Throwback Thursday: How to Dress Like a 90s Icon

It was the era of the slacker and the supermodel, grunge and Gen X—the nineties already felt iconic before the decade had even drawn to a close. Twenty years down the road, as we watch the defining fashions of the time resurface as fresh inspiration on the fall runways, we can’t help but associate the key moments with the women who first embodied them. From Kate to Winona to Gwyneth, the most stylish looks of the nineties are perhaps even more relevant in 2013.

Giambattista Valli's Valli Girls Share Their Favorite Looks

Giambattista Valli’s sublime 392-page coffee table book just hit stores and to celebrate, Vogue.com asked the designers’ beloved Valli Girls to share their most memorable looks.

Time Traveling: Vintage Shopping with Rapper Misfit Dior

Photographed by Jeremy Allen

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Here is what Laeticia Harrison-Roberts, aka Misfit Dior, is wearing for an afternoon of shopping at the Manhattan Vintage clothing show: an exquisite black-and-red-plaid swing coat and matching small-waisted sheath, a combo halfway between Betty Grable and Bettie Page; a narrow fake snake belt from Primark; Zara pumps; a red Givenchy purse, and a tiny hat perched on her undulating blonde Tippi Hedren–esque coiffure. It’s all period-perfect, until you notice that her slender arms are half-covered with expressionist tats, as if Marc Chagall had devoted himself to inky buxom viragos.
 
“My mom sewed this outfit in two days, she bought the fabric for a pound a yard at a market in East London! I usually wear pink, but she couldn’t find any pink on such short notice,” laughs Harrison-Roberts, whose mother makes virtually all her clothes from sketches her 29-year-old daughter, a rapper with fashion aspirations (more on this in a moment) provides. But there are things that mum, skilled seamstress that she is, just can’t whip up—vintage furs say, or structured handbags, or the funny little hats Harrison-Roberts loves. We are in search of all three, and whatever else catches her eyes, hidden today behind red Dior shades with purple stems.
 
At the very first booth, just inside the door, a strand of chubby pearls captures her imagination; less than a minute later, a framed handbag shaped like a little suitcase finds favor. “It’s almost like a laptop carrier, it’s the right size,” Harrison-Roberts observes, though in fact that invention is more than a half-century in the future.
 
But of course, it’s the ability to time travel, at least when it comes to clothes, that makes clothing shows like this so compelling. (The next edition is January 17 and 18.) While other shoppers are melting over beaded flapper frocks and Victorian lingerie, Dior is in love with mid-century fashion modernism, trying on a succession of big-shouldered furs, pancake flat chapeau, and gently caressing exquisitely wrought garments like a navy New Look dress with lacy insets. “I love the buttons!” Harrison-Roberts sighs. “They made things so beautifully back then.”
 
When she spied a full-on fox coat from the eighties which actually sports a Dior label she nearly swoons, but the price—$3,500—is not what an up-and-coming recording artist has in mind, regardless of her love of all things Dior. (On this subject she is quite knowledgeable, discoursing on one of her idols, the perennially leopard-clad Dior muse Mitzah Bricard.) So it is with great excitement that she uncovers another, shorter fox coat, perhaps showing a few signs of a long happy life and with a far less impressive provenance, but nevertheless chic and supremely wearable for $240.
 
This sublime purchase is rapidly stuffed into a shopping bag, and we repair for a coffee so she can fill me in on her extraordinary story. Harrison-Roberts grew up in the English countryside, in Sussex, but by fifteen was hanging out in London clubs til all hours. “My parents would pick me up at four in the morning,” she says with a smile.
 
As soon as she could, Harrison-Roberts moved to London, where she worked as a model and was an admitted hard partier. She loved rap and, in that way that young girls have, managed to talk her way backstage when Eminen was in town (maybe her chainmail top, pasties, and baggie jeans helped her case.) She quickly became friendly with his entourage, forming an especially close bond with Proof, who would take on the role of hip-hop Higgins to her rapping Eliza Doolittle. “He would critique all my rhymes, he mentored me,” she remembers.
 
On New Year’s Eve 2003, Harrison-Roberts arrived in the U.S., where she found an apartment in Williamsburg (where else?), worked the door at various clubs, attended open mics in Harlem, appeared on VH1’s Ego Trip’s (White) Rapper Show—“I left after two episodes; it was patronizing for me, but I got a lot of exposure”—and not accidently, watched a lot of Hitchcock movies, perfecting her personal style.
 
