A week before the major event that is London Fashion Week, the documentary Girl Model by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin will be shown in cinemas around London. It follows a 13-year-old aspiring model from Siberia as she is sent to Tokyo by her agency and gives us  a disturbing insight into the world of modelling.

London is the first city in which a trades union, Equity, has agreed to protect models. Rachel Blais is involved with Girl Model and advocates models’ rights: ‘On a shoot or during a show, a model is constantly working. Equity has guidelines on pay, working hours, allowed breaks, payment transparency etcetera. Without normal office hours, it is good to know your rights. Especially for young models, male and female, who won’t have the confidence to set boundaries.’

The size zero and the age debate seem linked as Kim Choong-Wilkins and Pliny Champion, the team behind menswear brand Bodybound note: ‘Our ideal is a developed masculine frame and we find it hard to get those kinds of models. Society is obsessed with youth but 14-16 year olds do not generally have developed bodies. If you tackle the age limit, you will automatically affect the size of the models.’

Rachel had challenging experiences herself when she started modelling at 17. She would like the model age limit raised to 18; she was spotted at the age of 14 but finished high school first: ‘At 18 at least you are legally an adult and if you have finished high school, it is easier to move on after your modelling career.’

She urges models to sign up on the Equity website; the fee they pay gives them access to free legal advice, for example, and insurance on and off work: ‘Protect yourself and the money you work for. The more models sign up, the bigger our voice and the bigger difference we can make for ourselves.’

As for the fashion industry’s attitude to young models, the Bodybound team reckons it can never be tackled by the sum of its parts: ‘There has to be consensus if there is to be change and something more concrete than the lip service given to the ‘black’ issue for example. I think that our position should be made not from a designer’s perspective, but from a human one.’

Girl Model is showing at Hackney Picturehouse, Ritzy Picturehouse and Soho Curzon from February 10, 2012.

Bodybound’s collection will be showing as part of VFS’s Ones to Watch on February 22, 2012 at London Fashion Week.

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

Is Size Zero Really the Answer?

Do the words ‘vegan footwear’ make you clutch your hair in despair? Do nightmares of outrageously comfortable shoes that look exactly like pixie ears pass through your brain? You don’t want to join the banana-skin-eating brigade, you say? Beyond Skin vegan shoes may just change your mind.

Maybe you won’t become a raw-food Nazi overnight. And maybe pepperoni pizza will still beckon on a Tuesday evening. But Beyond Skin pumps are more feminine and flirty than Deborah Kerr. And more sexy-assassin than The Bride. (Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration.)

The Beyond Skin story is one of survival. It’s what your grandma used to say about success. Talent is great and all, but perseverance despite setbacks is what will get you there in the end. For Beyond Skin, the vision to produce cute vegan shoes that harm ‘no humans, animals or small children’ began in 2001.

The idea was to produce the shoes locally in the UK, supporting local industry and enterprise and featuring ethical business practices. But it was two years before the small team even found their first factory, which went bust shortly after.

Two defunct manufacturers and many demoralising years later, a London family-run factory agreed to produce their shoes, and Natalie Portman took their label to the first step in its long-term vision by wearing Beyond Skins to the Golden Globes and in the film V for Vendetta.

A boutique line of high-end, designer footwear called Sui Generis was born. But the team quickly realised that in order to offer wholesale, relatively affordable shoes to a wider clientele than Natalie Portman, they would have to consider manufacturing options outside of the UK. Now their wholesale line is produced in Alicante, Spain.

Says designer Natalie Dean, ‘We do not use any animal products in the creation of our shoes. All our production is in Spain and all our materials are either Spanish or Italian and sourced as close to the factory as possible. Our focused eco fabric is Dinamica, which is made from 100 per cent recycled PET plastics (water bottle lids), is fully sustainable and so durable it is used by Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar for their high-end interiors.’

Dean, a veteran of the music industry, and Heather Whittle, a graduate from Cordwainers, have run the label together since 2005.

