Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Fashion Power from the Southern Hemisphere - Karen Walker


Traditionally, when people talking about fashion, they will mention the fashion from Europe especially from Paris which leads the fashion trend of the world. Later, fashion from US especially New York also generates significant influence in the fashion industry. Nowadays, fashion power from the Southern Hemisphere also shines along the fashion path. In the coming blogs, we will talk about some of the execellent fashion collections from the Southern Hemisphere :

KAREN WALKER (New Zealand)

A fashion brand named by its founder and fashion designer, Karen Walker who was born in New Zealand. Karen's collections are high casual with one foot in tailoring and the other in street wear. Mix and match of different extremes and pushing them together such as masculine and feminine, tailored and the street, luxury and casual are the major characteristics of Karen Walker's collection. Her fashion was described by UK's newspaper as "The kind of look that provided a means of appearing cool but not trying-too hard, cute but not saccharine, alternative but not self consciously so. The fact that these clothes appear to be so totally not 'fashion' is what makes them so now". Right now, this label has been carried in over 100 stores all over the world. Celebritites such as Jennifer Lopez, Kate Hudson, Claudia Schiffer and Madonna all favour her work.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

The Da Vinci Code of Fashion


Lately the movie "The Da Vinci Code" has brought about great disccussions in many religious issues. If there are the Da Vinci Code of Fashion, what would they be?
The most famous painting of Da Vinci is Mona Lisa. This figure of a woman, dressed in the Florentine fashion of her day and seated in a visionary, mountainous landscape, is a remarkable instance of Leonardo's sfumato technique of soft, heavily shaded modeling. The Mona Lisa's enigmatic expression, which seems both alluring and aloof, has given the portrait universal fame. The dressing of Mona Lisa is the typical fashion of their time which is conservative and bulky. They were mostly made with wool, silk and velvet with natural dyes. Darker colors were naturally adopted. At the time of drawing, Europe is undergoing the Renaissance ages, a term adopted from the French equivalent of the Italian word rinascita, meaning literally "rebirth," describes the radical and comprehensive changes that took place in European culture during the 15th and 16th centuries, bringing about the demise of the Middle Ages and embodying for the first time the values of the modern world. Maybe from the smile of Mona Lisa, we can decode the Da Vinci Code of Fashion which means a radical change of fashion design will be coming in the later time and women will have a greater freedom in expressing themselve in fashion styles and own personalities.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

The Magic of Accessories


Whenever you think that the clothes you wear are not attractive enough or you would like to add more features or attractiveness to yourself, why don't you think of adding some accessories to your dressing. The beautiful style can just be added with simple accessories such as necklaces, bracelets, ear rings or hair accessories. In the past, ladies may tend to dress such accessories in a more formal party and they are usually composed of precious metals and stones such as gold, platinum and diamonds. However, the concepts have totally changed nowadays. When you attend the latest fashion shows in the world, fashion designers tend to add more simple accessories to the models' dressing in order to make their designs more presentable. The most popular ones are necklaces or bracelets with ethnic characteristics. This may be a continuity of the ethnic fashion trend which became popular in the past fall/winter fashion. The elements of the necklaces are normally composed of irregular beads or square in vivid colors and there may not be only one necklace but multiple quantities in different length and compositions to present the ethnic concepts. Therefore, whenever you feel boring with your own fashion, add more accessories which may generate a spark in your life.