Fashion designer Anand Jon Alexander avoids jail in New York sex assault case

A celebrity fashion designer — already serving a lengthy prison sentence in California for raping and sexually assaulting would-be models — was sentenced Tuesday to time served for forcing oral sex on a woman in Manhattan.

Most of the 49-count indictment against Anand Jon Alexander, who appeared on “America’s Next Top Model,” was dismissed when he copped to a single count of forcing oral sex on one victim in February. The original charges were based on allegations he raped or molested 12 women.

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The deal was hammered out “to spare the victims from having to testify 10 years later,” prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal said.

In exchange for his plea, prosecutors agreed to turn over documents his attorney believes will help him win his appeal in California, where he’s serving a 59-year sentence.

RELATED: DA: STRIP DESIGNER TURNED CONVICTED RAPIST OF FREE ATTORNEYS
Rosenthal argued Alexander, 39, is “a predator” and “a threat to the community,” and should be branded a high-risk sex offender. Judge Cassandra Mullen agreed Tuesday, branding him a level 3 offender, the highest-risk designation under the law in New York.

One of Alexander’s attorneys, Kimberly Summers, said his defense team now has “what we think will effectively help us fight his California” conviction, referring to the documents Alexander scored in the deal.

ictoria Beckham Buys London Supermarket? Fashion Designer Expands "Working Space" as Business Grows

Looks like Victoria Beckham's business is getting a little bigger.

The talented fashion designer has reportedly purchased a London supermarket to expand her working space for her ever-growing fashion empire.

A rep for Victoria's XIX Entertainment tells E! News "there is no plan to open a VB shop in London," but confirmed the company is looking to expand their "working space" due to immense growth in the business.

Victoria Beckham: Officially a fashion authority as judge of international Woolmark Prize

The fierce fashionista—who has kids Brooklyn, 14, Romeo, 10, Cruz, 8, and 20-month-old Harper with her soccer stud husband David—recently debuted a strong fall 2013 collection at New York Fashion Week in February, where she earned rave reviews for her evolution as a designer.

The Beckham beauty's flourishing fashion empire currently includes a ready-to-wear collection, as well as denim, handbags and other accessories and boasts a bevy of celebrity fans.

The former Spice Girl is also launching an online shopping site for her brand in the spring.

DHL Brings Business Insights to World MasterCard(R) Fashion Week With 2nd Fashion Industry Panel

DHL, the global market leader in logistics, is set to shine a spotlight on the competitive and global nature of the Canadian fashion industry by kicking off its 2nd DHL Fashion Industry Panel on Tuesday, March 19 at 1 p.m. in "The Studio" at World MasterCard Fashion Week. As the official logistics partner for the event, DHL hopes to spur an insightful conversation with the local fashion community on the knowledge and resources critically needed by emerging and established designers to improve business and drive long-term success in the Canadian fashion business.

"This is the second year in a row we are offering young designers and entrepreneurs the opportunity to tap into some of the industry''s brightest minds, and to share DHL''s decades of fashion industry experience with Canadian retailers and designers," said Greg Hewitt, President of DHL Express Canada and panel participant. "We think it''s very important to address these topics in order to help young designers and entrepreneurs to succeed in a very competitive market. We want to make sure they understand the nuances that go into building a successful brand, and we, as a global company, can help them thrive through our expertise and connections."

Fashion is internationally recognized as a difficult industry to break into and achieve long-term success. Canadian market designers and fashion retailers face the additional challenges of selling to a small domestic market already saturated by large international brands. Along with real-life design experiences from Christopher Bates and Adam Taubenfligel of Triarchy, this year''s panel will include business and retail advice from Mark Zimmermann of MaRs and Roxanne Joyal of Me to We. Jarrad Clark, Director of Global Production for IMG Fashion will also be talking about the lessons he thinks are key for young entrepreneurs for their own businesses, and how these insights apply not only to their brand at Fashion Week, but also other venues that offer exposure locally and globally.

"Becoming an internationally known brand doesn''t happen by accident, and it isn''t all about the artistic vision and designs," says Jarrad Clark, Director of Global Production at IMG Fashion. "Knowing how to seek out growth opportunities, how to find key business allies and handle the business aspect of a fashion label or retailer are integral considerations for any successful brand."

DHL has developed specific logistics solutions to meet the demanding needs of the fashion sector. As specialists in international shipping and logistics, DHL masters the fashion supply chain - from procurement of material to sample production, quality control, warehousing and processing of garments to direct delivery to shops. DHL''s customers include both large retail groups with complex distribution requirements as well as small, independent fashion boutiques requiring a one-off service.
As a global company operating in 220 countries worldwide, DHL can deliver optimized supply chains, reduced lead times and easy access to new markets for up-and-comers and established fashion icons. DHL''s fashion industry solutions include distribution centre management, international supply chain management, analysis and design, e-commerce management a Global Fashion Network.

DHL - The Logistics company for the world
DHL is the global market leader in the logistics industry and "The Logistics company for the world". DHL commits its expertise in international express, air and ocean freight, road and rail transportation, contract logistics and international mail services to its customers. A global network composed of more than 220 countries and territories and about 285,000 employees worldwide offers customers superior service quality and local knowledge to satisfy their supply chain requirements. DHL accepts its social responsibility by supporting environmental protection, disaster management and education.

Fashion 2.0 Awards Honor Social Media Stars of the Industry

The most sartorially extravagant social media event of the year — the Fashion 2.0 Awards — took place at the SVA Theatre in New York last night, organized by Style Coalition, a fashion influencer marketing platform.

Categories for the four-year-old event included Best Twitter, Best Facebook, Best Pinterest, Best Blog by a Fashion Brand, Best Website, Best Mobile App, Best Online Video, Best Fashion Startup (a new category this year), and Top Innovator. Voting was open to the public on the Fashion 2.0 site.

The tech industry is sometimes criticized for the lack of women in entrepreneurial and leadership roles, but the ladies cleaned up at this event. Most of the nominees in all categories — including three of the five Best Fashion Startups — were founded or co-founded by women. "DVF [through Glass]," starring designer Diane von Furstenberg and Google Glass and featuring a cameo appearance by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, won Best Online Video. Style Coalition itself was founded by a woman, Yuli Ziv, who developed interactive online strategies at ad agencies before starting her own business blending fashion and technology.

"It always amazes me how this online fashion community is so tight," Ziv said in her opening remarks.

The evening was hosted for the second year in a row by stylist, interior decorator, and TV personality Robert Verdi, who offered free startup ideas for the audience: RentTheLouboutin.com (no doubt inspired by his earlier frantic search of the lobby for a lost spike from his $2,000 Louboutin loafers), Assbook ("How come nobody's done Assbook? Like you could tell people where you're sitting."), I'mWearingThisToYourFuneral.com, and FatOrPregnant.com.

Sporting a blue-spangled Burberry trench, Barneys Creative Ambassador-at-Large Simon Doonan delivered a gleefully wicked keynote on the "social media miracle." He praised social media for increasing pedestrian distraction and, thus, the stepping in of dog poo, resulting in his own amusement and an uptick in shoe sales at Barneys. ("Hashtag retailgratitude.") He spoke of the benefits of giving trolls or, as he refers to them, "Satan's disciples," a platform that makes them happy. "When Satan's disciples are happy, they're more likely to stay at home and less inclined to come knocking on my door asking to use the bathroom and insisting that I prepare them a tuna melt."

W Hotels Worldwide Sends CFDADesigners on Fashion-Focused Inspiration Trips Around the World

W Hotels Worldwide and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) today announced the second phase of their multi-layered partnership as they unveiled the weeklong trips on which the CFDA {FASHION INCUBATOR} designers will embark in order to seek inspiration for their upcoming collections. The dynamic group, which includes designers from fashion and accessories brands Ari Dein, Burkman Bros., Daniel Vosovic, Emanuela Duca, Isaora, Jonathan Simkai, Reece Hudson, NUMBER:Lab, Timo Weiland and WHIT, will draw creativity for their Spring 2014 collections from the vibrant destinations and cutting-edge W Hotels they visit around the world.

“W Hotels is proud to be a partner of the CFDA {FASHION INCUBATOR} program, and together, we have created a unique global platform to elevate exposure and drive business for these rising fashion stars,” said Carlos Becil, Vice President of Brand Management, Starwood’s Luxury and Design Brands, North America. “In addition to the designer showcases at W Hotels around the country, these ten inspiration trips allow each designer to leave home and soak in the energy, creativity, and spirit of dynamic destinations around the world to inspire their next collection.”

Passports and Sketchbooks in Hand, Designers Jet Off in Search of Fashion Inspiration
American menswear design brand Burkman Bros. and womenswear designer Jonathan Simkhai will separately travel to the newly opened W Bangkok, set in the pulsating heart of the city near glittering temples and spicy street markets. Founded by brothers Ben and Doug Burkman, the contemporary menswear collection Burkman Bros. is heavily influenced by travel and incorporates prints and fabric treatments from countries around the world. Jonathan Simkhai offers sophisticated dressing for the modern, cosmopolitan woman, bringing forth classic predominantly menswear codes translated into sexy and feminine silhouettes.

Emanuela Duca, an award-winning jewelry designer, will travel to W Doha Hotel & Residences where sand dunes soar next to towering skyscrapers. A rapidly evolving destination, Doha offers juxtaposition of old and new with its historic forts and camel racing, ancient souks and luxury shopping, and old Shisha cafes and modern cuisines. Originally from Rome, Duca, whose designs are inspired by the marriage of movement and sculpture, creates earth-bound, highly textured surfaces, evocative of volcanic ash and ancient ruins of her native city.

Womenswear designer Daniel Vosovic and Reece Solomon, of the designer handbag collection Reece Hudson, will each travel to W Istanbul, located in the center of the historic Akaretler Row Houses. Vosovic’s collections embody a modern signature style, which caters to those who appreciate an easy sophistication. The Reece Hudson collection, made in Italy, aims to bridge the gap between luxury products and street style through strong design sensibilities mixed with the highest quality materials and craftsmanship.

Timo Weiland and Alan Eckstein, the designers behind Timo Weiland, and Whitney Pozgay, the designer of contemporary women’s collection WHIT, will separately travel to W Retreat & Spa Bali – Seminyak, set on one of Bali’s most famous beaches. Timo Weiland reflects the designers’ personal aesthetic, sensibilities and broader desire to spur a return to the art of dressing. WHIT specializes in beautiful modern clothing with a fun whimsical twist. Her silhouettes celebrate color and are made to mix and match to incorporate your personal style.