Dean is inspired by Anita Roddick, who shared Dean’s commitment to the environment, and was the founder of the sustainable practices of The Body Shop and a passionate supporter of The Big Issue.

Other inspirations include strong, politically awake women such as Katherine Hamnett, who is famous for her business ethics and her political T-shirts (think Wham!, Wake Me Up Before You Go Go), and Blake Mycoskie, who produces Argentine-inspired TOMS shoes and is known for giving a free pair of shoes to someone in need for every pair that he sells.

Visit the website for news of Beyond Skin lines, and check out its winter sale which includes Joanie – a ballet slipper in red faux-suede; Vixen – uber-trendy wedge over-knee boots; and lush and sparkly Sirene pumps. The spring line is on sale soon, and Beyond Skin is soon taking its ethos into producing other accessories. Don’t miss it at fashion buying event Pure London in February.

Pure London takes place February 12-14 at Olympia.

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

Vegan Shoes at Beyond Skin

Valentine’s Day approaches, and you’re thinking ‘how drunk can I get and how long can I hide under my duvet?’ That is if you’re single, and February 14 is your WDOTY (Worst Day of the Year.) Or you’re a guy in a relationship and wondering what on earth to get for your girlfriend.

This second kind of thinking includes musings on important life questions such as a). What kind of gift can I afford? b). What does the kind of gift I get say about the current status of our relationship? c). Depending on what I get, what are the chances that I’m going to be her favourite person in the world, and what are the odds that I’ll spend the night on the couch? So, what do the presents you get your girlfriend say about her?

1. You’re so cute: Lollipops Lindienne Rain Boots (£22.50) say that you think your girlfriend is fun, kooky and so cool. These are definitely for the off-beat girl, the girl that wants to slosh through puddles with you, feed hungry kittens, wear skinny jeans and work at that homeless shelter over Christmas. She’d rather go out for a paintballing session, followed by a chunky burrito in Soho than be wined and dined at some hoity-toity restaurant.

2. You’re hot, hot, hot: Lingerie is really a present for you as much as it is for her. It says you think she is sexy and feminine and a sex goddess. This woman is more Belle de Jour and less Betty Boop. More Veronica than Betty. More a dominatrix than a dog walker. Warning: This present doesn’t work so well if a). She’s already asked you to slow things down, or b). She reminds you twice every date that she has a brain, too, and oh, her eyes are over here, under her forehead. It might work wonders, though, if you’re in a bit of a romantic slump. Check out Ryder and Rowe, the new kids on the lingerie block.

3. You have a heart and a head and you look fabulous: Does your girlfriend have more to say about the dangers of capitalism than about her favourite shade of lipstick? Can she rattle off Marx and Engels by heart, but looks blank – or actually hostile – if you mention Miranda Priestly? Does she hug trees, read a lecture to unethical cow traders, and join bra-free marches? And does she also have a secret desire, now and again, to wear really cool and sexy stuff? Your girlfriend is the perfect candidate for Beyond Skin vegan shoes (£69). Get her a pair of red Jojo Faux-Suede pumps.

4. You’re an arty type: Not everyone can carry off clothes that look like a mating of Jackson Pollock with mad scribblings about Che Guevara. Of course, not everyone wants to. But if your girlfriend stays up half the night painting her walls, and wakes up with dark circles under her eyes, if she seems troubled by the workings of her soul, if she is hungry for life and passion to consume her, if she is smiling one minute and throwing a fit about the state of the human condition the next – then Desigual might just be the right place to shop. The Amy dress is just the ticket for spring and is £119, though this pricey store still has a big winter sale on!

5. Will you marry me: Jewellery is serious stuff. Many people choose Valentine’s Day to pop the question – though, yes, be warned it may be a little tiny bit of a cliché. Still, if you’re not worried about that, and your girlfriend is the kind who wants you to romance her socks off, then go the whole hog. A sexy weekend in Paris wouldn’t be out of place. Even if you’re buying a present for a very special girlfriend or wife, look at Mimi sterling silver earrings at By Brilliant or check out the range of rings.

