Fashion for everyone

Stylewise, I've always waffled between forward-thinking fashion, while at heart being a hopeless romantic girly-girl. Rarely do those two styles meet, but somehow British label Neurotica managed to combine them both in their Spring collection, "For the Love of Ivy." This season, the designers were inspired by the innocent beauty of The Virgin Suicide, as well as the photography of Tim Walker. While they've extracted bits and pieces of romance from these sources in the forms of loose crochet, washed out faded pastel colors, and a couple of frills, they're combined with oversized draping and pleating details that make the silhouettes anything but saccharine. Many of the pieces are touched with digital prints of flowers, fairies, and forest creatures, all executed with the a slightly sinister Neurotica twist. Cute, but still cool and concept-driven.

Chau Hur Lee's futuristic heels were another treat that I discovered at the London Show Rooms a few weeks ago. Mixing traditional materials like leather with cut acrylic and stainless steel, Chau's shoes cut a defiantly cool, if not necessarily functional, silhouette. One pair is lacking a heel, and the thin metal plates that serve as heels for another pair look like they require an incredible sense of balance. Her pieces are machine-like, with multiple parts and pieces serving different functions, and one pair of plastic heels can even be taken apart and assembled like a puzzle. Which are your favorite pair?

A show-stopping printed evening gown

Holly Fulton is one of my favorite young designers, and I was overjoyed to have the opportunity to view her collection in person last week at the London Show Rooms. Holly is known for her continued use of Art Deco motifs in her clothes, and this season, she said she was particularly inspired by the Memphis Group of Architecture. The Memphis style, which emerged in the eighties, is defined by striking and sometimes clashing colorways, and bold and outrageous design statements. Holly adopted the movement's mix of bright colors, Art Deco influences, and mishmash of materials into her clothing, which one might describe as highly stylized retro-futurism.

Both of my parents are architects, and my father is quite a big fan of the Memphis and New International Style, so I grew up surrounded by it, and all of the pieces remind me a bit of my parent's first over-the-top apartment back in the 80's (they have since moved, and gotten more minimalist). There wasn't a single piece I didn't love, and I was particularly blown away by the massive amount of work that goes into many of the pieces, which are alternatively covered in Swarovski crystals, or millions of tiny little beads. If you are like me, and would like a piece of Holly's collection, but can't afford the prices, don't fret! Holly informed me that her new collection for ASOS.com just launched, and is available for a pretty reasonable price right here. Not a bad substitute at all.

A skirt which is hand-embellished with thousands of beads

More birds, more beads, more crystals!

A sampling of Holly's gorgeous jewelry, which is made of a mishmash of cut perspex, wood, studs, and crystals!


Holly's adorable sketches for the Spring collection

A cartoony cloud-printed dress

One of several gorgeous bags

Holly Fulton for ASOS dress $112

Holly Fulton for ASOS printed jersey top $77, and leggings $77

For Spring 2011, Meadham Kirchhoff designed the most sophisticated Harajuku girl collection of my dreams. Each look is so strong and so perfectly styled, I have to admit, when I saw the clothes in person at the London Show Room, viewing each garment separately felt like seeing them out of context. They didn't seem quite complete without the rainbow hair, the funny patchwork socks, clunky sequined shoes, and the ornate Nasir Mazhar headpieces. Thankfully, I had all the runway images on hand, laid out in the Lisa Frank-style lookbook of my grade-school fantasies, to guide me through how the pieces should be worn. Normally I don't advise lifting looks straight off the runway, but when it's this good, you kinda don't want to mess with it. Just looking at it makes me want to revert to my teenage hair-dyed days, but I know that if I tried the rainbow color combo every member of my family (husband, parents, brother) would think I was having a personal crisis. I will have to settle on pouring over these images over and over--I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Louise Gray was one of the few designers that I didn't get to meet during the London Showrooms Event this past Fall. Either she was shy or antisocial, but I didn't feel particularly comfortable poking around her collection without her permission and opted to skip the entire thing, even though I had been looking forward to seeing it. Anyhow, her collection is partially available at ASOS, in addition to the latest installment of a wallet-friendly collaboration she did with the online retailer. The small collection includes My Girl style denim overalls and jackets, as well as two sweet heart-emblazoned jersey dresses which might be the perfect choice for Valentines Day--adorable but not overly saccharine.

While many jewelry designers (myself included) are still using the age-old technique of wax-carving to create their work, designer Jordan Askill seems light-years ahead of the pack with his perfectly proportioned, intricately detailed pieces created through 3-D computer rendering programs. Starting as a sculptor, Jordan made the brilliant decision to render his larger scale resin sculptures of packs of galloping horses and panthers into smaller-scale, wearable pieces. His second season includes large resin helmets made of flowers, and "backpacks" made of prowling panthers, in addition to smaller and slightly-more traditional looking fine-jewelry pieces following the same themes. While at first glance, his gold and ruby rings and aquiline necklaces look like traditional jewels, closer inspection reveals a menagerie of streamlined miniature animals, all dynamically rendered in movement. My favorite piece? The crystal horse jewelry box, which looks like an ice-sculpture of gallivanting horses, but opens to store jewelry, and is transparent, allowing your precious gems to peek through.

A selection of digitally-printed dresses from Mary Katrantzou's Spring 2011 collection

Yesterday night, I stopped by the London Show Rooms with two of my favorite boys, Brandon and Hector, to take a look at the Spring collections from Britain's finest up and coming designers. It was an incredibly geeky pleasure to meet some of my favorite designers in person, and one of the highlights of the night was meeting Mary Katrantzou and getting an up-close look at her extraordinary digital printed dresses. Mary is a personal design hero of mine, and like a true fan, I decided to wear one of her perfume bottle dresses for the evening, which made her very happy. Mary originally studied to be an architect before switching over to textile design, and eventually fashion, and her latest collection was inspired by interiors. Images of entire rooms are digitally printed onto the garments, which are constructed in a hodgepodge of fabrics that visually resemble the different materials one might find in a room (marble, tiles, curtain tassels), but to the touch, possess the softness of silk. Amongst my favorite pieces were a pair of skirts modeled after lamp-shades, complete with dangling crystal trim, that Mary worried wouldn't be produced, but which have surprisingly sold quite well. I love every piece in the collection so much, I'm thinking of asking my friend Andrew Yang to dress my doll in one her pieces (she saw his Mary Katrantzou dollies, and approves of his interpretation). Not to sound like a total creep, but I'll do anything to get more Mary in my life!

One of the interior dresses, constructed with fabrics that resemble marble and ceiling tile

I don't know where the image is from, but the deep oak colors remind me of Philip Johnson's Four Seasons restaurant in New York

Some gorgeous jewels dripping with Swarovski crystals

Lampshade skirt number one

Lampshade skirt two, which really looks like an old-fashioned lampshade!

I love how the curtain-skirt falls right where you imagine the curtains in the digital image to fall

More "curtains"

One of Mary's more "commercial" pieces, a printed blouse with a huge chandelier at the neck