Lingerie designer Arielle Shapiro, whose Ari Dein brand is largely inspired by boutique hotel living and art deco style, will travel to W St. Petersburg, where Russian tradition is fused with Antonio Citterio’s avant-garde décor. Architectural details and exceptional tailoring contribute to Ari Dein, a line that is unique, nostalgic and versatile.

Ricky Hendry and Marc Daniels of ISAORA will take to the road in search of adventure on America’s West Coast, visiting three of the W brand’s newly renovated hotels: W Seattle, W San Francisco and W San Diego. Covering almost 3,000 miles, they will take in everything the left coast has to offer— from the surf, to the cities, to the snow, to the desert— meeting with like-minded innovators and inspiring creatives along the way who share their passion for design driven excellence.

Finally, sportswear label NUMBER:Lab, founded by established architect Luis Fernandez and serial entrepreneur Greg Lawrance, will travel to W Barcelona, a skyline icon designed by renowned architect Ricardo Bofill. Anchored by a defined aesthetic and vision, NUMBER:Lab offers a collection of essentials for the athletic side of the discerning man.

“One of the interesting aspects of our partnership with W Hotels is how the brand can help to create global exposure for our {FASHION INCUBATOR} designers,” said Steven Kolb, Chief Executive Officer of the CFDA. “We thank W Hotels for sending our designers on these incredible inspiration trips and adding this unique layer to the {FASHION INCUBATOR} program.”

This past September, W Hotels and the CFDA announced a partnership that will bring {FASHION INCUBATOR} designers out of New York City and into markets that are important to growing their businesses, a first such opportunity for the {FASHION INCUBATOR} program. In addition to the Inspiration Trips, the partnership will travel {FASHION INCUBATOR} designers to W Hotels around the country for fashion showcases and special events, the first of which took place this past December at W Atlanta – Buckhead with designers Burkman Bros., Daniel Vosovic, Emanuela Duca and WHIT. W Dallas will host the second {FASHION INCUBATOR} showcase later this spring.
Since its inception in New York City in 1998, W Hotels has identified fashion, a direct extension of design, as one of its key passions to appeal to its jet set guests, who are always looking for what’s new and next. As the reach of W Hotels has expanded globally, it has become a more active participant in its passions of design, fashion and music, which has enabled the W brand to champion emerging talent around the world.

Infor Implementation Accelerator Now Available for the Fashion Industry

Infor, a leading provider of business application software serving more than 70,000 customers, today announced the general availability of the Infor Implementation Accelerator for Fashion. This application is ideal for organizations that want to implement an integrated solution quickly and without major modifications, yet reap long-term benefits from its flexibility and ability to execute continuous improvement in the future. Implementation Accelerators are a set of preconfigured industry solutions based on the latest version of the Infor application suites that will deliver core industry application processes, reduced implementation times, costs, and risks, and are available as a cloud or on-premise technology platform.

The Infor Implementation Accelerator for Fashion delivers the same scalability and ease of integration Infor applications are known for, while pre-built industry leading processes provide an immediate opportunity for business improvement -- to help provide a faster return on investment. Additionally, this solution delivers predefined but easily configurable menus, processes, templates and training, using examples specific to the needs of mid-sized fashion companies.

"Just like large, global companies, mid-sized fashion organizations face the same challenges of high order volumes, increasingly complex supply chains and managing multiple product lines efficiently, but have to normally do so with fewer resources readily available to them," said Bob McKee, industry strategy director, Fashion, Infor. "Recognizing this problem, Infor developed a tailored, streamlined implementation process designed to deliver benefits in weeks, not months or years, and provide them with a foundation for the expanded features they'll need down the road as their business evolves. With more than 1,100 fashion customers worldwide, we're able to listen to our customers' key industry needs and translate them directly into our applications."

An Implementation Accelerator can be the final step -- or just the first step -- in an ongoing process of added functionality and continuous improvement. As an organization changes and grows, it is easy to expand the scale and scope of an Infor application and integrate it more fully with other solutions. Through the Infor Implementation Accelerator for Fashion, implementations can be less costly, less risky, provide reduced stress for employees, and deliver a faster time to benefit.

Fashion Statement: Designer Creates Line of Drone-Proof Garments to Protect Privacy

As the U.S. government draws up plans to use surveillance drones in domestic airspace, opposition to what many consider an unwarranted and significant invasion of privacy is mounting across the country, from rural Virginia to techopolis Seattle. Although officials debate anti-drone legislation at federal, state and local levels, one man is fighting back with high-tech apparel.

A New York City privacy advocate-turned-urban-guerilla fashion designer is selling garments designed to make their wearers invisible to infrared surveillance cameras, particularly those on drones. And although Adam Harvey admits that his three-item Stealth Wear line of scarves and capes is more of a political statement than a money-making venture, the science behind the fashion is quite sound.

“Fighting drones is not my full-time job, but it could be,” says Harvey, an instructor of physical computing at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts and the creator of the CV Dazzle project, which seeks to develop makeup and hairstyles that camouflage people from face-recognition cameras and software.

Harvey’s newest medium, metalized fabric, has been around for more than 20 years. It holds in body heat that would burn bright for infrared cameras—a characteristic that could prove attractive to those who do not want unmanned aerial vehicles spying on them.

Metalized fabric
Metal is very good at absorbing and scattering infrared light, says Cheng Sun, a Northwestern University assistant professor of mechanical engineering. In that sense there is nothing exotic in how metalized fabric works—it “would strongly attenuate the [infrared] light,” he says. The metal would dissipate heat to surroundings as well, making the wearer harder to pinpoint.

To date, the fabric has primarily been used in tape and gaskets to protect electronics and communications equipment from static electricity and electromagnetic interference, according to Larry Creasy, director of technology for metalized fabric-maker Laird Technologies, based in Saint Louis.

Here’s how metalizing works, at least at Laird: Woven fabric, commonly nylon or polyester, is coated with a special catalyst—a precious metal Creasy declined to specify—that helps copper bind to the fiber. Once dry, the fabric is submerged in a copper sulfate–plating bath and dried. A nickel sulfamate bath follows to help the finished fabric withstand the elements and abrasions. The result is a flexible, breathable fabric that can be cut with ordinary tools but that protects against electromagnetic interference and masks infrared radiation, Creasy says. The process adds weight to the original fabric. An untreated square yard of nylon weighs about 42.5 grams. Treated, the same patch weighs more than 70 grams.

The fashion
Harvey’s fabric is coated with copper, nickel and silver, a combination that gives his scarves, head-and-shoulders cloak and thigh-length “burqa” a silvery and “luxurious” feel. The material blocks cell signals, as well, adding an element of risk to tweeting, texting and other mobile activities, as the wearer must break cover to communicate.

Stealth Wear is sold only via a U.K. Web site. The burqa goes for about $2,300, the “hoodie” is $481 and the scarf is $565—luxury items, but so, too, is privacy today, Harvey says.

The impetus
The high cost and limited availability are significant drawbacks—Harvey says he’s only sold one Stealth Wear item online, a scarf. But the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicts 10,000 commercial drones will ply domestic airspace by 2017—almost twice the that of the U.S. Air Force’s current fleet of unmanned aircraft. The number of drones flying in the U.S. today is hard to pin down because not every company and agency that gets FAA approval to fly a drone actually puts one in the air. In fact, 1,428 private-sector and government requests have been approved since 2007, according to the FAA. A Los Angeles Times report states that 327 of those permits are still active. Meanwhile, President Obama signed a law in February 2012 that gives the FAA until September 2015 to draw up rules that dictate how law enforcement, the military and other entities may use drones in U.S. airspace.

Witches Lose the Warts

Lena Duchannes is new in town, exotic and seductive to a handful of bored locals in the Southern community where she lives. But if that weren’t enough to turn her into man bait, her pallid good looks would do the trick.

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Lena, the sweet-and-sulky heroine of “Beautiful Creatures,” the film adapted from the young-adult novel of the same title, is a witch — a caster, in the parlance of her kind — who can, by a glance, shatter glass or summon a tempest or, when the spirit moves her, capture the heart of a hunky young man.

She is one in a coven of weird sisters who in recent months have darkened the plots of adolescent fiction and films, and cast an enchantment on the concert stage and the fashion runways, where witchy apparitions have come to represent a kind of wish fulfillment.

“The witch is the ultimate bad girl,” said Carly Cushnie of the design team Cushnie et Ochs, who riffed on the Salem witch trials in the fall collection she unveiled last month. “You want to be her.”

It’s a concept, all right. Witchcraft and its moody expressions — long weedy hair, peaked hats and pointy boots — have attained a strange cachet of late. No longer the hideous wart-covered crone of folklore and fairy tale, the witch of current films, like “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” and “Oz: The Great and Powerful,” and recent youth-oriented novels like “Released Souls” and “A Discovery of Witches,” has swept aside the vampire as a symbol of power, glamour and style.

The Saint Laurent collection Hedi Slimane showed in Paris last fall, with its wide-brimmed hats, flowing capes and ethereal drifts of chiffon, had a whiff of sulfur about it. The line, as Mr. Slimane revealed, owed a debt to the kinds of self-anointed Gypsy sorceresses who thrived during the 1970s in subterranean Los Angeles, equal parts Stevie Nicks and Marjorie Cameron, the latter an urban legend in her day who painted pagan goddesses and dabbled in the occult arts.

Diaphanous frocks and mantles favored by Ms. Cameron, who died in 1995, and her spiritual kin have wafted into collections as diverse as those of Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor, whose label, Skaist-Levy, was obliquely inspired by Ms. Cameron, and Thom Browne. With its chalk-faced models clad in white tights and sharp-shouldered goth-tinged frocks, Mr. Browne’s fall show in New York last month might have been an outtake from a Tim Burton film.

Fashion’s black-magic women are trading on something subtler than raw sex appeal.

“Maxidresses and capes are not really revealing a lot of skin,” said Hayley Phelan, the senior editor of the style blog Fashionista.com. Vaguely feminist in spirit, according to Ms. Phelan, “they’re celebrating a kind of beauty,” she said, “that maybe appeals more to other women than to men.”