6. Or take a walk through Soho and discover a little gem of a concept store (Cabinet of Dreams at 9, Noel Street). Domestic abuse charity Women’s Aid are giving you the chance this February (until Valentine’s Day) to visit this store front that houses a 3D installation of quaint bell-jars – some chocker-block with chewy sweets (A Portion of Spoilt Rotten, by Suck and Chew), others that house tiny Doll’s House type characters reading a book, enjoying a quiet moment together under a wintery tree and a romantic lantern (Some Old-fashioned Romance, by Marie-Louise Jones). Make a donation to Women’s Aid, text a number to the charity, and your girlfriend will receive a virtual gift that shows you really care. Donate £2-£20

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

Fabulous Gifts for Valentine’s Day

So, what do you get when you mix a Nigerian palette with the minarets of Budapest and the design know-it-all of fashion capital London? An intensely modern collection of womenswear with kooky cuts and breathtaking simplicity.

Funmilayo Csilla Deri was born in Nigeria, and having traipsed her way through Switzerland, Hungary and North Wales, Deri is now a quintessential Londoner – belonging everywhere and nowhere at once.

After leaving behind a prosaic banking career that didn’t curl her toes, Deri, taking a leap of faith, trained at the Istituto Marangoni in London, and started her fashion label Funlayo Deri in March 2011. Her designs show the Marangoni influence in their trendy, melting-pot look, and reveal her startlingly postmodern sensibilities.

In her spring/summer 2012 collection, a bias-cut silver sheath fits like a glove, and shows just a peak of an indigo animal-print slip underneath – a layering, you might say, of space age couture with a little Belle de Jour. Says Deri, ‘I design for the modern woman; she’s confident, sophisticated, captivating, a woman who loves life, is cultured, and has an individual sense of style. She is not a slave to trends, but is a trendsetter herself.’

Deri seems just as comfortable experimenting with silk, taffeta and crochet, as she is with earthier hemp, and mimicking this juxtaposition, her models, though dressed luxuriously in flyaway purples and chic geometric patterns, are often framed by industrial murk and urban skylines.

The spring/summer 2012 collection is inspired by architectural lines, and is a potpourri of the strident and the sexy. Her collections stem both from her mix of cultural backgrounds, and her mood of the moment. She chooses her themes ‘based on what is going on around me at the given time, and stirs me towards certain music, people, places.’

Her autumn/winter 2011 collection displayed at Africa Fashion Week in New York, and her spring/summer 2012 at Felicities Presents, during London Fashion Week. Her penchant for triangles and trapezoids shows a glimpse of Balenciaga 2011 collections, and the influence of the granddaddy of geometric patterns, Yves Saint Laurent.

Even from the time of her first collection, Labour of Love, which Deri dedicated to the woman who labours, a collection that showed a mere hint of a distinctly personal style, but didn’t quite come into its own, Deri has travelled a long way in just a year, and her designs seem more comfortable in their own skin – a trait that they perhaps share with their dynamic creator.

Funlayo Deri
1 Fairmont Avenue (by appointment only)
Canary Wharf
E14 9PW

Tel: 020 7987 4240

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

Designer to Watch: Funlayo Deri

Straight, glossy groomed hair is now possible without battling with a hairdryer, straightening irons and a gallon of mousse. Sounds too good to be true? It isn’t!

Since I spent a few hours (well three to be precise) at Brooks and Brooks in central London having the new KeraStraight treatment, my hair has been a glossy dream.

The concept is not new, but the product is formaldehyde-free and the keratin-based formula is kind to even damaged hair. The process involves injecting the hair with pure keratin (something your body produces naturally to give you healthy nails, skin and hair) before being sealed in with straightening irons.

It’s expensive – from £180 (including a shampoo, conditioner and blow dry) – but because it lasts for two to four months, it’s definitely more than worth it.