Though she is currently completing her first album—the premiere track of which is entitled, tellingly, “Hitchcock Blonde,” she confesses, “I love fashion! Fashion actually came before music for me.” Visions of boxy purses and tiny hats and full-skirted frocks dancing in her head, she lowers her glance, gives the slightest toss to her pale waves, and admits,  “I want to get one album out and then—I really, really want my own clothing line!”

London Calling: Roksanda Ilincic's Spring Store Opening

Roksanda Ilincic with her daughter Efimia.
Photo: Courtesy of Roksanda Ilincic

The tallest, willowiest member of London’s young establishment East End designer gang is staking her claim on the poshest West End shopping ground. Two weeks ago, a surprise display of unmistakable color-blocked dresses by Roksanda Ilincic appeared at 9 Mount Street with a notice on the window declaring: OPENING SPRING 2014. “It’s a big milestone for me and my label, and one of those rare moments in life when I feel that dreams sometimes do turn into reality,” she said with a smile.

Roksanda’s arrival practically turns a swath of London’s most elite shopping neighborhood into block party packed with British designer friends. Swing around the corner from Berkeley Square (where the nightingales sing) and along the imposing curve of red-brick Edwardian houses at the start of Mount Street, and it’s there you’ll see Roksanda’s spacious interior. This is the place where the red-lipsticked thirty-six-year-old with an addiction to vintage YSL is about to paint an entire picture of her quirkily feminine world. She’s kicked it off with a teaser installation designed in collaboration with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation—vivid, abstract-art inspired dresses which Net-A-Porter will launch exclusively on November 6.

Photo: Courtesy of Roksanda Ilincic

Roksanda’s new bolt-hole is almost next door to Nicholas Kirkwood’s ragingly successful shoe shop, right opposite Loewe (which will be stocked with J.W. Anderson’s designs for the label by next fall), and just a couple of doors along the row from the yet-unannounced address at which Christopher Kane will be opening his first store. Just along the same street, under tantalizing hoardings, is the vast Céline flagship Phoebe Philo which will open next year. Solange Azagury-Partridge’s new exotic jewelry box is positioned around the corner in Carlos Place. A short trot onwards, facing the Connaught hotel, and there’s Roland Mouret, the pioneering British designer in this area (which is designated by the halo term ‘Mayfair”) who has long been serving clients in his beautiful, many-storied townhouse. It is here that high-net-worth individuals are given to stay, lunch at Scott’s or Harry’s Bar, and then take in a spot of serious post-prandial fashion spending.

Clockwise from top left: Cate Blanchett, Jessica Chastain, Emma Stone, Carey Mulligan, Amanda Seyfried, and the Duchess of Cambridge
Photo: (clockwise from top left) Brendon Thorne/Getty Images; Michael Loccisano/Getty Images; Fotonoticias/FilmMagic; POOL - Mark Cuthbert/UK Press via Getty Images; Luca Teuchmann/WireImage; John Shearer/Getty Images for MRC

But what distinguishes a Roksanda Ilincic? “I’m inspired by art, architecture, and the notion of comfort and practicality,” she says. Over time—ever since she stepped out of Central Saint Martins—she’s serially used references to the bright side of 20th-century modernism:Ellsworth Kelly, Lygia Clark, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings in Brasilia, which she had seen on a family holiday expedition. The state of grace her design has reached can now be identified in the way she handles a silhouette, often with something exaggerated going on in the volume of a shoulder line, an oversize flourish of a bow, a chic explosion of a pom-pom corsage, an aerated flounce in a hem, or maybe a surprise streak of multicolored train pouring down the back of an otherwise sober A-line column. Other Ilincic-isms: her contrast-color waistbands, using opposing fabrics front and back, and the crowning gesture of a turban, headscarf or big, fat hair bow. (She can’t resist. She wears them, too.)

Often, she’s at her best in her resort collections, like this one. Something about it brings out the best in her sunny nature, as does her swimwear collection. “I design it just the way I design dresses,” she says. 

Looks from Roksanda Ilincic Spring 2014 swimwear
Photo: Courtesy of Roksanda Ilincic

Like all her great sister-designers, everything Roksanda designs flows from the way she lives, from her passion for abstract art to the scheme for her store (by avant-garde architect David Adjaye, who designed the first home for Ilincic and her husband Philip Bueno del Mesquita) to the adorable line of dresses for little girls, Blossom, which just happened to pop out naturally not long after the birth of her daughter, Efimia. “I remembered that my mother, Ranka, always used to have dresses made for me from the off-cuts of material from her own things when I was growing up in Belgrade,” she laughs. (A lot in Roksanda’s references to the exuberant color and poufy shapes of the eighties can be traced back to the influence of Ranka, a trained pharmacist with a hankering for high style in the then-communist Yugoslavia). Efimia and her little London friends model for mommy’s lookbook. So who’s the latest customer to be wearing Roksanda? None other than Harper Beckham. 