Wiccan spirits surfaced at Gareth Pugh in London last week, draped in hooded capes and sweeping gowns with a distinctly pagan cast, and at Ann Demeulemeester and Rick Owens in Paris, each designer offering gauzy gowns and wraps that flirted with the dark side.

Jessica Rayne, a South African designer with a predilection for filmy black frocks trailing fringe and lace, has explored pagan imagery and lore as a source of romance.

“The witch is a strong character,” Ms. Rayne said, “encompassing what it is to be a woman: powerful and sometimes terrifying.

“She’s crazy but engaging,” Ms. Rayne went on, “the kind of woman you fall in love with, though it scares you to death.”

Tapping that sort of spooky drawing power, updated variations on ’90s hits like “Charmed” began appearing on small screens more than a year ago. “The Secret Circle,” though canceled after a season, has developed a cult nonetheless, as has the new Web series “13 Witches,” about a family of pagans with a thirst for revenge. 

Hollywood stepped in with “Hansel & Gretel,” in which the comely Famke Janssen portrays the witch as raven-haired temptress, and “Oz: The Great and Powerful,” with Rachel Weisz as Evanora, the Wicked Witch of the East. Scheduled for release early next year is “Maleficent,” its title character, Sleeping Beauty’s nemesis, fetchingly conjured by Angelina Jolie, whose crimson pout and leather-wrapped horns are lacquered to a sheen.

Fashion Design Students Upcycle Thrift Store Looks to Create Hollywood-Inspired Prom Dresses

Prom is one of the most significant events in high school, and for over ten years the style experts at FIDM/Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising’s FashionClub.com have been predicting prom fashion trends, reporting on celebrity-inspired prom hair and makeup, and creating original prom beauty tutorials. This year, Art Director Harriet Grant challenged FIDM Students to upcycle a thrift store gown into a prom dress for a celebrity, featuring this year’s hottest prom fashion trends.

In the spirit of the 1980s classic movie Pretty in Pink, where Molly Ringwald’s character refashions a plain dress into a prom gown, the Pretty in Pink Prom Challenge tasked five top fashion design students to design a dress for a young celebrity, while channeling a past Hollywood star as their muse. The themed looks included:

The Ingenue – A little black dress with a peplum, inspired by Audrey Hepburn, and designed by David Lee for Emma Watson.

The Class Act – A red illusion dress inspired by Grace Kelly, and designed by Danica Ybanez for Taylor Swift.

The Bad Girl - A short, lavender dress with spiked embellishments at the shoulders, inspired by Liz Taylor, and designed by Angie Martinez for Mila Kunis.

The Femme Fatale – A long grey and white dupioni silk dress with beaded bustier, inspired by Veronica Lake, and designed by Jarret Levin for Blake Lively.

The Boho Princess – A romantic gown with a sheer overlay and lace tiered bodice, inspired by Lisa Bonet, and designed by Lizbeth Robles for Zoe Kravitz.

FashionClub.com features these great looks as well as Prom DIY videos and a Polyvore styling tool where visitors to the site can design their own prom outfits. Prom-ready red carpet looks for hot Hollywood couples are waiting to be styled. There is also a fun quiz about celebrity style icons.

The annual Prom Advice Scholarship Competition kicks off on March 1, 2013. High school students can enter for a chance to win one of two full-year scholarships to attend FIDM. With a deadline of May 15, 2013, entrants are asked to sketch a prom fashion line of their own creation or design a prom boutique.

FashionClub.com is an online teen magazine sponsored by FIDM, and the only magazine of its kind to be sponsored by a college. FashionClub.com features the hottest teen fashion and jewelry trends, the latest looks from the runway, prom and homecoming style advice, DIYs, make-up tips, beauty how-to videos, creative career advice, fashion quotes, cute clothes, and the latest news about FIDM, its events, majors, and alumni.

Trunk Club helps the uncertain man fashion a wardrobe

Which doesn’t mean that Trunk Club is for everyone. It’s not.

Sure, Trunk Club team members tout their wide range of prices and client ages (early 20s to 80s, with 36 being the average). They also stress that it’s fine to look and not buy while picking the brain of your assigned style consultant (most are female) and enjoying an array of free booze offerings, from craft beer on-tap to wine and bourbon.

But how much can a person mooch and still be welcome? Likely answer: Not much.

And one more thing about the prices for threads that can either be purchased in-store or handpicked by a knowledgeable stylist and shipped (hence the “trunk”) free of charge to anywhere in the lower 48 states: They aren’t cheap. Think Nordstrom or Bloomingdale’s or Haberdash for Men on North State — sans blowout sales. Designer denim starts at around $160. Better shirts hover around $150. Shoes are up there, too, with a pair of top-end, Italian-made di Bianco kicks going for nearly $900.

“It’s not that [other] stores don’t have the right products, it’s that guys don’t know how to navigate them,” says Michael Barkin, Trunk Club’s director of sales. All around him, in various nooks decorated by different apparel designers in exchange for advertising signage, stylists tell clients what looks good and what doesn’t. Millions of dollars in inventory is stashed on stainless steel racks in back and elsewhere on the property.

The middle of a sprawling seventh-floor working/shopping space, made from repurposed vintage bowling alley planks, is abuzz with sales associates communicating with potential members who’ve submitted online profiles (who they are, what they do, where they go). When guys can’t navigate correctly, Barkin continues, “they touch, they feel, they pull four things off the rack, they go to the dressing room and try it on, nothing fits, they leave frustrated.”

Trunk Club — begun in 2010, with $11 million in venture capital cash — aims to eliminate that frustration. The company hasn’t turned a profit yet, Barkin says, but hopes to, soon, via a combination of sales earnings and location/rent savings. Being tucked away in a relatively low-traffic area and well away from high-rent districts such as Michigan Avenue is a big part of how Trunk Club remains retail-competitive.

“I’m not very casually well-dressed, and they hook me up,” says Chicago-based international banker Casey Ryan, who’s in his mid-30s. He’s in the process of trying on a charcoal-colored cashmere blazer with side vents and plaid lining. His style consultants, he says, even convinced him to buy red sneakers.

“I come in, they have five different brands [ready]. I don’t have to go to Nordstrom. The prices are competitive, and they have all my sizes. It’s easy. I get out in an hour with everything I need for the whole season.”

At the opposite end of the budget spectrum is Max Kaufman, a student at Northwestern.

“I’m on a college budget, so I’m going to make it work somehow,” he says, wearing a colorful Gant sweater like one might spy in a ski lodge.

“We try to mix if up a little bit,” says stylist Jan Seale, “so guys don’t walk around wearing the same thing as everyone else.”

Personal trainers Sarah Ashenden, 30, and Tom Feeney, 36, won’t be dropping a bundle, either, whether on the $500 deep-crimson cashmere sweater under glass up front or on a pricey custom suit like the one Barkin is wearing. A couple of outfits is all they’re after today.

“They dress me better than I would dress myself,” Feeney says. Ashenden sits on a nearby sofa sipping white wine.

“Tom just doesn’t like to shop,” she says. “He said, ‘I wish I could just overhaul my entire wardrobe.’ So this is perfect.”

French fashion lives on with unrivalled drama and creativity

Despite a sense of impending economic doom in France, Paris fashion still rules supreme.

It's not often that the financial future of a nation is topical at fashion weeks, but with France's future entwined with those of some of the biggest names in fashion, this is different.

Bernard Arnault, the fourth richest person in the world and CEO of LVMH, the parent company of Dior and Louis Vuitton, has applied for Belgium residency where taxes are lower.

You get the feeling that the new French socialist government, led by President Francois Hollande, and the luxury fashion industry are not natural bedfellows.

But all will be forgotten when the crowd take their seats in the extraordinary Grand Palais for the Chanel show.
French fashion lives on with unrivalled drama and creativity no matter what.
This is a country which emerged from a revolution with its fashionable feet firmly intact, after all.

The rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, with its enlightened fashions, Empire lines, and his decorative lover Josephine, started a mere five years after the society-altering revolution finished. Nothing stops fashion moving forward in France.

This season there has been a further instalment in the game of musical chairs that sees a new designer anointed at a luxury house almost every season.

This time it is Alexander Wang at Balenciaga.

Now, if I had been asked to predict who would replace the future-focused Nicolas Ghesquiere, possibly best known in Australia for designing Nicole Kidman's wedding dress, I would not have picked Alexander Wang.

I love what he does. His cool-edged, chic, urban collections have become staple pieces in my wardrobe and most of those in my office.

But I have to admit I didn't see him in the Paris line-up that traditionally features more flamboyant, or what I'll call intellectual fashion, the type of clothes which are usually dark and moody and worn by art curators.

One of the most extraordinary things about the week is watching next season's clothes or the most modern looks in fashion yet imagined, shown in some of the most glorious buildings on earth.

You feel like you are watching fashion history being made, while sitting in a piece of
history itself.

A good case in point this week was the amazing Dries Van Noten show in the Hotel de Ville with its serious archways, marble staircases and chandeliers.

It may just be the backdrop to the clothes but this is a serious backdrop.

Stella McCartney always shows in the Paris Opera.

Her show is this Monday at 10am and the light always makes the beautiful, gilded building shine even brighter. Sometimes it is hard to stay focused on the clothes.

And that's one of the reasons why buyers and media hold their breath for Paris fashion week.

New York has its business, Milan has its beautifully made clothes, London has its creative edge, but Paris, well, Paris has Paris and some of the biggest fashion names in the world.

Tilda Swinton’s Latest Role? Fashion Muse for Chanel

In 1992′s Orlando, Tilda Swinton portrayed a cross-dressing nobleman. In 2005′s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, she transformed into the White Witch. Apparently Karl Lagerfeld appreciates her versatility. Today French fashion house Chanel announced that, for her latest role, Swinton will be playing the part of Lagerfeld’s muse.

Swinton will front the campaign for Chanel’s Paris-Edimbourg collection—a pre-fall, ready-to-wear range that Lagerfeld unveiled last December at Scotland’s Linlithgow Palace. Given that Lagerfeld drew inspiration from the Scottish Highlands, dreaming up kilt-pleated coats and other garments with tweed and tartan accents, it makes sense that he chose Swinton. She can trace her lineage back to medieval Scotland, and currently lives in Nairn, in the Highland region, with her partner and their twin sons. ”Tilda perfectly embodies the Paris-Edimbourg collection,” he said. “She is of course Scottish, but more than that she is a modern woman, a timeless icon of elegance.”

