Now that fashion week is over I can share with you the rest if the photos that I took and the sweet memories that they remind me. This year fashion week was a remarkable adventure! So much young talent, so many beautiful designs to look for, clothes to die for. On my opinion, London has gradually managed to take the place among Paris, Milan and New York of a fashion capital and from what I saw the past week, it absolutely deserves it.
The collection itself had a strong urban sportswear slant and incorporates shearlings, leather and jersey seperates and dresses mixing these items with sharp tailoring and coats all within a range of rich jewel tone colours like deep ruby red and navy violet set against a backdrop of anthracite greys and burnished gold tones.
Enlarged and reduced Japanese woodblock prints added visual depth to the collection as did the use of embellished sash type belts along with more novel items like glass beaded and printed leggings and Seditionary style bondage trousers in metallic leather.
Daniella Issa Helayel's collection teetered between smart clothes for grown women and overly embellished flotsam and jetsam for It girls. The latter may have brought Issa initial attention in its early days, but Helayel should start focusing on the former, because, to go by what was on the runway, that is where her strengths actually lie. A favourite of mine were the plain gray wool dresses, as well as a long black number that came towards the end of the show.And in case we judge by the Issa's front row (Peaches Geldof and Pippap Middleton) there a lot more to expect from the English brand in future.
In 2009, Bally tasked fifteen students, selected by Louise Wilson from both the 1st and 2nd year of Central St Martins MA fashion design course to submit women’s shoe designs for Bally.
The brief was to create designs that have high editorial values, and a strong luxury feel, keeping in mind Bally’s heritage for exquisite craftsmanship and highest quality leathers. Jointly Central Saint Martins and Bally selected five out of the fifteen entrants to have their work developed at Bally’s workshops in Florence, Italy, and Caslano, Switzerland. The chosen students work specifically focused on creating innovative heel shapes, each choosing to create styles that accentuate a different part of the foot, making for a wonderfully diverse group of footwear.
The five students, Estefani Cortes Harker, William Hendry, Frida Hofslagare, Stephanie Turner, and Charles Youssef, were taken to the last and heel manufacturers in Italy, to have the foundations of their designs realized into three dimensions. They then went on to Bally’s Swiss shoe factories, to work with the craftsmen at the modelleria beginning the prototype process.
Four revisions and some months later Bally can present the results of the exciting collaboration. Bally and Central Saint Martins intend to continue collaborating for the foreseeable future, ultimately some or part of the student’s designs will be incorporated into future Bally collections.
Fashion can so easily isolate itself in a bubble of trends, but when it reaches out beyond its boundaries into another world, such as music or art, the results are often inspiring. One such example is the current collaboration between the Serpentine Gallery and Pringle of Scotland.
To celebrate the label’s 195th birthday and to coincide with the gallery’s 40th, a group of artists has been invited to create fresh pieces using the twinset and argyle pattern, both recognized as being typically Pringle. Each new work, developed alongside Pringle Creative Director Claire Waight Keller, will be limited to 195 editions: investment buys, surely.
The chosen artists, who all have links with Scotland, include two Turner Prize winners, an Oscar recipient and the band Franz Ferdinand. Performance artists and Academy Award-winner Tilda Swinton has called her work “The Twinset of My Dreams”. To create it, Swinton destroyed the garments, then re-darned the damage, just like her granny had. Jewellery designer Waris Ahluwalia worked with Swinton on the buttons and a brooch.
Duglas Gordon, the 1997 Turner Prize winner, believes he is the perfect person to design for Pringle. His reworking shows knitted tattoo motifs “like a Glaswegian plumber’s”.
Photographer Ryan McGinley based his work on the Seventies cult novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Other artists include the 2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright; Daniel Shrigley, whose “Annoying” sweater had a label intentionally hanging out of the back in order “to annoy those sat behind on the bus”; Stephen Sutcliffe; Luke Fowler and Alasdair Gray. Julien David of Colette in Paris and Carla Sozzani of 10 Corso Como in Milan also contributed their own versions. All the designs are made of 100% cashmere and are produced in Scotland, the natal land of the brand. With this collaboration and their return to England Pringle are closer to their roots and history than ever.
