Fun with Photoshop, Part 2: Rolex

Unlike the DKNY ad below, this one, for Rolex, is gorgeous, I think. Cleverly referencing Amelia Earhart (who will be big news with the forthcoming biopic later this year), delicately lighted, and beautifully styled. I especially love the skinny little scarf knotted over the portrait-collared leather jacket.

The product, too, is exactly in place, neither dominating the shot nor lost within it.

So all good, right? Until I saw the same ad running in British Vogue.

Take a good look at the watch here.



A simple question: with a luxury brand like Rolex, do you really want the mechanism showing this clearly?

Fly Girl: The Aviatrix's Cap High Fashion Again

Jean Paul Gaultier, designing for Hermès, has seen the style potential of the aviator's cap, and used it as a recurring theme in his Autumn/Winter '09/10 line.

The question: was his inspiration helped along by the fact that Hillary Swank will be portraying Amelia Earhart in a forthcoming film? The wardrobe for the movie promises to be amazing, and it will be interesting to see how closely Hermès comes to replicating the leather-and-pearls élan of this incredibly stylish adventuress.

To give an idea, here's an photo of the lady herself, in a custom-made white leather flying cap.

If you'd like to get an early jump on the look, leather flyer's caps are available on eBay -- but this may be a little too authentic for anything but a costume party.

An more interesting and highly wearable option might be a hat like this one, a vintage wool cloche inspired by the idea of taking to the sky but more realistically stopping short at penthouse level.



(Hermès collection photographs from the Telegraph Online, by AP/EPA/Reuters)

Fashion Icons: Amelia Earhart

The Space Shuttle Atlantis may be landing this morning, if the weather cooperates, after a successful mission servicing the Hubble Telescope. Which got me thinking about fashion in way up there. Stay with me now, because one of the most strikingly stylish women ever to successfully design a line of clothing, or work as an editor for Cosmopolitan, was in fact far more famed for her aviating.

Amelia Earhart looked the business, whether she was dressed in pilot's leathers or, as here, a more genteel day touring the labs at the Langley research building in 1928.

(According to Wiki, her beaver coat got sucked into a wind tunnel. I have no doubt whatsoever that she handled it with breathtaking composure.)

Amelia Earhart, and mission specialist K. Megan McArthur, this one's for you.