She’s also something of a fashion buzz word. During Fashion Week she’s a front-row fixture at Lanvin, Pringle of Scotland and Haider Ackermann. Elsewhere, Lagerfeld recently photographed her for Chanel’s “The Little Black Jacket” book and exhibition, which opens at Milan’s Rotonda di via Besana on April 6. And last October TWELV Magazine had an ice sculptor create a 533-lb. ice dress inspired by Swinton’s turn as the White Witch.

But Swinton does much more than pose. Last fall, during Paris Fashion Week, she starred in a live performance piece at the Musée Galliera, a museum of fashion. Entitled ”The Impossible Dream”, the performance required her to walk down a runway carrying various garments from the museum’s collection, as if she were engaged in dialogue with the women who once wore them.  ”She’s like a pedestal for our collection,” the museum’s curator said at the time. Others feel the same way. She’s previously been a muse for Viktor & Rolf.

The actress—who made a name for herself in art house movies before going blockbuster and mainstream—has always had a flair for the avant-garde. She embraces her own androgyny and was an early adopter of Haider Ackermann’s fashionable pantsuits. ”She’s got such a great sense of self,” burlesque star Dita von Teese once told Grazia, ”and knows herself and has a great style that doesn’t look affected or like it’s trying too hard to gain acceptance.”

Swinton attributes her fashion status to the people she’s surrounded herself with. Speaking to W magazine in 2011, she explained that her foray into couture began after filming The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio. The success of the movie meant that red carpets loomed, so she turned to a good friend for advice, and he introduced her to fashion A-listers like Albert Elbaz of Lanvin and Phoebe Philo of Céline. “For someone to know what you need to make you comfortable, they need to know who you are,” she said. “Having them make clothes for me is like being cooked for by someone who knows what you like to eat.”

Express Joins NBC's Search For The Next "Fashion Star"

Express, Inc. (EXPR), the specialty retail apparel chain, has joined NBC's ground-breaking fashion reality competition "Fashion Star" as a buyer for the program's second season. Hosted by international fashion icon Louise Roe, "Fashion Star" premieres on Friday, March 8, 2013, at 8PM ET featuring celebrity mentors Jessica Simpson, Nicole Richie and John Varvatos.

The program aims to discover the next big name in fashion with contestants competing in a weekly challenge designed to further develop and expand their brands. Express joins the series as a buyer with fellow retailers Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue continuing from the first season.

Buying for Express is Erika De Salvatore, Director of Visual Merchandising for the dual-gender brand. Known for her critical eye and passion for understanding the importance of customer experience, she ensures consistent execution of visual presentation and merchandising.

"We came to Fashion Star with a different lens than the other brands," said De Salvatore. "As a retailer with a singular edit point rather than a department store serving a more varied customer base, we had to be extremely targeted in what we decided to purchase in order to meet the specific needs of the Express customer."

During each episode, product selected by De Salvatore can be purchased immediately at express.com/fs, giving fans of the brand immediate access to the exclusive collection. Following the season finale on Friday, May 10, a select number of stores will carry the line bought by Express, licensed through NBCUniversal Television Consumer Products.

"Everyone who came into the competition was a legitimate designer; no one was thrown in for ratings or TV drama," said De Salvatore. "This was a real design competition and I can't wait for our customers to see what we bought for them!"

Paris Fashion Week: a sneak peek at the show venues

On Tuesday, February 26, Paris Fashion Week kicks off and the venues where the Autumn/ Winter 2013-2014 shows will be held are already being transformed to showcase the new pieces created by the world's fashion giants. As well as being a week about fashion, this week is also very much about Parisian culture. It's time to discover Fashion Week in another way.

Paris Fashion Week is an opportunity for journalists and celebrities from all over the world to discover upcoming new prêt-à-porter collections in quirky, prestigious and historical venues. Whether these venues are used as they are or are completely transformed for the event, they become ideal spots for designer pieces to be seen in all their glory.

Designers and fashion houses make it very clear: light and dimensions are key when it comes to choosing a venue. However, the venue's history, which is often linked to some form of cachet within the fashion world elite, is also very important.

Historical venues
From the Oratoire du Louvre to the Grand Palais: some designers prefer to showcase their new ready-to-wear collections in historically rich venues. This season, designers such as Guy Laroche, Vanessa Bruno and Akris as well as Chanel will be showing at the Grand Palais on Paris's Right Bank.

The Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild in the city's 8th arrondissement, which is also a listed historical building, will play host to prêt-à-porter shows by Anthony Vaccarello, Aganovich and Gareth Pugh.

From museums to luxury hotels: world-renowned venues
Models and fashion professionals from all over the world flock to the French capital for Paris Fashion Week. This explains why luxury houses choose to stage their shows in prestigious renowned venues.

Designer Steffie Christiaens will show her new Autumn/ Winter 2013-2014 at the Hôtel Shangri-La with views of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. This luxury hotel used to be the residence of Napoleon Bonaparte's grand-nephew, Prince Roland Bonaparte. The atmosphere of such a renowned refined venue is sure to bring something unique to the show.

Spanish luxury fashion house Loewe has also chosen to showcase its new designs in a prestigious venue known all over the world: the Galerie de Minéralogie et de Géologie du Musée d'Histoire naturelle (Paris's mineral and geology gallery at the Left Bank's Natural History Museum).

Transforming seemingly simple venues
Some couture houses have chosen to completely transform less prestigious Parisian venues. Spanish designer Amaya Arzuaga's show, for example, will be held at the Spanish embassy.

Designer Jacquemus has also chosen another highly unusual venue, the Cour des Lions pool.

Meanwhile Nina Ricci, Issey Miyake, Viktor & Rolf, Chloé and Elie Saab will show their collections in ephemeral spaces that will be set up along the Jardin des Tuileries during Fashion Week.

Fashion royalty: Donatella Versace gives career advice to the next generation of designers at London Fashion Week

It's understandable that the six finalists competing for the International Woolmark Prize during London Fashion week felt a mixture of nerves and apprehension before they presented their work to the esteemed judging panel. And when judge Donatella Versace said she knew how they felt, she really did mean it.

"I have a show on Friday and I'm really freaking out," she confided before the catwalk event that was the culmination of a global search for outstanding emerging talent. "I understand that the rule of fashion is to change, even as a successful designer – you do not want to be stuck in the same rut."

Following the rules of fashion has never come easily to Donatella Versace, nor to her older brother Gianni, who built up the empire that bears the family name before his untimely death in 1997. But of course Donatella had more than a helping hand in moulding Versace into an iconically glamorous label while her brother was alive thanks to her role as his "muse" and, more tangibly, her work supervising advertising campaigns shot by Richard Avedon and Bruce Weber and starring the biggest models of the Nineties. Versace also gave his little sister first an accessories line to design, then a children's line, Versace Young, before in 1994 she became the head designer of Versus, her very own brand aimed at younger fans of the main-line collections.

Purely judging by appearances, Versace comes across as something of a blond bombshell – a role she certainly seems happy to play up to. But she is by no means a bimbo – misjudge her at your peril, there is an immense talent underneath that façade. Immersed in music, culture and fashion, Versace has manoeuvred herself into a position from which she is able to quench her thirst for the new. "I'm always excited for young talent, I'm always looking for it," she says. And her track record speaks for itself. Having chaired London's Fashion Fringe initiative for two years, judging the Woolmark Prize is a continuation of a broader search.

"I already have some background," she says of the competing designers' work. "I could see a difference in them, could see that some have commercial points, other ones are totally trying to find something new, pushing forward and using wool in an amazing way."

Although her involvement in the project this time around came about through fellow judge and Vogue Italia editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani, Versace has been familiar with the prize for a lot longer than that. "More than 20 years ago, Gianni did something in Australia for Woolmark – he went there to do this show with clothes made only from merino wool. And it was very different from normal Versace, but for Gianni it was amazing." A special event was held to honour the Australian wool industry, but Woolmark, or as it was then known, the International Wool Secretariat competition, first entered fashion folklore long before that. In 1954, a 21-year-old Karl Lagerfeld won the award in the coat category and Yves Saint Laurent, then just 18, took home the dress-design award, both having impressed a judging panel that included Hubert de Givenchy and Pierre Balmain. A year later, Saint Laurent was installed at Dior and Lagerfeld was working for Pierre Balmain.

Back to the present, however, and alongside Versace, this year's judging committee included Franca Sozzani, Diane von Furstenberg, Tim Blanks and Victoria Beckham. "It's a wonderful initiative," Versace says. "It is designed to help the next generation of designers." Indeed, Christian Wijnants, the winner of the prize, was awarded a fund of $105,000 (£70,000) and a chance to gain international stockists' and industry attention for his merino-wool hand-dyed creations.

"I have worked with wool all my life as a designer," Versace says. "There's so much more to it than knitwear – it's an amazingly versatile material and can be used in so many different ways from chic to rustic. It can be so light now, you can drape wool, pleat it and create a cocktail dress, which is of course important to Versace."

As well as welcoming talented London graduates in to the ateliers of her labels, Versace has forged a close relationship with young designers from the capital. In 2009, she appointed Christopher Kane to head Versus, passing on the baton that had been handed to her by her brother. "From just one sketch of Christopher's while he was still at Central Saint Martins, I knew he was something special," she says fondly of the Scottish designer. "Somebody gave me the sketch and I was mesmerised. There were so many ideas. But he was so shy. He asked us [the label] for some mesh, a little mesh for his collection. So I called him and said yeah, of course I'll give you whatever mesh you want.

"That's how I started our conversation and he was so happy. The minute I met him I thought he had a very fresh way of looking at fashion. He's very feminine, but he is also cool – his is not an old-fashioned femininity."

Kane's spring/summer collection for Versus would be his last for the brand. In November, in the midst of speculation that Kane would be headhunted for the then-vacant position at Balenciaga, Versace suddenly revealed that Kane and Versus would be parting ways professionally, though it was underscored that the split was amicable. Indeed, when Kane showed his latest collection in London last week – a greatest hits of sorts – Versace was on the front row to support her protégé.

"I look for people with ability, of course," she says. "But I am also looking for people with a particular spirit that fits with Versace – a rock'n'roll rebelliousness, with lots of energy. They need to have their own vision. That is really the most important thing for any fashion designer – you need your own voice. When I find someone with potential, I always follow their careers closely, and see if I can help. Apart from anything I benefit personally from exchanges of ideas with young people. But more importantly, the next generation of designers is the future of fashion – so these people should be nurtured."