At my appointment, I sat down to start my transformation, starting with a hair wash and a rough blow dry. Valerie Benavides, my stylist, then painted a lotion into my hair before blow-drying it into a sleek straight style. As she dried, great clouds of smoke blowed out as though it was burning my hair. It wasn’t, though; don’t panic. There were no nasty chemical smells and my head wasn’t burning as it has done with some other brands; the ‘smoke’ is just harmless steam. Valerie then ran straightening irons over my hair over and over again, leaving it wholly smooth, and sealing the keratin into my hair cuticles.

I was then left for 30 minutes to read magazines and sip on Buck’s Fizz as the products seeped into my hair and set. It was then another wash, before blow-drying it to finish.

When the treatment was finished, I was amazed by the results. The kinks and frizz that I am used to have well and truly disappeared and my hair looked uber-shiny too!

It’s early days, but the blow dry is still intact. I wake up most mornings to my hair still smooth and all it needs is a quick brush and a run over with the strengtheners. I’m keen to see how it looks in a few months’ time, but I’m pretty confident it will still be straight. I’ve got a KeraStraight shampoo and conditioner, made without sodium chloride, which can strip away the keratin and already I am using less and less of my GHDs, which can only be a good thing. My appointment is already booked for four months’ time; there is no way I can go back to unruly hair!

Brooks & Brooks
13-17 Sicilian Avenue
Bloomsbury
WC1A 2QH

Tel: 020 7405 8111

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

KeraStraight…For Unruly Hair

As an east London local, there’s no telling the number of times I’ve been reminded of the borough’s colourful past. Meet a local, read a book or take any tour through the back alleys of E1 and you might be told of the bombs that dropped on the cobbled streets of our beloved Brick Lane back in the 1940s.

Well you should get to putting up that Anderson shelter because it’s happening again, only this time the fallout is rather fashionable!

This month is another Blitz Party, one of London’s most unique nights out. Described as ‘extreme fancy dress’ to me on Twitter when I inquired about the rather exclusive and secretive event I was lucky to go to back in November, I just knew this one would be good.

Forget the rather relaxed dress codes of the Cargo and Catch nightclubs; instead you’ll need to be ’1940s glam, home front utility clothing and allied uniform’ or you’re not coming in. It might sound rather fascist to be so strict (excuse the historical pun there!) but it’s the Blitz Party’s attention to detail and eagerness to make the night so special that really makes it stand out as my night of the year 2011.

Vintage will work a treat (and there’s no shortage of vintage boutiques around here) so it’s tea dresses and hair curls for the girls and white shirts, braces, flat caps or full military attire for the guys.

I opted for an American GI uniform, along with a few of my buddies from the trenches, and so with the utmost excitement (we’d been given out shore leave, of course!) we marched off to The Arches – a grenade’s throw from Shoreditch High Street station.

Hand over the ticket and walk through the doors. Immediately you’ll be overwhelmed and amazed by the authenticity of it all: British flags flying from the roof, bars with sandbags propping them up and a cocktail list with drinks straight from the era – did you bring your ration book? Even the odd air raid siren and the searching sky lights will put the hairs up on the back of your neck. As soon as the skies have been deemed safe, the live music’s back on: authentic 1940s swing.

Through one set of doors you’ve travelled 70 years and you’re not lost in time, you’re with friends. You’re comfortable. You’re confident. You’re just having pure, honest, wholesome fun.

And that’s the beauty of the Blitz. It brings together the 1940s and our own decade with such ease and innocence. Long gone are the boozy lads on the pull you might meet on the streets this Saturday – instead you’ll find gents, genuinely wanting a dance (that’s swing, not crunk) and beautiful ladies, not slags.

Winston Churchill once said: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat…’

I’d be tempted to agree, and I’ll be giving it my all come later this month when the bombs begin to fall.

The Blitz Party takes place at irregular set dates throughout the year. The last events were on November 9 and New Year’s Eve – the first of 2012 will take place on January 28.

