Archive for February, 2008
London Fashion Week is reckoned to bring over £100 million to the city, when the fashion circus arrives every two years – and the Welsh capital is now eyeing that income and wondering if it too, can become a pit stop on the international circuit. Cardiff wants the fashion media coverage, which is reckoned to be worth around £24 million and fashion orders worth £40 million, as well as the more than five thousand visitors who attend LFW each time it takes place.
Cardiff’s own Fashion Week will be held for the very first time this March and will focus on spotlighting Welsh designers and models. If it’s a success, there will be another event in 2009. Designers who will be taking part include: Helen Rhiannon whose dress, designed for Welsh opera star Katherine Jenkins, appears in the Cool Cymru book and exhibition; and combination music collective/clothing designers Acid Casual whose T-shirts have decorated the cover of NME, both featuring alongside major international lines such as Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, and Armani.One of the primary features of the show will be the models – along with home-grown talent from Wales, catwalk stars from London and Los Angeles will fly in for the show - and talent scouts from Storm, LA Castings and JBT Models will be watching intently to see if the next big model is going to be found in Cardiff. And celebrity attendees may include Welsh stars Charlotte Church and Catherine Zeta Jones.
Charlotte Church courtesy of coolhawks88
February 29th, 2008
The supermarket chain has announced that it’s found a new way to deal with that pesky plastic packaging we all complain about – by turning it into clothing that it will sell back to us!
Apparently, in the next twelve months, we can expect to see clothes on their shelves made from recycled plastic that has been thrown away by shops or returned to recycling bins, including: soft drink bottles, fruit and vegetable packaging, and even meat trays. The plastic waste will be made into shirts, T-shirts, trousers and skirts which will then be sold at around 250 large Sainsbury’s stores, at a price comparable to the Tu fashion range that is Sainsbury’s in-house line. The clothes will be manufactured in Europe to save on transport emissions and costs, and in addition, Sainsbury’s has committed to having only Fair Trade cotton clothing in the next two years.
It’s an interesting approach – but several commentators from the sustainability world have already suggested that Sainsbury’s would do better to reduce packaging in the first place, and some consumers have raised their eyebrows at the idea of being asked to pay for clothing made from packaging recycled through Sainsbury’s, as it does seem a bit like paying twice for the same thing!
Recycling bins courtesy of soylentgreen23
February 26th, 2008
You might not be a football fan, but even so, there’s no doubt that football shirts, team support shirts, sportswear etc are big, big sellers. And the individual players are now getting in on an act that used to be reserved only for team sponsored. Frank Lampard scored his hundredth goal for Chelsea last week, (actually he scored both his hundredth and his hundred-and-first, but even he couldn’t have predicted that). When he pulled off his team shirt at the end of the match and stood before Chelsea’s fans, he was revealed to be wearing a sleeveless T-shirt which read, ‘100 not out. They are all for you. Thanks.‘
And Lampard’s gesture to the fans follows in a long tradition of footballers communicating via T-shirts under team shirts. Robbie Fowler is one of football’s highest-paid stars, but in 1997 he was fined by the Football Association for ‘disreputable behaviour’ - after scoring his second goal in Liverpool’s 3-0 Cup Winners’ Cup win over Brann Bergen of Norway he pulled up his red Liverpool shirt to display a T-shirt which stated ‘Support The 500 Sacked Dockers’. A politically active footballer? Well, why not?
And what does it say on the shirt of Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite? Well, he’s better known as the Brazilian footballer Kaká who plays for AC Milan and on the front of his football shirt it says, ‘I belong to Jesus’ – and if you ask Kaká his ambition, you won’t be surprised to find out that it’s to become an evangelical minister when he retires from football.
Frank Lampard image courtesy of Free-ers
February 22nd, 2008
Hand Embroidery
Originally embroidery was undertaken by hand and, in many cultures, it was work undertaken by women. Some of the most famous Western embroidery is religious, and can be found in the clothing and church decorations used in traditional religions. In India, sequins and beads are added to the design. Such work has always been expensive and reserved for the richest and most powerful members of society – Henry VIII had bed hangings, cushions for the royal barge and ‘hose’ (stockings) all embroidered with his favourite symbols and his monogram – and he used the same symbols with different monograms for stained glass windows in his palaces – the first monarch to ‘brand’ himself! He gave many of his craftsmen a headache though; each time he married a new wife, the poor men who made the windows had to take out the monogram and replace it with the initials of the most recent bride!
