited to feast my eyes on outfits that haven’t already been published in the Trend Report section of Vogue, or taken straight off the runways of Milan.

Australian Fashion Week

Seoul Fashion Week

Tokyo Fashion Week

Which city was your favourite?

Images via style.com and Fucking Young!

Symmetry

 

I just can’t get into working out. Sure, being trim and toned is nice. I like the idea of putting in work to better my body and push myself to become stronger, but the execution leaves me cold. Or rather, sweaty and cranky and as red as an heirloom tomato.

What’s much easier to get behind, though, is wearing clothes designed for working out. This was something I didn’t really understand until maybe a year ago. Being brought up in a family of dorks, I viewed the athletics and everything related to it with complete derision. So I missed out on the luxury of wearing clothes made from fabrics that breathe when I’m hot and insulate when I’m cold. My childhood was sweaty, ok?

These adidas track pants do exactly that, and since purchasing them it has been extremely difficult not to wear them everyday. I can no longer say with confidence that skinny jeans are comfy. Just last week alone, I wore these three times. Because they’re a simple black and white, they go with pretty much anything. It’s a very sporty look, no doubt, and incorporating them into your daily wardrobe can be challenging at first. Unlike the slouchy black and white trousers from the high street that’s merely inspired by activewear, this is the shit real athletes who play real sports wear. Or, like, high school boys.

These are a few of my favourite things

Fashion week officially starts today in Toronto. Look forward to lots of runway and personal style updates here and on our Instagram in the coming days! Lucky for me I also get to spend the next 4 nights pacing frantically in my closet trying to figure out what shade of white goes with which kicks. Oy vey.

In the meantime, I give you some of my favourite street style looks from the last month in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, which also serve as fantastic inspiration for my sartorial game plan for the week. Of course, unlike many of these international editors and socialites, I don’t exactly have at my disposal the latest in designer RTW pieces. But that’s ok. Sometimes all it takes to look good and dress interesting is a closet of rare vintage finds, a badass shoe collection, and heaps of creativity.

Margarita

Every once in a while, a street style unicorn emerges from the sea of Birkin bags, Jimmy Choo shoes, and H2T Prada that’s become known as the circus outside of Fashion Month runway shows. Her outfits are perhaps a bit more left-field, less refined, at times eccentric, boyish, but always memorable. She isn’t too concerned with wearing big name designers but would rather show love to less established, up-and-coming talents like Nasir Mazhar and Marques’Almeida. She gravitates toward unusual accessories like tomato red vinyl bucket hats , and isn’t afraid to try out unexpected combinations like Nike gym socks with strappy sandals (before everyone else started doing it obviously).

Not to be a hater but scoping out the street style scene during Fashion Month gets super boring after the 5th or 6th slide. A mixed print here, a bratty graphic tee there, at least three kinds of handbags in the shape of a fruit/body part, plus countless arm parties scattered throughout and I’m ready to throw in the towel. How thankful I am for women like Margarita Zubatova who bring a totally nonchalant vibe to the contrived polish of fashion week peacocking. Like the Rei Kawakubo faithfuls, the Emmanuel Alts, and the Rick Owens loyalists, women like Margarita have a powerful fashion compass, their sense of personal style outweighing even the most ubiquitous trends.

Margarita takes her self-assured style vision and applies it to her work as a freelance stylist and as a buyer at the Kuznetsky Most 20 concept store based in Moscow. Information regarding her career is hard to come by on English-speaking Google but I was delighted to find some of her lookbooks and editorials, including one she styled for ZDDZ’s debut collection as part of September’s VFiles’ Made for Fashion show. She is also principle stylist for Ukrainian designer and Central Saint Martins grad, Yasya Minochkina, and you can see her handiwork in the minimal and sporty images above. Did I also mention that she has great taste in music? Check our her IG for video and photographic shout outs to amazing musicians like Dev Hynes, Kelela, and DJ Rashad (R.I.P.). OK I’ll stop stanning so hard.

Images via iamkoo, tommy ton, j’ai perdu ma veste, style du monde, and Yasya Minochkina

Street Style Wallflower

Photo via Tommy Ton

Unless you’re a model or a Vogue Paris editor, extravagance is the name of the game when looking to get noticed by street style photographers during fashion week, and with good reason. As perfect as black is, it just doesn’t pop in photographs like mixed prints and colours. In the decade since the explosion of street style, online fashion mags have even started posting shopping guides just before fashion weeks advising showgoers on what to buy if they want to get snapped. Of course, good bloggers should be considerate of how clothes look in photographs, but never at the expense of their personal style. There is something unseemly and kind of thirsty about getting dressed not for yourself, but to satisfy the attention of photographers and the fickle tastes of the commercial fashion industry. So in the true spirit of not giving a fuck, here is The Pack’s handy style guide for anyone looking to just blend in, in a stylish but practical, even irreverent kinda way.