The Blitz Party
The Arches
Shoreditch
EC2A 3PQ

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

A Stylish Bombing of East London

Nell Gwyn (1651-1687) throws you a deliciously superior glance as her robes fall off her shoulders and reveal a not-so-coy vision of milky breasts. King Charles II’s mistress, mother of at least two of his bastards, and one of the first actresses to perform at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, Gwyn seems exclusively to be painted getting into or out of her clothes. As one of the visitors to the National Portrait Gallery commented, ‘This one seemed to be cursed with a series of wardrobe malfunctions.’

Nell Gwyn’s mother Old Madam Gwyn is said to have been an alcoholic brothel owner, and accusations of prostitution followed Gwyn into her foray into the royal courts. Samuel Pepys, a fan of her charms, wrote in his diary in 1667 of Gwyn’s assertion that she was ‘but one man’s whore’ even though she was ‘brought up in a bawdy-house’.

The First Actresses exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is a series of portraits by celebrated painters, such as Simon Verelst, Sir Peter Lely and Thomas Gainsborough, of the first actresses to be allowed on the English stage. Many of these pioneering leading ladies are painted with enticing peeks of nipple and flesh, combined with a self-preserving hauteur. Sarah Siddons, actress and reading instructor to King George III’s children, is painted with a stately but melancholic gaze by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1804. Mary Robinson, favoured mistress of the Prince of Wales in the 1770s, is pictured by John Hoppner as a lady of fashion, with gloriously plumed hat and inviting décolletage.

What is it about actresses and dancers throughout history that leaves them prey to roving eyes and fingers? While the 1660s allowed actresses to perform on stage for the first time, these women were considered disreputable and dangerous, and encountered hostility from their hungry public. Automatically branded as whores, the performers teetered between the desires to succeed in their art, be disease-free while living in penury as labourers and mistresses, and to gain some measure of respect both for their acting talents and their throw-it-in-your-face personal lives.

Mary Robinson is reputed to have been offered £20,000 to become the Prince of Wales’s (later King George IV) mistress, after he was captivated by her performance as Perdita. The prince was soon bored of her, however, and never paid up the money, and she not only lost her reputation, but also her position as an actress. She revolted by becoming a successful poet and playwright, and a writer of feminist treatises.

Some of the choicest pieces in the exhibition are perhaps the ones least touted in the press. These are hilarious satirical etchings by artists such as William Hogarth and James Gillray. One, titled Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, is a scene of dressers, seamstresses, half-dressed actresses, surrounded by a mind-numbing quantity of green room paraphernalia. Another, this one by Gillray, is simply titled The Whore’s Last Shift (1779).

The First Actresses exhibition is showing until January 8 at:

National Portrait Gallery
St Martin’s Place
Trafalgar Square
WC2H 0HE

Tel: 020 7306 0055

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

Fashion and Femininity

New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken. So, let’s make some easy ones. Let’s take the advice of style guru Nina Garcia as our sparkly aphorism for the season. The Project Runway host says in her book The Little Black Book of Style, it is not a beautiful woman that sustains her interest, but a confident one. It is not the woman in a plain black dress that catches her eye, but the woman ‘in the interesting shirt and the vintage skirt’ that makes her ‘immediately want to know where she got them.’ Here are my top five fashion resolutions for the New Year…

1. I don’t have to wear what the Duchess of Cambridge is wearing
Repeat this mantra every night before you go to bed. Say it when you go shopping. Remind yourself of it when you are dodging women in Oxford Street who aren’t looking where they’re going, but are doing that desperate, craning-the-neck-to-look-in-shop-windows thing.

I know the high street is flooded with lace. You can’t sneeze for being confronted with long-sleeved lace dresses, sequinned Jenny Packham-lookalikes, and midnight-toned Issa remakes. But the appealing thing about the Duchess of Cambridge’s style is that it is uniquely her own. There is a fairy-tale princess aura to her clothing. The dresses are just a tad conventional. There are never odd bulges, or waist lines hanging in the wrong place. No Princess Beatrice-type fashion moments that would more likely put her in the Rocky Horror Hall of Fame than Harper’s best dressed list. That’s what we love.

