Harmonious wardrobe: Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon says her brand will re-think the fashion timetable. Photograph: Nick Harvey/WireImage.com
Tamara Mellon has form as a game changer. As the co-founder of Jimmy Choo she masterminded the high-heeled shoe becoming an emoticon for glamour. The name Jimmy Choo gained such totemic power that the spending of a month's rent on the firm's footwear could became a rite of passage for the newly independent young woman.
Mellon, having served out the gardening leave which followed her selling her stake in the company for a reported payout of $135m, is launching what she believes to be an equally agenda-setting brand at Paris fashion[1] week.
The Tamara Mellon brand intends to steal a march on luxury competitors by challenging an illogical retail timetable which, Mellon believes, is confusing and offputting to shoppers.
Fallout from a decade of racing to beat competitors to first deliveries, and to provide "newness" on the shopfloor, has caused clothes on the shopfloor to be out of kilter with the weather, with coats on sale in July and summer shorts available in January.
At her seventh floor design studio in Paris on Wednesday, Mellon was examining a cream cashmere tunic and thigh-length ivory leather boots, which will go on sale in January.
"Our January/February collection will sell the clothes you want to wear in those months. I don't believe women want to buy sun dresses in January. And now that catwalk shows are online instantly, women aren't excited by the trends if it takes six months for them to reach stores. The consumer is way ahead of the industry here, and the industry needs to catch up."
Another early adopter of the seasonless, buy-now-wear-now, wardrobe is Stefano Pilati, the former YSL designer, who has instigated a similar approach at the Agnona label.
Mellon believes it was the pioneering business model, rather than simply the shoes themselves, which drove the success of Jimmy Choo. "That was a time when fashion magazines were realising that if they put a celebrity on the cover, it sold more – so I took that principle and applied it to what we did."
Jimmy Choo, the first British brand to set up a suite at the Oscars, quickly gained cachet as a brand associated with the red carpet.
The publication of Mellon's autobiography happens next week. The book gives her version of the power struggles which went on within Jimmy Choo. Mellon, who considers herself a feminist, says she wanted to "encourage young women to find their voice, to value themselves more highly, and to speak up in the workplace".
The higher profile of fashion in popular culture has had an impact on the exhibitions favoured by museums. Shows such as the McQueen blockbuster at the Met have attracted record audiences due to the rise of interest in, and knowledge about, fashion among the public.
Olivier Saillard, director of the Musée Galliera, in Paris, recently told the New York Times that the success was because everyone felt "free to visit fashion museums".
The latest fashiondesigner to be awarded the honour of an exhibition is Dries Van Noten, who created the collection shown on his Paris catwalk on Wedndesday while preparing for an exhibition at Les Arts Decoratifs in the city next year.
This exhibition will honour the under-the-radar influence of a designer who brings a matchless taste level to the process of mixing influences – feminine with masculine, modern with traditional.
After a catwalk show which mixed crisp poplin with gold lamé snake print accordion pleats and ethnic carpet bags, Van Noten said he wanted "to take very feminine elements and see how far I could push them, that they would still be believable garments for modern women, strong women".
The venue for the Dries Van Noten show was a vast warehouse, one long wall of which was lined with bleachers for the audience, the facing wall veiled by a zig zag of Venetian-slatted screens in lustrous gold.
To accompany a show which the designer billed as "brittle yet tenacious" and "culturally informed", Colin Greenwood, of Radiohead, wearing what appeared to be Dad Jeans, played the bass guitar in the middle of the space, while the models stalked past in Japanese-style cork flatforms, or chunky sandals in cardinal red leather.
The musical accompaniment was a very Van Noten touch: eccentric but not silly, notable rather than fancy, it brought a masculine element into the feminine space of a catwalk awash with Fortuny pleats – where one dress alone used 16 metres of ruffled, tissue-thin silk.
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