Yonge and Nude

Artful nudes and high fashion photography go together like bacon and eggs, or bucket hats and #sadboys. But for what has felt like an eternity, it seemed like high fashion editorials have barely made a blip on the Canadian publishing radar, leaving us fashion-starved hosers to settle for out-of-date shopping guides and meatless editorial spreads.

But as Gandalf and Buddha would say, nothing is permanent, and the fashion publishing landscape in Canada is changing for the better. With beautifully-made and artfully designed publications like Bad Day and Frische rising out of our soulless, mass media rubble, and with shops like SOOP SOOP doing their part in spreading the good word, it’s sort of nice to be Canadian and into fashion these days.

The Toronto-based, Milan-founded styling and photography group MILA is another such entity making it a little more interesting ’round these parts. Handling everything from photography to styling to photo editing, the two women of MILA, Maddalena Petrosino & Eleonora Gaspari are pretty much behind every element of their editorials short of modelling the clothes themselves. The photoset seen here appeared in the Italian online mag nss and features clothing and accessories from SOOP SOOP, Kaelen, and Armed.

The Baddest Female

We admit it. We’ve been sippin’ on the kimchi brine pretty hard as of late, and I am quite possibly the worst offender. You can’t really blame us though. Sure, exciting things in fashion are not restricted to just this one tiny peninsula, but for the past few years my ladies from the Land of the Morning Calm have really emerged as a new and exciting influence on the global style scene, creating garments that appeal to young women who want to wear more than just another pretty dress. It also doesn’t hurt my obsession that, because I’ve lived there, I can’t help but feel a personal connection to the country’s growing pack of young designers.

Local Inspiration

There’s absolutely no question that sporty casual is a personal style choice fully endorsed by The Pack. I was pretty much hooked from my first pair of Air Force 1s. Recently shhrug spilled the beans on a newly-discovered tumblr, curated by the owner of Toronto boutique SOOP SOOP. Aside from running a pretty au courant vintage + new retail store (stocked with a plethora of 90s track jackets and Calvin Klein jeans), owner Christina Pretti also maintains the boutique’s companion tumblr, filled with carefully selected street style images that align with the SOOP SOOP brand. I wasted a good couple of hours gaping at the images last weekend and selected some of my favourites / future outfits. If you think this is as tight as we do and you live in the city, you should definitely drop by the store.

Business Casual

Out of all the uniquely interesting (not to mention, impossibly gorgeous ❤ ) women of The Pack, I am quite possibly the most conservative. No, this is not me outing myself as a card-carrying member of the Tea Party. But as a trouser-wearing, pinstripe-adoring, still-into-blazers kinda woman, my personal style quite frequently veers into the realm of the 9-to-5er. I ain’t even ashamed of it though. I’ve learned through years of negotiating my style through predictable workplace dress codes that there is a way of doing business casual without channeling the Talbots catalogue, and it probably looks a lot like this editorial.

Styled by Anne-Sophie Thomas (a frequent Jalouse contributor) and photographed by Daniel Thomas Smith for L’Officiel Paris‘s April 2014 issue, the understated spread features all the mainstays of conservative dressing—oxford shirts, trench coats, pantsuits—minus the dowdy, pulled-too-tight look. Model Jordan van der Vyver’s youthful face and suggestively messy locks obviously help. But the key to looking polished but not prissy is all about subverting expectation.

Temper the rigidity of a monochrome pant suit with a pair of super drapey, voluminous trousers. Take the snootiness out of a trench coat by pairing it with Adidas kicks. Or if you’re feeling extra saucy, wear a classic pinstriped shirt strategically unbuttoned way too close to your under-cleavage.

OK, maybe save that for outside the office.

However you end up interpreting this style, it’s important (and a blessing!) to note that you won’t have to sacrifice your comfort for any of it.

Shout out to Alexander Wang for making those perfect white pumps.

Nadja Bender for SSAW

In the grand scheme of things, Helsinki’s bi-annual SSAW magazine is a relative newcomer in the high-end European fashion magazine market. But since launching in 2012, the publication has already earned props as a photographer’s mecca, each collectible issue packed with artfully shot images and thoughtful editorials.

“Nadja on a Bender” might be a little on-the-nose, but it is in name only. The boozy eight-page spread features plenty of copy-worthy ensembles, including a killer iridescent top and skirt set, some Babysitters’ Club-inspired patchwork jeans, and a show-stopping satin bomber. The star of the photo spread, however, is the only item that appears in every photo—the Nike shower shoes. Much like the updated Birkenstock, the shower shoe (Nike or Adidas) has really got that 90s-inspired cozy luxury thing down, and will likely be the only footwear I wear all summer. This means it’ll officially be the first summer since I hit puberty that my feet won’t be covered in blisters. Scooore.