So, find that personal style that is your best accessory for the New Year.

2. I don’t have to spend, spend, spend
They’re telling us that what got us into this recession is that we spent way, way more than we had. But, uh, then they’re saying that the best way to get out of this slump is to – hold your breath – spend, spend, spend. Well, let’s not.

Let’s instead check out vintage wear and charity shops. Call me an elitist, but I hate that charity shop smell you get sometimes. You know it. It’s a mixture of stale sweat and old carpets. Possibly diluted with cat urine. But show me a good charity shop, a non-smelly one where there are psychedelic, poufy-sleeved tops from the Eighties, Fifties’ full-skirted tea dresses, fitted Ted Baker coats for £12, and you’ll have me eating out of your hands.

3. I won’t be trigger-happy with make-up
The best favour you can do your skin is to moisturise, drink lots of water, and get those essential cardio workouts. Loading on the foundation, drawing an extra pair of lips around your own, laying on the kohl with a hand as heavy as King Kong’s are fashion no-no’s. The same goes for buying clothes that are a size or three too small, giving your hair cheap rinses, and turning orange in the hopes of looking like Freida Pinto.

4. I’ll check out eco-friendly brands
When you’re e-window-shopping, check out the latest in trendy eco-fashion – hot young designers that are blitzing the scene with fairly traded, eco-friendly material.

Amana’s hemp and cotton fabrics are tailored into comfortable wear by Moroccan women who work for fair-trade cop-ops. For more floral prints and youthful trends, check out Annie Greenabelle who specialises in recycled materials. Then there is Beyond Skin, a homegrown, family-run brand that specialises in trendy pumps, while Ciel gives you the things people miss about all-hemp brands – silken sheens and fitted cuts. Or, if you just want to be able to say, I’m wearing a Bono today, well then, check out Edun, a label founded by Bono and his wife Ali Hewson to provide ethical employment to fashion-workers.

5. I’ll clear out and throw away
Make this an affirmation for your clothes, those uncomfortable heels that make you cry that you keep telling yourself you’ll wear again one day, and all those habits that you hate in yourself but that are more stubborn and resistant than a stain of Merlot on a white silk dress. Give things you no longer wear to charity shops. (Wash them first – please!) Clear out your closet. Detox your head.

Image by Annie Greenabelle

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

Fashion Resolutions for the New Year

So, you’re travelling in a bus in New York City. (Already, this is starting to seem like an impossible Christmas season fantasy in this time of recession? Stay with me here.) Junior Bazaar magazine spots you and thinks that you may just be the cat’s pyjamas. That is, you have what it takes to be the next supermodel. Test shots are taken. They are sent to the magazine. You wait, and wait, and wait some more.

The mission is a colossal failure. But hang on. You get an opportunity to shoot for Vogue, and suddenly you are making $7.50 an hour to model for the world’s best-selling fashion magazine. Did I mention that you are 13 years old? (Now you can’t tell if this is a dream to be enjoyed with a glass of mulled wine, or an Oliver Twist parody…)

The London College of Fashion presents a retrospective of Carmen Dell’Orefice, supermodel extraordinaire, a woman born in 1931 at the height of the Great Depression, on Welfare Island, New York. A woman who has invented and reinvented herself more times than Christmas turducken. This tiny, but exquisite, exhibition is a yummy hors d’oeuvre for the holidays, a glimpse of a 66-year career of fashion’s favourite muse, not to mention the skill of the world’s best photographers that daily walk the line between fashion and art.

Magazine covers from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, advertisements for Elizabeth Arden and something called Hunt’s Catsup, portraits by Cecil Beaton and Horst P Horst feature in this exhibition which could easily be five times bigger and not put you to sleep.

In Irving Penn’s Girl with Fruit, Shoe and Butterflies, Vogue, 1946, Dell’Orefice sits surrounded by half a melon and a black leather pump. Butterflies flit around her, one sits on her shoulder, another on her shoe. And it is impossible to know if Dell’Orefice has just served tea and croquettes to the local chapter of the Women’s Institute, or butchered the latest in a long line of hapless victims in her basement.