David Beckham with Harper Beckham in Blossom.
Photo: Cau/Blet/Sipa/Newscom

All that’s good news for the women who wear Roksanda, the people who’ve discovered how her vivid flair for “appearance” dressing undercuts formality to the exact degree it fits in with all the rules of appropriateness, while still standing out as elegantly characterful. Just like the designer herself, who sails through British fashion events, all cheekbones and bright lipstick, wearing the most dramatic of her long pieces (she wears long and midi full-time), and always accessorized with something from her personal hoard of mid-century modern jewelry. 

These days, Roksanda’s aesthetic is discreetly championed by the ultimate triumvirate of theDuchess of Cambridge, Samantha Cameron, and Michelle Obama, who all appreciate the high-impact simplicity of her signature crepe pieces for public parades, that demanding daytime slot in the wardrobe which includes such panics as “weddings” and “conferences” in other women’s lives. 

But, she also attracts individualists who love exploiting the drama of her eye-strobing  color combinations, especially when worn against a super-pale skin or clashed with strong hair color: Cate Blanchett, Florence Welch, and Liz Goldwyn being prime examples.

Five Stars: Daily Celebrity Style Sightings

In this series, we’re seeing stars: Every morning, we pick five celebrity looks and pinpoint the trend that defines them.

The temperature outside is cooling down, but the saturated shades on the red carpet are heating up. Rich, vibrant Crayola colors provide the palette for bold looks. Here, Kate Bosworth slips into a flounced hem electric blue dress with pronounced shoulders, while Reese Witherspoon puts a minimal twist on her red dress with neutral trim and coordinating sandals. Camilla Belle andLupita Nyong’o embrace Skittle-friendly shades for day and night, whileLindsey Wixson smolders in a light, sequined violet sheath.

 

The temperature outside is cooling down, but the saturated shades on the red carpet are heating up. Rich, vibrant Crayola colors provide the palette for bold looks. Here, Kate Bosworth slips into a flounced hem electric blue dress with pronounced shoulders, while Reese Witherspoon puts a minimal twist on her red dress with neutral trim and coordinating sandals. Camilla Belle andLupita Nyong’o embrace Skittle-friendly shades for day and night, whileLindsey Wixson smolders in a light, sequined violet sheath.

 

Alexa Chung Has It: Her New Book and Her Best Style Moments of 2013

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Alexa Chung’s signature look—an A-line dress paired with a flat shoe (usually in black or white) and topped off with a cat-eye-lined eye—makes a lot more sense when you find out that the fashion icon was once obsessed with Wednesday Addams and French New Wave muse Anna Karina. Although her trend-agnostic sense of style seems innate and effortless, the 29-year-old (like most of us), was once a young girl with more than a few sartorial missteps under her belt such as emulating the Spice Girls’s “sixties fashion in the nineties” wardrobe. In her new book It (Penguin), out today, the model/designer/TV host, shares her evolution through fashion, reflecting on everything from relationships to music. Part memoir, part how-to book, the tome is filled with personal photos and drawings, advice on what to pack for a music festival, and even the occasional piece of laugh-out-loud wisdom such as: “Boys say they don’t mind how you get your hair done. But then they leave you for someone with really great standard girl hair and the next thing you know you’re alone with a masculine crop crying into your granola.” We’re sure more than a few girls will have the pink cloth-bound book on their coffee tables or gift lists come the holiday season. In honor of her latest venture, we look back at some of Alexa Chung’s best fashion moments from this year.

Circus Maximus: Dakota Fanning and Carolyn Murphy Get Into the Fashion Mood in Montauk

Even fall in Montauk is festive—a riotous happening with daytime pajamas and nighttime abandon. Carolyn Murphy, Dakota Fanning, and Naomi Diaz and Lisa-Kaïndé Diazjoin the circus and fete the season's best looks.

Generation X: The 2013 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Finalists

Over the past decade, the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund has recognized and nurtured America’s best emerging designers. Meet the ten talented finalists who’ve made the cut this year.

The Season's Best Fur Accessories

With a riot of color and wit, fur—the most decadent of materials—shakes off its staid pedigree to wrap itself around an electric, live-wire future. 

The Season's Best Fur Accessories

With a riot of color and wit, fur—the most decadent of materials—shakes off its staid pedigree to wrap itself around an electric, live-wire future. 