Instead of taking up its usual slot on the Milan schedule, Versace is planning to do something altogether new with Versus, having installed JW Anderson as the first of a series of guest designers creating limited-edition collections. Versace's new vision for the line sees it becoming a seasonless concept, with a strong focus on its digital offering.

"After the H&M collection [a series of collaborations with the high-street brand began in 2011] was very successful, we realised how much young people know the history of Versace. We thought young people who know fashion through the internet wouldn't know anything before 2000, but the reaction was inspiring."

It is fitting that the history of the brand is playing a part in pushing it forward; after all, Gianni Versace was a revolutionary in his time. Inevitably in the middle of the awards season a conversation with the head of one of the most glamorous, red-carpet-ready labels turns to the Oscars. "Red-carpet dressing came very naturally to Gianni," Versace says. "He was a very good friend of Jane Fonda, and she asked him to dress her for the Oscars. It was one of the first times that glamour was celebrated on the red carpet – at that time, Hollywood thought that being glamorous was not a good thing. You had to look intellectual and arrogant and that is totally wrong, in fact. Image is everything now."

HSN Is Your Authority For Spring Fashion, Debuting The Hottest Looks From Fashion Icons Christian Siriano, June Ambrose, Iris Apfel And Padma Lakshmi

Multi-channel retailer HSN is the destination for everything Spring Fashion, identifying the hottest looks and how to make them work for you. From February 21 through March 23, HSN brings together the best in fashion, accessories, jewelry and beauty, to share their latest collections and most sought after looks for the season.

Anchoring HSN's Spring Fashion series are six key trends that include print mixing, jackets, color blocking, neons & neutrals, maxi's and finishing touches. The multi-platform event will feature celebrity stylist, Robert Verdi as he shares the insider tips, tricks and tools to pull these looks together the perfect Spring wardrobe.

"Our Spring Fashion series makes it so easy for customers to update their wardrobe with the latest styles for the season," said Anne Martin-Vachon, Chief Merchandising Officer for HSN. "By identifying and integrating these key Spring themes and giving our customers access to authorities like Robert Verdi, Christian Siriano and June Ambrose, we are enabling our customers to evolve their personal style and create the looks they will love."

On the heels of his 10th show at New York Fashion Week, designer Christian Siriano will debut his HSN exclusive collection on February 22.  Striking by Christian Siriano includes sophisticated pieces inspired by the runway and combines modern, chic silhouettes with everyday glamour. The collection ranges from $79.90 - $169.90 with a soft but powerful color palette.

Celebrity stylist turned footwear designer, June Ambrose launches her first ever collection with HSN on March 22. Ranging from $59.00-$119.90, the June Ambrose collection includes a mix of sandals and pumps with unique textures and fabrics including animal prints, suede, lace and neon, all fresh and on-trend with a timeless feel.  The esthetic of the collection is inspired by Studio 54 in the late 70's where icons like Donna Summer, Bianca Jagger, Grace Jones, Tina Turner were center stage.

Known for her eclectic sense of style and impeccable taste, Padma Lakshmi launches her first ever jewelry collection for HSN on March 22. PL by Padma Lakshmi bridges the gap between East and West with influences from her heritage and travels during her time as a fashion model and contributing editor to Harper's Bazaar Magazine. Ranging from $16.00 -$90.00, the collection includes fashion forward pieces with a hint of bohemian gypsy luxe and red carpet glamour.

Style icon Iris Apfel returns to HSN with her first ever shoe collection under the same name as her fashion jewelry, Rara Avis by Iris Apfel.  The collection consists of five styles and ranges in price from $59.90 to $99.90.  It's effortless and comfortable footwear infused with her notable flair for fashion.

The HSN Spring Fashion series also features the debut of collections from luxury handbag brands Foley + Corinna and Isabella Fiore as well as the launch of the trendsetting cosmetic brand Too Faced with guest celebrity spokesperson Jillian Barberie Reynolds.

HSN's Spring Fashion Series highlights the season's newest trends in fashion, footwear and accessories from designers including Giuliana Rancic, Badgley Mischka, Sam Edelman, Queen Latifah, Vicky Tiel, Carlos Falchi, Vince Camuto, IMAN, Serena Williams, Donald Pliner and Stefani Greenfield, as well as new on-trend jewelry from designers R.J. Graziano, Iris Apfel, Fern Mallis, Randy Jackson and Ranjana Khan and finally, fresh new beauty assortments from Deborah Lippmann and Trish McEvoy.

HSN is a leading interactive multi-channel retailer, offering a curated assortment of exclusive products and top brand names to its customers.  HSN incorporates entertainment, inspiration, personalities and industry experts to provide an entirely unique shopping experience.  At HSN, customers find exceptional selections in Health & Beauty, Jewelry, Home/Lifestyle, Fashion/Accessories, and Electronics. 

Milan fashion week opens with hopes of economic comeback

Designers kicked off Milan fashion
week on Wednesday with bold collections to persuade Italian
shoppers that the worst of the economic crisis is over and it is
time to hit the stores again.

Fashion houses including PPR's Gucci, Giorgio
Armani and Prada are among the top names showing their
womenswear 2013-14 autumn-winter collections, taking up the
baton from catwalk shows in London.

"I have great hopes for this country after the political and
economic debacle of the last months," cashmere goods maker
Brunello Cucinelli told Reuters at his showroom.

The colourful crowd of fashion critics and bloggers
descending on Milan will mix this year with Italian voters
heading to the ballot box on Feb. 24-25 to choose a new
government and decide the country's future economic path.
Italy came close to a major debt crisis in November 2011
before Silvio Berlusconi stood down as prime minister and was
replaced by technocrat Mario Monti.

"There is a need to clean up politics and give small
businesses the incentives to hire people," Maurizio Modica,
co-designer at Italy's brand Frankie Morello, told Reuters.
Sales of Italian fashion goods are forecast to drop 3.5
percent to around 58 billion euros ($77 billion) this year,
after falling 5.4 percent in 2012, according to preliminary data
by textile and fashion body Sistema Moda Italia (SMI).

Gucci, the first big name brand to show, proposed a fetish
aesthetic for its sensual collection, with sculpted dresses in
materials such as python skin.

Creative head Frida Giannini, who is expecting her first
baby in a couple of weeks, was inspired by the idea of a "femme
fatale" for her show, which also featured evening gowns with
colourful feathers stitched on black lace.

For the morning, Giannini showed sporty jackets embroidered
with three-dimensional leaves.

Fashion house Frankie Morello presented a "dark lady" for
its youthful collection, which featured black blouses covered
with mirror shards and stiff fabrics in geometric patterns.
"I am confident that this edition of the Milan womenswear
week will confirm the positive signs of recovery that we saw in
January during the menswear shows," Mario Boselli, chairman of
Italy's fashion national chamber, said in a statement.

He said he expected orders for the autumn-winter collections
would improve as the recession eases in 2013.

Foreign markets will make up the mainstay of the revenue,
with exports expected to reach record levels in terms of value,
surpassing the previous record in 2000. Non-EU countries such as
China will outpace EU members for the first time, SMI said.
"These forecasts are based on a scenario that there will be
no fiscal shocks in 2013 and the government to be named after
the election will couple fiscal austerity with measures to boost
spending in the second half of the year," SMI said.

The fashion week, which ends on Tuesday, will also include
shows from Versace, Dolce & Gabbana and Roberto Cavalli.

Rihanna's Fashion Line: A 'Slutty' Disaster or Triumph?

Rihanna debuted her first-ever fashion collection as part of London Fashion Week, and depending on who you believe, it was an unmitigated disaster or a triumph of young, streetwise style.

The presentation of the collection, a joint venture with the British brand River Island, was presented Saturday night in a decommissioned post office on London's New Oxford Street, and lasted just nine minutes, according to the British paper The Sun, which said that the show got underway 50 minutes late because Rihanna was tardy.

The Daily Beast called the 120-piece collection "hideous," lacking either "panache or style." The website's critic also labeled Rihanna's clothes "unsurprisingly slutty and yet tiresomely predictable," and suggested that if a guy were to meet a girl in a bar wearing one of the looks, he might think she was a prostitute. Furthermore, the critic slammed Rihanna's latest project as a "cynical marketing exercise entirely devoid of inspiration or authenticity." Ouch.

PHOTOS: Rihanna: Through The Years
However, Elle UK praised the collection, saying it was "an ode to all things high fashion," describing it as "Eighties Norma Kamali meets Alexander Wang luxe sportswear." Among the standout pieces, according to Elle: a black jersey column evening dress, a bra top, a navy cropped sweatshirt, a denim jumpsuit and a jersey skirt with a silk shirt attached.

"Rihanna really does have a great eye for fashion and the attention to details and styling elevated the collection to proper collector's item status," concluded the magazine.

While the British paper The Observer predicted that Rihanna's designs were "sure to be a hit with River Island customers," and said it would be "a winner" when it hits stores in March, ultimately, the paper said the collection "undoubtedly fell short" for those fashion fans who look to London for innovative ideas.

SEE MORE: Celebrity Clothing Lines
But MTV.com was a big fan, describing the collection as a mix of "girly 90s grunge and streetwear," praising a two-piece denim ensemble, a two-piece black bodysuit with an oversized parka and thigh-high boots, a tie-dye off-the-shoulder cropped top and flirty skirt and the "very '90s floral pattern" she put on blouses, shorts and dresses.

Rihanna's co-designer, Adam Selman, told Vogue UK that the singer was "heavily involved" in all the designs.

"This collection is very based upon Ri's style and her mood - so it's evolved a lot," he said. "This all comes from her - it's very personal. She's at the top of her game right now in terms of her career and in herself. She's in a really good place."

He added that the collection was "urban-inspired, unfussy with a hint of uptown" and is targeted at "cool hip girls who aren't super thin".

The collection of clothing and accessories will launch internationally at River Island stores online on March 5. Since River Island is a U.K. brand with no stores in the U.S., you'll be able to buy it in the U.S. and in Japan at Opening Ceremony, an online and retail fashion destination.

