Entries Tagged 'fashion' ↓

by
Gregory Mitnick

This episode of Cool Hunting Video surveys the fashion and people at São Paulo Fasion Week's Winter 2009 shows. With commentary from designers and writers, as well as plenty of runway looks and peeks backstage, it’s a snapshot of what’s happening in Brazilian fashion now.

Brasileirismos, or Brazil-isms, is admittedly a redundant theme for the already distinctly Brazilian collections at the Winter 2009 edition of São Paulo Fashion Week, which ended last Friday. The biggest change, compared to past seasons, was the massive influx of international journalists flown in (including our own Ami Kealoha and Greg Mitnick; video forthcoming) to provide coverage of an event whose organizers are pushing for it to stay on the fashion map.

2nd Floor was strong all around (above). Taking inspiration from the 40’s and 50’s era of aviation, the result as a romantic collection of skirts with plane appliques, bomber jackets and schoolboy looks.

Do Estilista bounced back to form after last season’s fantasy-fueled outfits. This year designer Marcelo Sommer used prints taken off tiles and dishrags from Holland (above).

The Cavalera show took on a mysticism and folklorism inspired by an annual festival that takes place on the Brazilian Amazonian island of Paratins. Animal prints appeared among colorful, saturated pieces (below left).

Oestudio came through again with their expected element of surprise, integrating social commentary into fashion. This year they seemed to criticize society’s tendency to turn a blind eye to serious issues (above right).

Always intriguing and fascinating, Osklen’s collection used cotton sweatsuit material to create rather conceptual pieces. Playing with volume and unexpected pinnings created interesting silhouettes. Proving that function need not come at the cost of appeal, I especially enjoyed their rubber items (above).

Also on Cool Hunting SPFW Summer 2009 and SPFW Winter 2008.

What it does

FashionFreax is a European fashion network based out of Germany. The site plays host to everything fashion related and it goes without saying that there are plenty of visual treats to keep the most haughty fashionista amused. Street style shots a la FaceHunter are posted to be rated and reviewed. There’s a mix and match section where you can browse various outfits and styles, and tag them as hot or not. Check out random style shots from site members. You’ve also got a fashion map which maps out the hottest locales for Euro fashion. From there, you can find out about events, new designers, and sample sales. Upload your pictures and check out what your fellow chic mates are sportin’. Registration is free.

In their own words

“fashionfreax is the european fashion community. Register now!

Discover new outfits, fashion designers, events, shops, upload your pictures and inspire others (>>Styles), find the best insider tips in terms of Fashion (>>Fashion map).

Curious?

There is only one thing left to do: Register here, to discover more of fashionfreax and to be part of the community. 100% free!”

Why it might be a killer

This is an accessible fashion community designed specifically for European fashionistas. Noteworthy features include the fashion map and the outfit snapshots which detail price and purchase store of each item worn. It’s a not too shabby start.

Some questions

For a fashion site, it lacks a certain style. The design isn’t as coherent and attractive as it could be. There’s no allure, which is crucial for a site like this. It would be nice to see customizable profiles, a separate section for designers, and perhaps forums for discussing various fashion topics.

Updates

 » original news

The second season of The Countdown, Refinery29’s video series featuring profiles on important names in fashion, premiered yesterday 22 January 2008 in collaboration with MySpace Fashion.
The series visits five influential independent designers in their studios as they prepare for New York Fashion Week 2008.

The first episode’s subject is none other than Thom Browne and includes an interview with the designer as he prepares for his circus-inspired show. “There’s some things in the show that will take some very, um, multi-talented models,” explains Browne while trying not to give away too much.

Future episodes will feature Shipley & Halmos discussing their upcoming collaborations over burritos, Erin Fetherston casting for her show, Band of Outsiders creating looks with their stylist and Preen at their hair and make up trials. Check Refinery29 for dates and details.

The concept of designers in tropical Brazil creating winter wear might seem like an oxymoron akin to Icelandic designers pioneering summer styles. Though not entirely off the mark when it came down to execution, the fashion on the catwalks at São Paulo's Fashion Week ended up being, for the most part, mild. But credit should be given to a few choice designers who brought up the temps, plus those who took extra effort in arranging creative shows that veered from the normally staid runways.

But first, the hype to the lead-up. By far the most thrilling moment of the week was Vivienne Westwood’s appearance in support of two synthetic versions of her signature shoes she’s releasing with Melissa (pictured at right), Brazil’s hugely popular plastic-injected shoe manufacturer, accompanied by a retrospective exhibit featuring 147 pairs of the British designer’s over-the-top creations. Also, Minister of Culture/singer Gilberto Gil announced the government’s new dedication to pushing fashion in Brazil, which will affirm the country’s up and coming designers as bona fide resources.

