Choosing my favourite shops for Time Out’s 100 Best Shops In London list wasn’t difficult. I’m not a big online shopper because I prefer to make really considered purchases and I find the whole store ambience and experience adds to the value of what I’m buying. My top five stores are the ones I visit on a regular basis, not just to buy, but also to ‘keep my eye in’ and research what’s out there. (more…)
Loewe:
Masters of Leather on Nowness.com.
Loewe has done a lovely job of highlighting three of this year’s biggest macro trends – craft, heritage and luxury – in this short film by Matthew Donaldson for Nowness (ah ‘fashion film’, there’s another tick). Using Richard Avedon’s In The American West as a visual reference (oh to have a copy of this collectable tome), it’s a celebration of the leather workers’ graft and craft in creating the signature Amazona bag. (more…)
Two weeks ago, while searching my poor, overloaded inbox (14,000 emails and counting, no time to even think about pruning them) for an email from Blitz London, I rediscovered one from The Blitz Kids. This site is a charmingly rough-n-ready resource for ’80s club culture-related info and photos – from Boy George to Lizzie Tear to Anna Piaggi. While reacquainting myself with the site, I clicked the link to Graham Smith and Chris Sullivan’s Unbound book project.
The book, We Can Be Heroes, boasts thirty years of punk and post-punk photo imagery by Graham Smith that until now has been languishing unloved in an attic. Ain’t that always the way? Coming to his senses and realising the value of these negatives (negatives! not even contact sheets!), Smith contacted fellow scenester Sullivan to add his wordy recollections to these evocative images, which are now being published via crowd-funding site Unbound.
There’s been a bit of a PR push, with a radio interview with Robert Elms and a Boy George article in The Guardian. Being kids of ’76, it made perfect sense that Smith and Sullivan would go the DIY route to getting their book published – wasn’t that the whole ethos of punk after all? So I have pledged my £30 to make this project happen. Not least cos it will be a bloody good read.
Mondays aren’t known as a key day for launches and events in the fashion world. Fridays and Mondays are usually event-free to give us weary fashion folk the chance of a long weekend without the worry that we might be missing something major. But with so much to fit in before Fashion Month, including Fashion’s Night Out, last Monday was stacked with appointments. Boy am I glad I wasn’t out of town for the preview of the astonishing Chanel X Harrods takeover. (more…)
