Skindelle Stories

Black-Tie Dressing: What to Wear Underneath

The black-tie gown is a structural achievement. What goes underneath it determines whether that structure works for four hours or begins to fail at hour two.

Date Night Outfits: The Invisible Preparation

There is a restaurant in Lisbon's Bairro Alto, on the Rua da Rosa, that has maybe twelve tables and a menu that changes every few days depending on what arrived at the market that morning. The rese...

New Year's Eve: Afternoon to Midnight Dress Prep

The evening starts at the dressing table at four in the afternoon. For the woman who is doing it right, it starts earlier. It starts in November, when the dress is chosen and tested and the questio...

Cannes: Film Festival Season and Yacht Dinners

Cannes in May is not Cannes. It is thirteen days in which a city of 75,000 people is replaced by a different city, denser and louder and operating on an entirely different social logic, and then it...

Holiday Party Season: Dressing for the Dark Months

The invitation arrives in November. Black tie. The Guildhall. Eighth of December. By the time it is framed in your mind as something to think about, three more arrive: the company dinner, the frien...

Sleeveless at Work: Professional Dressing Without Visible Lingerie

The presentation is at nine. The room is a glass-walled conference space on the fourteenth floor of a tower in Canary Wharf with a view of the Thames and air conditioning calibrated for a building ...