London Fashion Week celebrates plus-sized models

It's a skinny girl's world, particularly in fashion where the thin, androgynous look always wins out. But this weekend, an alternative to London Fashion Week celebrated the larger lady and all her curves.
"Thank you all for being who you are", declared one of the organisers at the first Official British Plus-Size Fashion Weekend in Shoreditch, an edgy district in the east of the capital beloved of young hipsters and music fans.

Here, elegantly-dressed women browse racks of clothes designed for European size 40 (UK size 12, US size 8 or 10) and upwards, snacking intermittently from plates of crisps and cupcakes spread around the venue -- food here is not taboo.

The two-day event featured discussions, tutorials by bloggers and a final catwalk show featuring established and first-time models.

Wearing skirts, shorts or bikinis, the women were greeted with enthusiastic applause as they walked out on the runway, with the audience encouraging every display of confidence.

While many of the models could only be described as voluptuous, some of the clothes on offer were not what many people think of as plus-sized.

Hayley, a 24-year-old model who wears European size 42, berated the industry for the way it categorised women. "I think even some agencies these days call girls that are UK size 10 plus size. That's just crazy.
"I think that plus size is the wrong word. I think a curvy model would be a better word to describe me and plus size is not necessarily the nicest expression."

Thirteen designers attended the fashion weekend, but the number was dwarfed by the almost 80 labels showing across town at the official London Fashion Week, where skinny girls still reign supreme.

"At the end, I hope there won't be two segregated shows. But for now, we want to give curvy women an option," said Rianne Ward, one of the organisers of the event and the creator of online magazine Evolve.
She plans to run the plus-sized event again next year, hoping to emulate the success of New York's Full-Figured Fashion Week which is in its fifth year.

A plus-size model wearing clothes from Simply Be walks down the catwalk during Official British Plus-Size Fashion Weekend in east London on February 16, 2013. This weekend, an alternative to London Fashion Week celebrated the larger lady and all her curves.

A plus-size model wears clothes from Carolyn de la Drapiere at Shoreditch Town Hall, East London today. "Thank you all for being who you are", declared one of the organisers at the first Official British Plus-Size Fashion Weekend in Shoreditch, an edgy district in the east of the capital beloved of young hipsters and music fans.

A plus-size model on the catwalk at Shoreditch Town Hall, east London, today. Here, elegantly-dressed women browse racks of clothes designed for European size 40 (UK size 12, US size 8 or 10) and upwards, snacking intermittently from plates of crisps and cupcakes spread around the venue -- food here is not taboo.

Europe's Fashion History, Just a Click Away

An ambitious fashion archive is being readied for its debut May 2, when Europeana Fashion will go online with about 100,000 digital elements from 22 European museums and institutions — a gallery ranging from a 1921 embroidered dress by Madeleine Vionnet to a Diana Vreeland letter to the designer Emilio Pucci.

The project’s goal is to have a total of 700,000 fashion-related elements in digital form and online by March 2015, helping to preserve European fashion history for future generations.

“This is the first attempt to assemble such an important collection of fashion content from both private and public archives and museums,” said Alessandra Arezzi Boza, a freelance fashion curator based in Florence who oversees the site’s content and communications. “And it is surely one of the great challenges of the project as, until now, fashion content was scattered online and not easily searchable.”

The project is an offshoot of Europeana, the five-year-old online digital library that showcases images of about 24 million cultural artifacts, including the Mona Lisa and the Gutenberg Bible.

For now, those who go to www.europeanafashion.eu will find details about the project, a blog about its development, a social corner with Twitter feed and Facebook posts, and a list of fashion-related events around Europe.

Once the site is fully ready, organizers say, users will be able to search the archives by date, designer, item or keyword. A click on a particular image will bring up a detailed view and more information, as well as more images, if available.

Items will include images from fashion shows, catwalks, museum exhibitions and installations in fashion fairs; videos; biographies; blogs; documentation like show invitations, which might be considered works of art in themselves; and articles from newspapers and magazines dating from the 18th century.

Beyond the Web, Europeana Fashion is planning a series of conferences, beginning with “Fashion Industry and the GLAM Community” on April 17 and 18 in Florence, and organizers are considering virtual exhibitions, showcases and a cooperative arrangement with Wikimedia events.

Mrs. Arezzi Boza and Marco Rendina, a researcher and new-media expert at Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, a Italian nonprofit organization, came up with the idea for Europeana Fashion a couple of years ago when they realized the limits of the original site.

“If you search for ‘fashion’ on Europeana, you can find 5,935 digital items, which is nothing compared to the 24 million digital objects” that eventually will be on Europeana Fashion, Mrs. Arezzi Boza said.

It turned out that ModeMuseum in Antwerp, Belgium, was working on a similar idea, so the two groups joined forces.

Museums in Asia and the United States have begun similar efforts to preserve their fashion collections online, but not in such a comprehensive way, Mrs. Arezzi Boza said.

The Fondazione, located in Florence, is coordinating the project. Its secretary, Marco Rufino, is Europeana Fashion’s general coordinator while Mr. Rendina is serving as its technical director.

The European Commission provided 80 percent of the total €3.3 million, or $4.4 million, budget through 2015, with the partners’ providing the remainder. The partners have agreed to create a Europeana Fashion Foundation to administer the site and update content after 2015.

Participants come from 12 European countries and include institutions like Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris; ModeMuseum Antwerp, which will provide 100,000 elements; and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The Victoria & Albert Museum intends to contribute about 8,000 catalog records and images, including pictures of a corset constructed of red sateen, yellow leather and whalebone from 1883 and a silk day dress made around 1873 that was donated by the Marchioness of Bristol. The intense purple color of the dress illustrates the kind of vivid dyes popular at the time.

“Europeana will create a portal which fashion designers, along with anyone else who is interested in fashion, can use as a ‘one-stop shop,”’ said Heather Caven, head of collections management and resource planning at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which also is helping to develop a multilingual Fashion Thesaurus for the site.

Other partners include small museums like the RossiModa Shoe Museum near Venice, which is providing 12,000 images of shoes; photo agencies like Catwalk Pictures of Brussels; fashion schools; and fashion houses including Missoni and Emilio Pucci.

“Fashion is today part of a general collective system and part of Europe’s cultural profile,” said Laudomia Pucci di Barsento, vice president and image director of Emilio Pucci and owner of the Fondazione Archivio Emilio Pucci, which began digitizing its archive 10 years ago.

“A serious reflection on fashion culture and history on a specialized portal has become a must.”

On N.Y. Fashion Runways, White Models Remain The Norm

You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. This week was Fashion Week in New York City. That's when the big designers show off their new lines in runway shows. And one thing that hasn't changed this year is that most of the models were white. Reporter Arun Venugopal of member station WNYC looks at why the runways have so few models of color.

ARUN VENUGOPAL, BYLINE: A couple days ago, Shawn Grain Carter was teaching a class at the Fashion Institute of Technology when she decided to make a point on racial diversity at New York Fashion Week or the lack thereof.

SHAWN GRAIN CARTER: The first thing I said was take a look at the picture and tell me what you see and tell me what you don't see.

VENUGOPAL: As she tells it, she showed her students a page from The New York Times, a Fashion Week review with a bunch of runway shots.

CARTER: Beautiful-looking models but they're all Caucasian. You don't see an Asian model. You don't see a Latina. You don't see a black model.

VENUGOPAL: New York Fashion Week has celebrated designers of color like Jason Wu and Tracy Reese, and the crowds are quite mixed, but the runways are pretty homogenous. About four out of five of the runway models are white, according to journalist Jenna Sauers, who's done a regular analysis for the website Jezebel. Sauers says white models are the norm wherever you encounter images of luxury.

JENNA SAUERS: So when on the runway you have mostly white faces, the flow-on effect is that you have mostly white magazines and mostly white advertising.

VENUGOPAL: Ashley Mears is a sociologist and former model who wrote "Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model." She says high fashion is looking for something edgy.

ASHLEY MEARS: Edgy meaning something off, something distinctive, something different, and it's always meant to be distinctive in just the right way so that it's read as higher class.

VENUGOPAL: Meaning light-skinned, youthful and possessing a sort of sexual purity, she says. Black models in particular feel affected. Marcia Mitchell has been repeatedly told she should get a nose job to have a more aquiline appearance. And her hair, she says, stylists can't deal with it. In some ways, she says, the business is completely frank about race.

MARCIA MITCHELL: They just sort of said: We're not doing black girls this season. I'm sorry.

VENUGOPAL: Some designers, like Diane von Furstenberg, have called for more diversity, and China's growing appetite for high fashion has resulted in more Asian models being cast for shows. But some also see this as a kind of art form and don't think it should be subject to some sort of quota system. Backstage after designer Nicole Miller's show, her 20 or so models were standing around, celebrating with Miller. A quarter of them were models of color.

NICOLE MILLER: I had five diversified girls, plus a redhead, which is the most diversity because they're very - the lowest percentage of the population is redheads.

VENUGOPAL: Afterward, I met celebrity stylist Shalik Harford, who wore a pretty audacious ensemble of sequins, stripes and furs. People were taking his picture because he's the kind of eye-popping character that makes Fashion Week so much fun. He said the absence of models of color was frustrating for the black community.

SHALIK HARFORD: We want to flip through the pages of Vogue and Cosmopolitan and Glamour and all these amazing editorials and see our people there. And so when our people look into the magazines, it's like, well, where are we?

VENUGOPAL: But some says fashion is simply responding to consumers and their tastes. Preston Chunsaumlit is a casting director for models. He's also Asian.

PRESTON CHUNSAUMLIT: For me, personally, it's beyond my control. I'm not the client. I just facilitate. And is it the client's responsibility or the magazine's? You know, it's just - we can't fight racism. Fashion is not here to fight discrimination.

VENUGOPAL: If change is to come to fashion, he says, consumers will have to demand it. For NPR News, I'm Arun Venugopal in New York.

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The Fashion World Has a Serious Discussion About John Galliano and Anti-Semitism

Yesterday everyone was in a tizzy about the fashion designer John Galliano, who may or may not have worn a Hasid-mocking outfit to a recent Fashion Week event. Galliano has said some not so great things about Jewish people in the past, so people were quick to condemn. And by "people" we mean the New York Post. Though other outlets have since said that Galliano's outfit was nothing new, the Post is still pursuing the story. Yesterday they interviewed some true fashion luminaries about the ginned-up scandal, and what those fine people had to say is a treasury of silliness.