Lone Ranger: Matthew McConaughey Has Become an Anti-Hollywood Hero

Canadians are known for their equanimity, but on this cool Saturday night, the air outside Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre carries a tinge of hysteria. Hundreds of fans, mostly women, line the road. They’re hoping to catch a glimpse of Matthew McConaughey, the star of Jean-Marc Vallée’s film Dallas Buyers Club, which is about to have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. 

At long last, a limo pulls up a few feet from the rope line. The instant McConaughey emerges, sleek as a greyhound in his dark Dolce & Gabbana suit, the crowd starts screaming, a whoosh of ecstasy that keeps cresting. “I feel like a teenager,” says a 40-ish woman, madly snapping photos with her iPhone. It’s like it’s 2005, the year that People named him the Sexiest Man Alive, all over again.

When I mention the frenzy to the actor two days later at his hotel, he gives a good-natured laugh. “Some were shriekin’ for me,” he admits in his familiar Texan drawl, “but most were only shriekin’ to be shriekin’.” Sporting a gauzy shirt, loose tan trousers, and that famously immaculate tan, the 44-year-old star looks like a backpacker you might meet in Goa—if that guy were good-looking enough to be the face of a Dolce & Gabbana fragrance. 

On this Monday morning, his mood is as sunny as his outfit. Dallas Buyers Club wowed the critics, and McConaughey is being touted as a top Oscar contender for his galvanizing turn as Ron Woodroof, a racist, homophobic, sexually excessive Texas cowboy who, in 1985, learns he contracted HIV from a forgotten encounter and, in fighting for medicine to keep himself alive, gradually becomes a more decent human being. Reinforced by McConaughey’s unnervingly skeletal appearance—he lost 47 pounds to play the role—it’s a riveting piece of acting that’s at once angry, touching, and hilarious.

This triumph in Toronto is just the latest step in one of the oddest comebacks in Hollywood history. While many stars have recovered from flops to become bigger than ever, McConaughey has done something new: He’s bounced back from hits. Shucking off his male-bimbo image (oh, those shirtless photos!) after a series of profitable rom-coms, he has managed in the past eighteen months to turn in a rogues’ gallery of vivid indie performances, everything from spoofing his sexy-guy persona in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike to winning sympathy as a hopelessly lovestruck murderer in Jeff Nichols’s Mud—not to mention playing a self-promoting DA in Richard Linklater’s black comedy Bernie and a closeted journalist in Lee Daniels’s racial potboiler The Paperboy. Weathered and experienced, he has matured into a terrific actor—solid and serious, yet fearless. “Last year was arguably the best creative year of my career,” he says, “and it was the first year I ever lost money. I wound up in the red—and had the best time doing it.”

In person, McConaughey is exactly how you’d expect him to be—affable, twangy, and enviably comfortable in his own skin. He clearly doesn’t give a hoot what you think of him. He perhaps owes such ease to his upbringing. He was raised in Uvalde, Texas, by a colorful couple who kept divorcing and remarrying—his dad had played some pro football; his mother’s a cutup who’s been known, in her 80s, to flash her gams on the red carpet. Offering stories, not sound bites, he talks with his whole body, waving his arms, tap-tap-tapping on the table, lolling back on the sofa, then lurching forward to say something particularly juicy. “He’s from Texas,” says Vallée of his star’s nonstop physicality, “and Texas is movement.”

McConaughey was 23 when he first caught the public eye in Linklater’s 1993 cult hit Dazed and Confused. The movie instantly set a template for his rascally image—his first words were “Awright, awright, awright!” More important, it proved him to be a screen natural, a quality that goes beyond simple handsomeness. (“Matthew has a musical rhythm,” says Martin Scorsese, who just directed him in this month’s The Wolf of Wall Street, in which he plays Leonardo DiCaprio’s slippery mentor. “It’s there in both his dialogue and his body language.”)

Street Chic: New York

Photo: Alyssa Greenberg

Invest in a good chunky knit sweater and build out your outfit from there.

Sweater: (Shop similar:Chinti and Parker)

Jacket: (Shop similar:Joie)

Scarf: (Shop similar:Paula Bianco)

Skirt: (Shop similar:Proenza Schouler)

Boots: (Shop similar:Stuart Weitzman)

Want to see more street style? Check out our Tumblr and Pinterest!

Mango Star Miranda Kerr Uses Coconut Oil "in the Bedroom"

Photo: Inez and Vinoodh for Mango

I thought I was having a good hair day—and then I met Miranda Kerr. Curled on a couch at the Gramercy Park Hotel, the supermodel wore skinny jeans, a blazer, and no makeup. Her long, shiny hair hung loose down her back.