On the runways, plaid and flannel were staples, and while many used their own palette of colors, black reared its dark head. A variety of prints and strategically placed ruffles made everything more interesting too. When it came to size, trouser pants and other high waisted bottoms, like in the U.S., were responses to the skinny movement, and dresses and skirts took on all lengths. What follows is a more detailed rundown of the runways.

Alexandre Herchcovitch/Zoomp
Alexandre Herchcovitch was called in to manage Zoomp’s winter season, and the results were unanimously splendid. Crocheted designs starred on women’s black Cat Woman-like jumpsuits and light baby doll dresses took on different translations. The men’s line was marked by large, shiny parkas with oversized hoods.

For his signature collections, womenswear proved to be another exercise in which he could do no wrong. Pretty dresses in black and color blocks were cut generously and then attached in a way to play with movement. Urban cowboy was his theme for men’s, with open-back vests, fringes and leather galore in the form of hooded jackets and even a chaps entry.

Ellus
The
Ellus show, set in a beautiful, old train station in the city center, featured a collection as solid as rock. Its cheekier 2nd Floor line (above) was charming and playful, with scarves made from stuffed toy art pieces, oversized and voluminous everything and prints that ranged from chevron stripes to more elaborated artful takes, some of which were created by Brazilian artist Bruno 9Li.

The Ellus line itself brought 21st-century punks and rockers with great hair via train, dressed in the brand’s signature denim. Dresses had suggestive cut-outs, overlayed with black framing and metal hardware from the punk uniform (spikes and studs) embellished jackets of both sexes.

Continue reading…

by Pamela Liou

Here’s a thought: Every single designer in the fashion pantheon started out as a precocious newbie bent on mixing things up. With a little moxy and lots of talent, they built ironclad legacies, but established as they may be, they can’t keep a stranglehold on the industry forever. Each year there are more and more lines—some good, but most…not—jumping into the ring. And occasionally there comes along that rare tenderfoot who manages to hold his/her own and deliver something new. For 2007, these are our Designers to Watch.

Chris Benz

Take one look at Chris Benz’s debut sportswear collection, and it’s hard to believe that he has only a few collections under his belt. The line is deceptively simple, often erring on the side of relaxed. His garments keep to a very edited palette: grays and whites, with the intermittent shocks of Pantone. (Pictured at right.)

Tim Hamilton

Nominated for the CFDA’s 2007 Swarovski Award for new talent, Hamilton is well on his way to becoming America’s next great menswear guru. Think sweaters with detachable turtlenecks, wool blazers with narrow lapels and a re-invigoration of the iconic long-sleeve thermal with militaristic bullion accents. (Pictured above left.)

Robert Geller

It's hard not to be bowled over by Robert Geller's tailored-within-an-inch-of-its-life oxford shirts, trousers, and jackets. Geller is no stranger to accolades—his partnership with Alexander Plohkov for Cloak won him a CFDA award—and his eponymous line will continue in a tradition of decidedly cool refinement. For his spring '08 collection, Geller looked toward 1970s then-burgeoning skate culture and James Dean, with the occasional nod to Mod. He keeps the palette lively with bright colors in unexepected places, like Chesterfield shorts or chartreuse denim. (Pictured above right.)

Read more…

The world of webtop publishing (WTP) has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years, with plenty of services feeling as good, if not better, than many standard desktop packages. This is particularly true in the case of Microsoft Word-alikes such as Google Docs (née Writely), ThinkFree and Zoho Writer, which were featured in Josh Catone's excellent Self-Publishing Toolkit post earlier this week. In this post we’ll take a look at one stand-out service on the more visual end of the market – an online tool aimed at those who are familiar with the ‘print’ world’s standards such as Quark Express or Adobe InDesign. The service is FormatPixel, a Flash-based app that mimics the functionality of a desktop publishing app for the purpose of creating a visually stunning brochure web site without the need to break the bank.

FormatPixel has a thankfully simple registration process to endure before you can start playing around with your first project. You’ll need to choose which payment scheme to use. We chose the ‘Vanilla’ – or entry-level – scheme. This is free, but limits your account to just one project, and doesn’t allow you to export your projects as Flash files. On the plus side, whereas the starter version of other popular “freemium” apps, such as Basecamp, limit functionality on the entry level plan,the Vanilla level of this service includes access to every feature apart from the aforementioned export. There are three other packages to choose from, with the priciest (’Chocolate’) allowing the user to make 20 projects for $US80 a year.