Direct embroidery
Direct embroidery is performed onto the fabric with the help of computerised machinery which gives a professional long-lasting appearance to the design and is equally suitable for text or logos. To give a perfect result, the logo has to be redrawn manually into a format that the embroidery machine can ‘read’ – this process is called digitisation. It allows for any kind of logo, but especially plain text in simple fonts to be converted to crisp, elegant designs that are easily legible on clothing and match the colours of your brand logo. Direct embroidery is hard-wearing and can be washed regularly without losing its shape or hues.
Embroidered white coats courtesy of cesarastudillo
February 19th, 2008
Tie-dye is back – or actually, ‘ombre‘ which is the technical term that the fashion industry uses for fabric that has been dip-dyed (like batik) or colour-bled (like tie dye). Dresses, T-shirts and even bags of ombre fabric turned up at New York Fashion Week and are appearing in London Fashion Week too, with Luella, Louis Vuitton and Alberta Ferretti leading the way and Prada featuring bags with insets of tie-dye, very much like patchwork, which are tipped to be one of this year’s big hits.
Colour is also the key feature of a new range of designer T-shirts commissioned by Notify who are better known for their jeans. They invited François Berthoud – better known as a fashion illustrator whose work appears in galleries all around the world - to create ‘Colours of Summer ‘08’, a range of T-shirts designed to work with denim. Berthoud has produced square and circle motifs on vest, cap and long-sleeved T-shirts in bold contrasting shades like purple on beige and yellow on black.
And the colour of money features in a new promotion … Marks & Spencer and Oxfam have created Clothes Exchange. To benefit you just have to donate some Marks and Spencer clothes to an Oxfam shop – in return you will be given a £5 voucher, valid for one month, to use with your next M&S clothing purchase of £35 or more.
Tie dye courtesy of psd
February 15th, 2008
A survey from Source-e, which specialises in research for the marketing and promotional industries, has found that what we always suspected is true. When we’re given a freebie, most of us keep it – but what’s more surprising is that 89% of those who replied to the survey keep small items of promotional merchandise in their work bag, briefcase or handbag.
69 % of those receiving promotional merchandise keep it rather than giving it to a member of their family or a colleague. This offers strong evidence for the positive link between promotional merchandise, branding and sales and shows that the British public don’t only retain and use items (like T-shirts, which are very popular ‘giveaways’ with the public) but are equally happy to carry smaller promotional items with them When questioned about an item of promotional merchandise they had been given and were currently carrying around 23% replied that it was a pen while 10% of respondents said it was a USB stick and a further 10% said a keyring.
71% cent of respondents had heard of the company that presented them with the item and exactly the same number of people could (without looking) name the company that had presented them with the item suggesting that repeat exposure to an item that is used on a regular basis is kept at the forefront of people’s minds – and that’s why promotional clothing works so well too, because it reinforces the brand and name of a company in the customer’s mind, whenever they see a uniformed member of staff or a member of the public wearing that company’s logo.
Brand T-shirt courtesy of adactio
February 12th, 2008
In a week when Naomi Campbell has been up-front about how other models threatened to boycott shows if she wasn’t chosen to appear, the issue of colour bias in the fashion world has been very prominent. DKNY has taken its own route to a kaleidoscope of models. The Mark Van S. digital photo booth, is a patent pending device that has appeared all over the world: New York, Vegas, Switzerland, Montreal, Seoul, Paris, and now London. And if you pop into Selfridges and head for the second floor, you get the chance to experience yourself as a fashion model.
The booth instantly (yes, before you can stop it!) projects your picture out of the Selfridges windows for the whole of Oxford Street to observe and the booth’s specially designed studio lighting makes everybody look fantastic. Every new image is added to the slide show that runs constantly from 10am to 11pm for four weeks. You can take as many shots as you like and if one impresses you so much that you want it for your portfolio, a copy can be printed instantly for £1.00 – and because all proceeds of the digital photo booth will go to the Red Cross, this might be an ideal Valentine surprise for the shopping phobic man in your life. Why not whisk him to Oxford Street and project a his’n’hers image for the world to see?
Fashion model courtesy of Peter Duhon
