Fabulous fashion movies for a girls night in. By Kerrie Hess.

My first brush with fashion came on an overseas trip to Paris at eleven years old with my parents. I remember arriving into Charles de Gaulle airport, to realise that my fluorescent pink and blue patchwork parker, just wasn’t going to cut it in the most chic city on the planet. Then later in the Latin quarter, I noticed Parisian girls my age wearing little black dresses with black hosiery, smoking and sipping on double espressos.  All with an air of ‘bored chic’ that only a Parisian can pull off with panache.  Looking down at my big orange Fanta and denim cut off’s, I realised I had a long way to go.

Excited with my new found fashion obsession, I decided to lobby to my parents for a black velvet tuxedo jacket that I found in a painfully expensive boutique in the ‘Opera’ district.  (Yves Saint Laurent would have been proud.) I was in a trance; all after only one day in the fashion mecca of Paris.

I never did get the jacket, but remember spreading the word to my friends back home that the ‘tendance du jour’ was the little black dress.  Ironically, many moons later, it still is.

And now, through a love of design and fashion (but a complete inability to sew) I have found my niche as a fashion and beauty illustrator for such fabulous brands as Vogue, Tatler, Chanel and Neiman Marcus.  And I can’t help but wonder if that fateful trip to the city of lights so many moons ago may have been the original spark to the creative path I now find myself on.

Top fashion movies for a girls night in –

• Funny Face http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050419/

• The Devil wears Prada

• Rear Window (a la Grace Kelly)

• Roman Holiday

• Confessions of a Shopaholic http://www.shopaholicmovie.com.au/ 

• Breakfast at Tiffany’s

• Sabrina http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047437/