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"I thought it was really disrespectful. You don’t mess with people’s religion."  — former Real Housewives of New York day player Kelly Bensimon, who ought to know from disrespectful

"You would think that [when] one of the world’s most famous fashion designers invites you into a city that was built by Jews, that you would be sensitive to that. I don’t understand why he couldn’t create a new hairstyle that said, ‘More Jews in Israel.'" — Kelly Cutrone, that lady who organizes fashion shows and who had a Bravo reality show for a hot second. We're not really sure what she's even trying to say. How would a hairstyle say that? Could a hairstyle say that? Should it say that? All mysteries.

"When you work in fashion, it’s like a language, right? So in many ways, it’s like embracing the idea, it’s nodding to them and respecting them." — Robert Verdi. Aha, OK. Whatever you say, Verdi.

“It’s not meant to mock Hasidic Jews and the religion. I think it’s meant to sort of respectfully say, ‘Truce. See, look. Some of my best friends are Jewish.’ That type of thing.”  — Robert Verdi again! Bringin' the hits. How on earth would the outfit ever say "some of my best friends are Jewish"? In a related story, some of my best friends are Robert Verdi.

"The last thing I would think of when I see that photo is ‘Hasidic.'" — Patricia Field, costume doyenne of Sex and the City, bringing some reason.

"Look at the curls in the back . . . he’s got the same curls in the back as he does the front." — Patricia Field still, speaking truth to power.

"A Hasidic hat has got a wide brim, it’s got a smaller crown." — Go on, Patricia Field...
"The coat he’s wearing is just a contemporary coat with skinny lapels, and it’s navy." — And there you have it. Case closed. You have a fashion mystery that needs solving? You call Patricia Field. She will tell you what's what.

So it would seem that perhaps Galliano's look was just an unfortunate coincidence. Or maybe it wasn't! Who knows. There's really no way to tell. The real lesson here is that if you want a good, solid quote about whether something is or is not anti-Semitic you go straight to fashion people. They'll nail it every time.

British Fashion Gets a Web Dynamo

This month Natalie Massenet, the founder of Net-a-Porter and Internet guru to the fashion world, will throw her might behind London Fashion Week.
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The British Fashion Council

Natalie Massenet, left, with Prime Minister David Cameron and Caroline Rush at a 10 Downing Street reception to celebrate the London men’s collections last month.

As the newly appointed chairman of the British Fashion Council, she will use her power to promote designers not in their traditional role as funky and cool, but as major players in a global arena.

“I haven’t given up on my day job!” says Ms. Massenet, who is executive chairman of Net-a-Porter, explaining how she was persuaded to take up the role after working on a four-year business strategy with Caroline Rush, the chief executive of the British Fashion Council (BFC).

The pro bono appointment shows Ms. Massenet’s astonishing virtuosity. This month the executive, who built her online shopping empire over 13 years, will launch Net-a-Porter in French and German and in Mandarin, for the ever-growing number of Asian online shoppers, who now make up one third of Net-a-Porter’s clients.

Ms. Massenet, a pioneering force behind online luxury shopping will also unveil a newsstand version of the on-line magazine concept that has helped build the success of Net-a-Porter, because it invested in editorial content to attract more than five million monthly visitors to read, browse and shop the latest offerings.

This magazine maneuver takes Ms. Massenet back to her earliest days at the British magazine Tatler in the 1990s — before she built the e-tail business from a £880,000, or $1.4 million, start-up put together by her former husband, an investment banker. She then sold the brand in 2010 to the luxury group Richemont, which valued the company at £350 million, netting her a supposed £50 million.

Ms. Massenet, 47, sits on a couch in the glass box of an office that offers an aerial view of London. With the fitful sun shimmering through wisps of mist and on the space-age construction of the Westfield shopping complex, she is literally, as well as metaphorically with her online business, in the “cloud.”

She calls it “a cathedral-like feeling of light” and announces that the huge space is no longer enough: Westfield has promised to build a new rooftop wing by next year.

Ironically, the Net-a-Porter organization with its 2,500 global employees sits above a shopping mall that has bricks-and-mortar stores for luxury brands from Burberry to Prada to Louis Vuitton. Although Prada is one of the few brands that has resisted her blandishments. Ms. Massenet’s slim mouth, set in a perfect-oval-shaped face, puckers at such a refusal.

Her connection since Jan. 1 to the BFC is significant in reinforcing the changed image of British fashion from quirky but erratic to inventive but well-organized.

Working with Ms. Rush, she has encouraged Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife, Samantha, to support the fashion industry, which is worth more than £20 billion to the British economy, according to the BFC.

The two women have come up with five “pillars.” Ms. Rush cites these as first the designer perspective: getting the right deals, support and global reach; then the business of regulating investment possibilities; and teaching cash-flow management with an effective business strategy via terrestrial or on-line seminars.

The final categories are education and reputation: What Ms. Rush sees as expanding teaching beyond the well-known British art and design colleges; and building strong partnerships across Europe, in China, Japan and emerging markets.

“And if more people wanted to join the industry, they don’t have to be a designer — for an amazing life and career, you don’t have to be a creative,” says Ms. Massenet, referring to potential management and online strategic positions outside of the 700 fashion companies that the BFC has already listed.

Both Ms. Rush and Ms. Massenet applaud the fact that the Scottish designer Christopher Kane, 30, has been backed by the French luxury conglomerate PPR, which is already behind the Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney brands.

Mr. Kane says of Ms. Massenet: “She is my biggest client,” proving how online sales can be a gift to young designers.

 Ms. Massenet is seen from various perspectives within the industry. She remembers clearly her starting point at Tatler magazine after being brought up in Los Angeles and Paris (hence the grand double doors to the airy interior of the Net-a -Porter offices).

But the British Vogue publisher Stephen Quinn recalls little of her in that Tatler role and is more interested in her persuading big-brand British designers like Ms. McCartney and Mr. McQueen to show in London rather than Paris.

Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast International, regards Ms. Massenet both as a dynamic force within the industry and as an important advertiser. (Net-a-Porter covers increasingly the same farflung territories marked out by Condé Nast.)

Christopher Bailey, chief creative officer of Burberry, who stages his women’s (but not men’s) shows in London and is wedded to high technology, is enthusiastic about Ms. Massenet’s new role.

“I have so much admiration for Natalie and everything she has achieved through her incredible drive and singular vision,” the designer says. “I can’t think of a better person to champion our creative talent at home and around the world.”

British fashion needed a rebranding to keep a focus on eccentricity (defined at the Olympics last summer by the Danny Boyle opening ceremony), but also to be perceived as a serious business player in a wired world. Ms. Rush’s dynamism has also included Internet promotion and live-steaming shows.

Back home at Westfield, Ms. Massenet has a picture of herself dancing with Roland Mouret, the London designer whom she persuaded to sell his first collection on the fledgling Net-a-Porter in 2001. The speed with which she developed the business to embrace 300 A-list designers and to express-ship their goods to 170 countries has stunned the fashion industry, but few have successfully imitated it.

The executive also seems to have an impressive ability to juggle her work with another important part of her life: her pre-teenage daughters, who are already wired to Twitter and Instagram.

“I am pretty good about turning off — I am binary and when I am home I love being there,” Ms. Massenet says.

The business however, does not switch off, and she is scathing about chief executives who are “experts in old ideas” and whose stores still follow the rhythm of a working day.

“We try not to follow rules — we make our own rules,” she says, adding that Net-a-Porter works 24/7 — as witnessed by the digital screens on the wall documenting every sale, its cost and its place of origin. The figure on Wednesday, at midday, after a £1,250 purchase from Germany, stood at £639,325.

Thirty percent of those sales are from cellphones, changing even further the concept of modern shopping.

Who is the real Ms. Massenet and what makes her tick?

An employee, who asked not to be quoted, described his mentor as “very American” in a demand for super-tidy desks and that the forest of curving Artemis lamps are set at the same angle across the entire work floor. That sense of streamlined order continues along to the Mr. Porter male fashion site (started in 2011) and the Outnet site for marked-down pieces.

Colorful Post-its with baffling messages such as “cucumber” and “Java” are stuck on walls where clusters of staff congregate in stand-up discussions. (No time to be wasted by sitting down comfortably.)

There have been some grumbles in the industry that Mr. Porter’s visual style was too obviously modeled on Fantastic Man magazine, and that the U.K.-based Net-a-Porter does not seem to promote British designers in particular.

But the Net-a-Porter staff express a fierce loyalty. Lucy Yeomans, who originally worked at Tatler with Ms. Massenet, was persuaded to leave her editor’s role at Harper’s Bazaar after 11 years and is now handling the online/kiosk magazine. Jeremy Langmead, who heads up Mr. Porter, also comes from a Hearst magazines background as editor of Esquire.

“It’s very different from magazines in that there are so many platforms,” Mr. Langmead said. “But as Natalie always says ‘yes,’ it puts a spring in your step.”

Is Ms. Massenet really as shiny perfect as her glossy light brown hair and purple nails? She has a sophisticated and refined personal taste. Yet for all her digital savvy (she often speaks at technology conferences) her speech at last week’s BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund award was read from paper, not from a digital tablet. She admits to being fazed by the office telephones, which she finds complex to navigate for conference calls.

Then there is her hearty dislike of getting on a plane — despite her role at this global empire.

But Ms. Massenet’s enthusiasm and energy have an uplifting effect. The number of people applying for jobs puts Net-a-Porter on the almost Messianic level of Google.

“And we have to deal with how we handle the applicants and the 99 percent rejects,” said Ms Massenet, who has hired 40 people in Human Resources.

At last week’s design awards, her speech was a model of encouragement and compassion for finalists who did not win. And her dress code was impeccably British: a lace patterned dress by Erdem Moralioglu and shoes by the fashion fund winner, Nicholas Kirkwood.

From the black ballerina flats (with black jeans) for walking the length of her Westfield empire, through the high-heeled black pointy-toe court shoes for cocktails at the prime minister’s residence last month, it is rare, indeed, for the new chairwoman of British fashion to put a foot wrong.

Stockholm Fashion Week: is Swedish style having its own Ikea moment?

As the snow melts and re-freezes and Stockholm turns its eyes to the autumn 2013 catwalk shows, it's easy to forget there'll be a spring and a summer before then. This of-the-moment feel is one of the Swedish fashion scene's main strengths: more and more pieces from homegrown brands have, in recent years, strolled straight off the runways and into the shops. Reasonably priced, well made and commercial without being too obvious, is Swedish fashion having its own Ikea moment?