We also opted to use the Beta version of the publishing application for this review, rather than the supposedly more stable version, because it included some extra animation features along with the standard feature set detailed below. We didn’t run into any issues with stability or flakiness in the Beta version, however, so we’d expect the standard, non-animating version to be just as slick.

Because it’s not pretending to be a whistles-and-bells publishing tool, it’s easier to create content right away with FormatPixel than learning the intricacies of a traditional layout program like Quark. Each of your projects is organized with thumbnails of the pages below the main editor frame, so navigation from one page to the next is straightforward. Once you’ve started drawing shapes on your pages, outlines of those shapes appear in the thumbnails, to aid your memory of what’s where (see picture below). You can select the dimensions of your backdrop too, should you want your project to look more like a widget or a blog than a standard magazine spread. Tracking guides have been added to help you keep consistent layouts from page to page, but unfortunately, the shapes and other object don’t ’snap’ to the guides as you would expect in a full-featured app.

Creating new shapes and text blocks is a one-click affair; editing those elements requires a double-click. Once you’re in edit mode, you can adjust colors with a handy RGB slider, and set some text and shape preferences such as outline and blend options. If you’re using the Beta version, those shapes (and other media) can have basic animation behaviors assigned to them, such as fades and slides. The animation is ‘playable’ via a timeline at the foot of the canvas that shows the actions in frames, a la Flash’s own timeline. Don’t expect Photoshop-like finesse of shapes and images, but for the purpose of presenting a decent online scrapbook, it’s more than adequate. One serious drawback though is the inability of the text blocks to accept images or other media themselves (meaning text would flow around the media). Also, forget about applying two or more columns of text to a block; you’ll have to settle with appending one block next to another. That said, we were impressed with just how streamlined and intuitive the interface was; it’s just a shame that for a layout tool, more thought didn’t go in to some of the quirks surrounding text blocks.

Probably FormatPixel’s most useful service is the ability to add links from shapes to either external URLs or different pages in your project. This makes creating clickable wireframes a snap. Anyone thinking that this tool could be used for early-stage prototyping, you’re right. (For the purposes of this review, I played around with the tool with exactly this intention – rapid development of a simple site design – and found it easier and quicker at the task than my typical wireframing tool, Microsoft Visio.) Finally, there’s your personal library of photo or Flash video media. You can import, crop and tag your photos and vids, or paste in a YouTube URL for FormatPixel to add the video to your library. Then it’s simply a matter of dragging your media to the right place on the canvas.

Once you’re happy with your project, you can publish it (or keep it private) to the growing directory of current galleries, comment on other folks’ work, and find out how many people have viewed your projects. You’re assigned a profile page too which lists your work and stats. And, as we mentioned earlier, paid users can export their projects as Flash files that they could insert in any site or presentation as Flash objects.

Conclusion

None of FormatPixel’s features will take your breath away (for that, we’re waiting to see what birds of paradise emerge from the Aviary); but what FormatPixel does, it does well, and does simply. The community is young, and in need of some sharp projects to act as showcases, but we can already see this starting to bloom, especially if FormatPixel offers a few more carrots to the most creative users, as well as beefs up the app’s feature set a bit. Photographers or graphic artists looking to publish their wares online in a stylish and interactive format will need to search hard to find a better alternative to FormatPixel.

What are your thoughts about FormatPixel? Know of a WTP product that blows this one out the water? Let us know in the comments.

Fashionistas and animators made these holograms of freaky underwater creatures float around sexy models at the Diesel Spring/Summer ‘08 show, celebrated a few days ago in Florence. See how they did it and watch the tentacle porn their fascinating movements in the video after the jump.

The creatures were created by Diesel’s creative team, Barcelona animation studio Dvein and Danish multimedia production agency Vizoo. The latter created the technology for the projection, which is still a bit of a mystery:

“The visuals are projected through a series of ‘foils’ into mid air, so you see the images in mid-air. The models can then interact with them and walk through them. We used plastic foils placed at 45-degree angles so that the projected light from the ceiling goes onto a foil, is reflected on to another and then into the air.

We worked it so it had a real catwalk feel and so that you could view it from both sides: You can see the models, the holograms and the public from both sides. It’s never been used this way before as the technology has just been used in the corporate world before, for sales presentations, and the visuals have always just been viewed from one side. So we set up two rigs instead.”

Seems to me like they are not real holograms but according to the people at the event, the effect is quite stunning when you watch it live. [CR Magic via Oh! Gizmo]