And while I'll never have her genetics, her husband, Orlando Bloom, or even her "I just woke up this way" brand of wavy hair, I can get the dream girl's outfit—and you can, too. Kerr just teamed with photographers Inez and Vinoodh to shoot Mango's latest collection, and all the affordable clothes are available to buy.

Here, Kerr speaks about her Mango shoot, doing yoga with her son, and how to keep a straight face on the catwalk.

You've shot for Mango before. What's different this time around?

In this shoot, you can see a masculine side and punk side coming through. This is more grungy than before, and I really like that.

"Grunge" and "punk" aren't two words normally associated with you...

Which is good! It's really good to be able to express different sides of yourself, and it's interesting because we used the same photographers as the last Mango shoot, but we got a different outcome. It's good to show that versatility, because it shows the way you dress and the way you carry yourself can really change the whole dynamic of your personality. That's what I think is great about clothes: you can use them to express how you're feeling in that moment. And the thing with Mango is you can buy them anywhere in the world, and they're also quite affordable. So they make self-expression easy.

Did you have a favorite piece from the campaign?

The boyfriend blazer and the boyfriend jeans are super cool, and I quite like the coats. This coat here… [points to a shot from the catalog]. I actually think this should have been the cover shot. It's really cool!

Oh my gosh, you should be an art director next!

[Laughs] Right, because I don't have enough to do!

Yeah, you're pretty busy. I saw you making muffins for a Net-A-Porter video yesterday. They looked yummy! And I like how you substituted honey for sugar.

You should always do that. There are a few things that are always good substitutes: Coconut oil instead of any other oil, because you can raise it to the highest cooking temperature, and it still works, and then honey instead of sugar or goat's milk instead of cow's milk. Cow's milk is very hard to digest…Do you know your blood type? Because if you know what it is, you can look online and find out what foods act like medicine in your body and foods that act like poison. It really works. You should look it up!

I will! But what's with you and coconut oil? You talk about it in so many interviews.

I think everyone should have coconut oil for more reasons than one. You can use it in your hair, you can use it as a makeup remover, you can cook with it, you can use it in the bedroom! Um… [Laughs]

Yeah?

You can though—it's quite versatile, that coconut oil! [Laughs] You know, now I really need to do a coconut oil campaign in which I talk about all of this. That would be funny, right?

Yes! So we're both flying to Paris tonight. Any tips for jet lag?

I try to always sleep on the plane, if you can. And as soon as you get off the plane, look up and get a little sunlight in your eyes. And also as soon as you can, take your shoes off and put your feet on the ground, in the grass. It's good to re-center yourself. And use rose hip oil during the flight to stay hydrated. There's a really good one from my skincare line, KORA Organics, and I use it on flights. That way, your skin won't be dry or dull once you land.

What about tips for keeping a straight face when you want to start laughing? It must be hard on the runway.

I know! It's funny, right? It just takes mind control. When you have to be serious doing Balenciaga, Stella McCartney, or Chanel, you just have to focus. At the end of the day, people are there to look at the clothes. And I try not to make eye contact with anyone, because if you make eye contact with someone on the runway, it's over! You have to stay in the zone, feel the music, and feel the clothes.

Everyone's talking about Nicolas Ghesquière right now. What was it like to walk for Balenciaga while he was there? Especially right after having a baby?

Balenciaga was spur of the moment. I'd worked with Nicolas a few seasons before. I think he's a genius, and we really connected and appreciated each other. So I was walking for him before I was pregnant, and then I walked for him while I was pregnant, and then I walked for him as soon as I had the baby. And I just really appreciate him. He's a really good person. He's so creative and so talented.

And you were on the Balenciaga runway two months after giving birth.

The trick is to be gentle with yourself! Don't be hard on yourself. Be gentle and focus on filling your body with nutrients. Don't think about calories. Calories will drive you mad, and then you'll crave things just because you can't have them, and that's when you start eating sweets. And I don't believe in working out really soon after giving birth. I mean, every body is different and every birth is different, but I think you have to be really gentle. I started really gently doing yoga. Then I did Pilates, which is a bit more intense, and finally some light resistance training. But it was very gentle and very organic. My workout was, like, hiking with the baby. Because it's something you can do together as a family, and it's easy and it's fun. And when I do yoga at home, Flynn will be there jumping around next to me and it's fine.

Now that he's a bit older, does Flynn do yoga with you?

Oh yeah! Flynn is very good at downward dog!