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OPINION: A Statement for Copenhagen
If we are to have a sustainable future we need to address a number of dilemmas at the heart of the fashion industry. Fashion designers and retailers have always had to tread the line between clothes with a signature style that their clients recognize and pressure to increase sales by developing new ones. Over recent… →
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OPINION: Better Lives – Interrogating Fashion
It is my contention that fashion as a discipline needs to extend and expand its influence, to counter the traditional stereotype of fashion as a lightweight subject, which is not quite worthy of real research and instead, to clearly make the case and set the pace for developing areas of research that extend fashion’s influence.… →
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Opinion: Fashion Education in Prisons – Female Prisoners
Image: Sean Michael Fashion is often dismissed as trivial by those who see clothes as adornment, rather than an external display of internal thinking. However we dress we make statements about ourselves, willingly or unwillingly. At the London College of Fashion, while we encourage our students to think the unthinkable as they search for tomorrow’s… →
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SUBLIME: The Fur’s Flying
Designers are working with animal pelts again, both real and faux. With demand high, now that farming conditions are better than they ever were and the manmade version is so good – what’s the problem? Why are fur sales rising? The case against fur was made so strongly in the 1980s that many people in… →
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Yohji Yamamoto
This is a video of me in conversation with Yohji Yamamoto, one of my favourite designers. →
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SUBLIME: Evolving Shopping
We usually apply the concept of evolution as a biological reference to the sequence of events that result in the development of a species or group of organisms. For me, however, that concept is a far more interesting when applied to the development of activities of a biological group. The human evolution of shopping, over… →
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SUBLIME: Going Forward, Looking Back
In his essay, Dialogue between Fashion and Death, Giacomo Leppardi has Fashion making the case to Death that as sisters: “I’m saying that it is our nature and our custom to keep renovating the world.” Fashion then draws a number of parallels between the two of them. He makes his case, pointing out that: “I… →
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The Art of Dress: Tuxedo
When Steven Dell first conceived the idea of a project for the BA (HONS) Bespoke Tailoring course he had no idea how far it would travel, and the wonderful Partners and sponsors who would join the team. From the start, Henry Poole of Saville Row was invited to become a major collaborator and support Steven’s… →
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SUBLIME: A Philosophy of Clothes
If you google philosophy and fashion, over 20 million possible connections come up. A cursory run through some of the pages reveals that the main theme – encompassed in numerous websites, blogs, adverts and publications – contains advice, ideas and suggestions for how we as individuals might develop and evolve a personal approach or philosophy… →
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SUBLIME: The Fashion Body
The concept of the fashion body provokes in me a number of ideas and thoughts. For example, the role I play in an industry which is dedicated to style, personal identity or the ways we use clothes and adornment to express our bodies. How I like to try and fashion my body through running and… →