Her Italian father was a violinist, her Hungarian mother, a dancer. Dell’Orefice was training to be a ballet dancer at the Swoboda School when she developed rheumatic fever. Her dance career may still have flourished if she hadn’t grown three inches in height during her illness. By the late 1940s, she was considered too underweight and anaemic to be glamorous.

A visit to Condé Nast’s in-house doctor, however, pulled a miracle transformation out of the bag, and suddenly, Dell’Orefice glowed with health and vitality, not to mention an Amazonian bosom. This led, inevitably, to a flash career as a lingerie model at Vanity Fair and an asking price of $300 an hour.

Several decades, three husbands, and an honorary doctorate later, silver-haired Dell’Orefice laughs in your face in a series of photographs by Ali Mahdavi, recently commissioned by the London College of Fashion. As Norman Parkinson once said of the fashion camera’s favourite model, she ‘didn’t look bad for an old bag.’

Carmen: A Life in Fashion runs until January 28, 2012 at:

London College of Fashion
20 John Princes Street
Marylebone
W1G 0BJ

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

Carmen: A Life in Fashion

Chanel’s tasty Métiers D’Art 2012 collection, entitled Paris-Bombay, actively and unapologetically set out to woo the Indian upper-class customer who has more pocket money than she knows what to do with. Fuelled by a booming economy, and a desire to consume, consume, consume, India seems to be the next destination of choice for the big design houses.

At first glance, designer Karl Lagerfeld’s collections, inspired variously by Byzantium, Shanghai and Moscow in recent years, follow the path of fin de siècle designers like Paul Poiret. These designers and artists married early 20th century art deco with orientalist acquisition to market to the European fashionista the mystery, exoticism and opulence of the Orient. But peer a little closer.

The mingling of French lace with lavishly embroidered anarkali gowns, of elaborate hand-chokers and tikkas dripping down on to the forehead, is not just selling the fantasy India of elephants and maharajas to Europe, but to the generously pocketed Indian consumer. It is the Orient marketed to the Orient. Go figure.

The Paris-Bombay collection, in which models paraded their tight churidars paired with gold lamé, their lashings of pearls and their kolhapuri slippers down aisles studded with items from an Indian-themed banquet – mountains of fruit, ornate candelabra and, I want to say, chicken tikka, but who knows? – is the orientalist version of Willy Wonka’s party. Instead of children whose brains have been addled by sugary confections, however, the invitations were exclusively given out to design and pop culture royalty, and the Parisian ton.

Seventy-three-year-old Lagerfeld, famously attired in his indoor sunglasses, white ponytail, and Tourette’s-like quotes, says he has never been to India and that ‘It’s much more inspiring not to go to places than to go.’ Hmm? What does that even mean? He went on to say that women all over the world often respond to recession by dressing up in their most lavish jewels. Off to Accessorize I go…

Lagerfeld owns more than 200 exclusive stores around the world, and designs not only for Chanel, but for artists including Madonna, stores such as H&M and Diesel, and his own fashion house. He likes to periodically remind the world that he is still alive by using fur in his shows and employing strippers to model his lines. The Chanel Métiers D’Art collections have showcased the best of French craftsmanship for the last eight years.

Priced somewhere between Chanel’s prêt-a-porter gear (£2000) and couture (£20,000), the 2012 collection showcases Lagerfeld’s interpretations of Indian fashion history.

But there’s more. Now we can have Lagerfeld right on our doorstep in London – if we want him. Lagerfeld has joined hands with Net-a-Porter to bring the avid online fashionista (and the male version thereof) all kinds of urban clothing in monochromatic and metallic textures at ready-to-wear prices. The micro-site launches on 25 January 2012, and features competitions to win spending money and play with cool apps to make people who aren’t Karl Lagerfeld look like they are… Need I say more?

Image by Marinshe courtesy of Flickr

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

Karl Lagerfeld’s Paris-Bombay Voyage