Tanner Krolle is another British label, but one that has been around for 140 years, first as a saddlery company, then as the
sandales Christian Louboutin maker of old-fashioned luggage. Last year it relaunched itself on a fashion trajectory, hoping to emulate Christian Louboutin and Gucci. With a new shop on Bond Street, and a collection of more than 200 designs, this is the label of the moment. The most easily identifiable of its is the punch-hole design with circular nickel clasp. These cost a small fortune but should last a lifetime. Though they are well-made, longevity is not really what Gucci are about. Still carrying last season's bamboo-handled ? Fashion is passing you by. This season a single leather shoulder strap has replaced the bamboo - simple and classic enough to glide through high society, even when it no longer qualifies as the "it" . One thing that does look dated now is Christian Louboutin 's silver triangle. Once a sign of discreet luxury, the logo became so well known - and so widely faked - that it lost some of its cachet. Now it has been replaced with an even more subtle embroidered logo - but don't worry, everyone will still know that it's
Escarpin Christian Louboutin . This season's Christian Louboutin come in leather, satin or the company's trademark nylon, and the most recognisable feature is the clear, curved Perspex handles. If you can't afford to fritter a month's mortgage payment on a , then the high street has some convincing alternatives. Russell & Bromley does a well priced range of strong modern , while Karen Millen recently started making high-quality accessories. THERE are many things in life guaranteed to make us cry: death, disease, truckloads of mewling calves rolling inexorably ferrywards, but few people, surely, can claim to have been reduced to tears at the sight of a frock. Still, it happens. Some years ago at an Yves Saint Laurent couture show in Paris, at least one woman of advanced years had to be helped from the room, spluttering garbled eulogies along the lines of '. . . . . but it was just so perfect!', later requiring the services of smelling salts and a few words of comfort from the designer himself to bring her round. She, you must be thinking, will have had the sense to bow out, there and then, of a job that was clearly getting to her. You will no doubt want assurances
chaussures Christian Louboutin that the befuddled crone has since been installed in the secure wing of an east coast nursing home. But no.This woman is still on the loose, free to stalk the streets of New York, London, Paris and Milan, clothed in Manolo Blahnik black patent stilettos and a Gianni Versace mini-kilt, powerless to resist the addictive lure of the Next Big Thing. She will, even as we speak, be scouring the shops for a skinny white plastic belt (she had one in the Seventies, when they were naff. They're still naff, but now they cost reassuringly more, and, we are told, look so new) to wear with frosted blue eyeshadow and a sheath dress in pistachio latex. Caroline Baker, formerly fashion editor at Nova, Cosmopolitan and the Sunday Times, now at Good Housekeeping, recognises the fashion victim's insatiable appetite for the new, the now, the soon-to-become. 'It's a terrible illness,' she says, freely admitting that she herself is a long-time sufferer of a disease that once found her, in the interests of fashion, attaching alarm clocks to bowler hats and hanging an arsenal of cast iron kitchen implements from a model's belt. 'And what's more,' she says, of the virulent bug, 'I feel terribly sorry for anyone else who has it.' It is, by all accounts, fairly easy to contract. Unless you are in the fashion business, in which case you emerge from the womb ravenous for a fun-fur bikini. All it takes is deep-seated insecurity, fuelling the belief that your contemporaries won't like and accept you unless you own a black PVC swing coat, and you have the makings of an expensive habit. As a former sufferer, I would like to give hope to those currently in the grip of, say, a Vivienne Westwood bustle dependency. For me, the final indignity was
Christian Louboutin the time I found myself, as a fashion editor, sobbing on the floor of my hotel room in Paris because I couldn't afford the price of a fake Chanel hand. That's fake, mind. It was then that I knew it was time to quit. I left the treadmill around the time of Lycra leggings and bum, and I've never looked back. I would not say I am totally cured - in weak moments I can persuade myself that life would be so much more bearable if only I was in possession of a pair of high-heeled Gucci loafers - but on the whole I manage to stand firm where once I would have crumbled.