“There's a certain pragmatic aspect,” says Melissa Drier, the Berlin correspondent for Women's Wear Daily and in town for the shows. “Sometimes they're just good clothes that you want to buy. It's not necessarily directional, but there's a gentility to them, and then at the same time, a little bit of rock and roll too. ”For anyone who's in the contemporary part of the market, Sweden is a real base,“ she adds.

This is the sector that most brands showing in Stockholm fit into: everyday pieces at mid-range prices, not so high flown as the designer bracket proper but more considered, design-wise, than the upper echelons of the high street. And it's a niche that is doing well despite the downturn, as shoppers of every type converge on it, from above and below according to either aspiration or thrift.

“Many of the brands are quite small, and they're struggling” says Susanne Ljung, host of Stil, a weekly public radio fashion show. “But there's an optimistic vibe – you can trace influences from 'Swedish Modern', a term introduced in New York at the 1939 World Fair. It's a blend of modernism, craftsmanship, beauty and comfort.”

Labels on the schedule differ vastly, of course, and range from established names such as J. Lindeberg to H&M's indie arm Cheap Monday, with countless up-and-comings in between, and even the odd heritage brand looking to bolster its fashion credentials.

It isn't quite the same melting pot that gave birth to the Belgian designers in the late Eighties, but the current geographical vogue for all things Scandinavian hasn't hurt designers here in terms of international recognition.

The Swedish look – long hair, androgynous tailoring, grunge and an ankle boot – is in right now, not least thanks to l abels such as Acne and high-street brand COS, which have sown the Swede seeds of success abroad already.

“It's important for us to be accessible with our price points,” says Carl Malmgren, denim designer at Cheap Monday after the brand's show. Entitled Artificial Grunge, the collection mixed Nineties references with lace and neons to create a futuristic, punkish look for autumn – one that its young British fans will be only too happy to pick up at the flagship store which opened in Carnaby Street last year.

“It's a challenge for us to do fashion-forward stuff that people can actually buy.” He smirks at the suggestion that this is a particularly Scandinavian notion, but ultimately agrees. “That's fair – it's a socialist ideal.”

Cheap Monday's creative director is Ann-Sofie Back, a Central St Martins graduate, who has run a successful line under her own name for almost a decade, and has collaborated with Fred Perry and Topshop, and shown at London Fashion Week. Her diffusion line, Back, is on the Stockholm schedule and her worldwide sales increased 60 per cent last year. The autumn '13 collection was a riot of hazard tape-coloured workwear-inspired pieces, shown to a soundtrack of rowdy blokes chanting the designer's name.

“I always work with things I don't like,” she explains backstage. “I had to find a way of dealing with fashion that was different to anyone else's.

“My clothes are for someone with a sense of humour; someone who doesn't take fashion too seriously and who dresses for herself, rather than for a man.” Back's philosophy resounds through many other Swedish labels, even though few of them share so extreme an aesthetic.

Whether because of their national taste for functionality and asceticism or not, many womenswear designers here play with male and female tropes to create a new version of femininity that is far from girlish or traditional, but is in no way cumbersome or intimidating.

“We wanted to bring in parts of menswear, such as suits and military coats, and match them with a more poetic style,” explains Karin Soderlind of Dagmar, a knitwear brand run by three sisters and named after their grandmother. This they did in teal tailoring, marble prints, lace and sharp coats softened with cape sleeves. “We call it 'the awakening' – to a new lifestyle and a new feminine style.”

Carin Wester, whose clothes have been picked up by Urban Outfitters and ASOS, also looked to that mix, with unstructured and oversized greatcoats and duffels in blush tones, nude double-breasted suits – even a pinstripe crop-top worn with pinstripe hipster slacks. At Whyred, too, tailoring was mannish and boxy – inspired by Peter Saville's artwork for New Order's “Power, Corruption and Lies” – while archetypally couture-era feminine blanket coats came in utilitarian olive and khaki.

“I love sensual silhouettes and the female body,” agrees designer Elin Nystrom after her Stylein show, which saw silk tunics and fluid gowns cut geometrically to make them less soft and more severe. “But you also need the straight lines, the more masculine feel. When the two meet, that's when the magic happens.”

Apparently so: such is the interest in Swedish – and Scandinavian – designers that the largest ever showcase of their wares will be unveiled at Somerset House during London Fashion Week later this month.

More than 40 labels will exhibit there, nine of which are Swedish, and emerging talents will be given the opportunity to show their collections – to an audience far bigger and far more influential than one they might command in their native capital.

Great Swedish export H&M is also keen to promote young talent, and one draw of the Stockholm shows was its Design Award, the culmination of a talent search across Europe's best design schools. The winner, Minju Kim of Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, will see parts of her collection produced and sold by the chain.

Kim's flair for fit, proportion and texture – all the while referencing bold and bright Japanese manga comics –was a colourful addition to a schedule where a modern and litotic take on good taste was primarily the order of the day.

But there were homegrown newcomers showing in Stockholm, too, and ones that promise to join the Nordic invasion of our boutiques and wardrobes.

The much-hyped duo behind Altewaisaome offered minimal but glamorous sports couture: iridescent, petrol blue shift dresses and wide-leg trousers with zip, drawstring and bugle bead detailing provided opulence in among expertly cut trapeze-line coats in felt and boiled wool, cut deliberately flat and boxy.

At the Mes Dames show, too, classic elegance was undermined by way of paint-spattered maxi-skirts and oxblood silk jumpsuits, even a dirndl skirt made from shiny green PVC.

While the trend for pigeonholing these names according to their origins may help with recognition for the time being, the aim for these designers is to break free of such associations and emerge on to the global market in their own right. For labels as commercially viable as many on the Stockholm roster, this shouldn't be too difficult at all – but the next stage for them may well be the shopfloor rather than the international catwalks: Swedish designers make clothes you want to wear rather than watch.

Art Van Furniture Donates Furnishings To Detroit Veteran Sgt. Davin Dumar As Part Of Operation FINALLY HOME With The Kid Rock Foundation And Pulte Homes

Art Van Furniture is donating the furnishings for the new home of Michigan war veteran Sergeant Davin Dumar. Kid Rock and his foundation, partnered with Pulte Homes, as part of Operation FINALLY HOME, to present the new mortgage-free 2,600 square foot property to Sgt. Dumar and his wife Dana. The Dumars will move into the Macomb home on Friday, February 1, 2013. Deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 with the Army's 1-25th SBCT, Sgt. Dumar was struck by an IED during an engagement with enemy forces. Dumar's left leg was amputated as a result of the injury he sustained.

"On behalf of the 2,700 associates of Art Van Furniture, we want to personally thank Sgt. Dumar for his service to our country," said Chairman and Founder Art Van Elslander. "His sacrifice has not gone unnoticed by our community. It's an honor for us to help welcome this soldier home."

A longtime supporter of US troops, Kid Rock, through his Kid Rock Foundation, partnered with Operation FINALLY HOME's founder Dan Wallrath to include Michigan veterans as part of the project. The singer, a Michigan native, has performed benefit concerts across the globe in support of the country's armed forces. Pulte Homes, based in Bloomfield Hills, donated the construction costs for the home.

In addition, The Somerset Collection retailers donated bedding and housewares, and Meijer is helping with groceries and other household items. Paul's TV inside Art Van also helped with a donation.

Art Van Furniture is Michigan's largest furniture retailer and America's largest independent furniture retailer.  The company operates 36 stores throughout Michigan, a full service e-commerce website, plus six freestanding Art Van PureSleep bedding stores in Canton, Troy, Rochester Hills, Brighton, Ann Arbor and New Hudson, Michigan. Founded in 1959, the company is family-owned and headquartered in Warren, Michigan. Visit www.artvan.com for more information.

Operation FINALLY HOME is an award-winning program created by Bay Area Builders Association Support Our Troops.  A non-partisan/non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, Operation FINALLY HOME'S mission is to provide custom made mortgage-free homes to wounded and disabled veterans and the widows of the fallen in an effort to get their lives back on track and become productive members of their communities.

Fashion Companies Turn to DeSL iPad & Android Apps to Help Manage Their Ethical Trading Requirements

DeSL, a global company delivering integrated web-based solutions for the Fashion, Apparel, Textile and Footwear sectors, has seen increasing demand for their solutions which help to address Ethical Trading requirements for fashion industry.

With fashion companies facing increased exposure to a range of social and ethical issues in the supply chain, DeSL's iPad applications have been designed specifically to ensure ethical compliance and enable inspection teams to perform stringent product and quality audits at factory locations.  Today, a number of companies have already embraced the DeSL solution to help manage their Ethical Trading process.  Most recently in January 2013, A. H Schreiber, one of the largest swimwear manufacturers in the United States, selected DeSL solutions to help manage their supplier relationship process.

The DeSL application enables clothing companies and fashion brands to fulfil this due diligence in the most thorough yet simple way, preventing the likelihood of negative publicity as a result of potential negligence in social and ethical management, such as health and safety issues. The solution is built around the concept of close collaboration between vendor and company, sharing required information and processes via the Internet. Many vendors are located remotely from the company they are supplying, in different time zones, so a real-time, web-based solution is the ideal solution.

Colin Marks, CEO, DeSL, commented, "All processes from start to finish are managed by the application using a real-time, web-based solution, backed up by iPad/Android, off line, synchronised apps. Many factory locations do not have good Internet access; using this technology enables work to be completed off-line at the factory, then simply backed up to the system when Internet becomes accessible. Our solution is extremely functionally rich, incorporating inspection requirements management, critical path tracking and performance inspection."

Colin continued, "The beginning of 2013 has already seen a number of Ethical Trading issues hit the headlines. The consequences of poor Ethical Trading processes are enormous; often a company will genuinely think they have all the boxes ticked, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. We would ask any fashion company that has a desire to strengthen its Ethical Trading process to contact us now to see how we can help."

DeSL is a global company delivering integrated web-based solutions for the Fashion, Apparel, Textile and Footwear sectors. The company has a global customer base covering United Kingdom, United States, Western Europe, China, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Mauritius, Bangladesh and North Africa.  Customers include Calvin Klein, VF Corporation, Men's Wearhouse, Bravissimo, Nautica, GRI Group plus many more.