Chanel Airport Terminal 2

As expected, the newspapers put their reports about the Chanel fashion event not in their fashion and lifestyle pages, but with the entertainment gossip.
At least, the United Daily News devoted two full pages with lots of pictures to the event, and not all the photos showed celebrities. Yes, Shu Qi was there wearing a black flowery dress which covered her only between shoulders and knees.
Black and white, the traditional Chanel combination, still dominated the new collection. Long white dresses with black edges and stuck-on white flowers - those flowers are something you see everywhere now from Miu Miu to young ladies' clothing in Bangkok shopping malls. There were black dresses with what looked like effigies of white branches, and white dresses with black branches. My award for prettiest dress goes to a taffeta number, in a bare-shoulder or double-strap version, black background, with pastel-colored embroidery going around in rings.
And the men? Never thought of Chanel as a men's fashion brand, but one model showed off a pair of blue trousers, a white shirt and a loose black jacked, another one wore what looked like a uniform from Napoleon's army.
What's next on Taipei's fashion calendar? Shiatzy Chen's latest offerings later this month, and the opening - at last - of that Gioia Pan store next to the Grand Formosa Regent. The black marble front is in place, and through the windows you can spot the folks hard at work getting the interior ready. And the next time I pass by Warner Village, I need to go and check out the Martin Margiela store. The Belgian designer has turned a fast food joint into a sumptuous white boutique.

Chanel Airport

As I am writing this, one of the biggest Asian fashion events of the month is taking place at Taipei's Chiang Kai-shek International Airport. Chanel has chosen a hangar of Taiwan's largest airline, China Airlines, to show off its new collections to an Asian public.
So why am I not there, and sitting here writing about something I haven't seen? Well, because I don't belong to Taiwan's fashion elite (yet!).
The show takes three hours, from 9 pm to midnight, but reporters and photographers were supposed to get together in Taipei around 5 pm. In other words, a lot of wasted time.
Nevertheless, it should well be worth it. I imagine Karl Lagerfeld won't be there, otherwise it would've been all over the Taiwanese press. The media here, as usual, will be focusing on the stars attending the show, rather than the clothes themselves. Superstar Shu Qi is one of the top celebrities present, I once thought about devoting a web site to her, but that was before the age of the blog.
Ending this short posting on a positive note, the recent burglary at the Louis Vuitton flagship store on Dunhua South Road, which I mentioned in a previous posting, has been solved. They caught the gang who did it and found the merchandise, including a monogram travel trunk worth 1 million New Taiwan dollars, or about 33,000 US dollars. The other famous fashion theft of the past year, at Gucci's Chungshan North Road shop, has still not been solved though, as far as I know.
On that note, a Happy New Year to all fashionistas. And yes, I'll have to read about the Chanel show in the newspapers tomorrow like everyone else.

Mark Trungate's "Fashion Brands"

If there is an important fashion event in my life these days, then it's a book I picked up at the new Eslite book store in Taipei: "Fashion Brands" by Mark Trungate, easily the best book about the fashion industry in general to come out since "The End of Fashion" by Teri Agins.
The book, subtitled "Branding Style from Armani to Zara," describes the ins and outs of the modern fashion business and all the people and organizations that play a role in it, from photographers and fashion magazines to style bureaus, cool hunters, and department stores. Along the way, you also get a look at the workings of some famous names, such as Zara, Diesel, H&M.
I just went through more than 120 pages on the first day, so it's really good reading.
And while we're talking about the new year, the fashion event of January here in Taiwan must be the Asian show Chanel is putting on inside a hangar at the airport here on the 13th. More about that when it gets closer.
Happy New Fashion Year!

Bag Madness 101 Part 2

So much for bag madness at the Taipei 101. I went to visit this bag exhibition, and I got severely underwhelmed. The only thing you see are just a couple of bags inside giant plastic transparent replicas of themselves, and that's it. Each of the bags has a long text in Chinese only, explaining the history of the fashion house and the bag, but that's about it. Celine had a green Boogie bag and an orange Trunkette, and the orange paisley bag from Etro was also nice, but people, don't hurry to Taipei 101 just for this event.
You're actually much better off just strolling from shop to shop inside Taipei 101, along the course of the exhibition, rather than looking at the show itself. The stores themselves are loaded with new bags. I especially noted the orange and green bags at Celine with the Blason emblem done in sparkling stones, and the new Coach with the C logo large and purple.