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Carmen Dell'Orefice
I first met Carmen about four years ago when she came to the opening of David Downtown’s exhibition in the Fashion Space Gallery here at the College. It was hard not to be awestruck- a reaction I now recognise when people are first introduced to her. I knew the facts of her life and had… →
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Colin McDowell
Colin has been a great friend and colleague of myself and the College for many years. He is a seminal figure in fashion commentary and one of the giants of fashion journalism. He has been involved in the industry for 35 years, as designer, stylist, illustrator, editor, broadcaster and author, and has written expertly on… →
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Madame Grès (Musee Bourdelle)
Last year’s exhibition of 80 key pieces by the couturier Madame Gres (Germaine Emilie Krebs) was a revelation. Curated by Olivier Saillard, it was integrated into the museum dedicated to the sculptures and studio of Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929). I had been aware that Madame Gres had originally trained as a sculptor which meant that her… →
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SUBLIME: Work it Out
In the opening chapter of his biography, Dickens, Peter Ackroyd points out the parallels between our time and the Victorians “… The death of Dickens came as evidence of a giant transition; in these last decades of the nineteenth century, the English people were witnesses to the fatal disruptions of an old order and the… →
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SUBLIME: The Fashion Body
Sophie Robertson. BA (Hons) Fashion Photography 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… →
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SUBLIME: A Model of a Woman
Today there are thousands of girls aspiring to be the next Kate Moss in an age when perhaps it has never been easier to get into modelling. Yet there was once a golden age, when only a handful of models made it into the history books. We meet one of them Flicking through a magazine,… →
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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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SUBLIME: Making it Big
Feeling stuck in a rut, bored with your job – or just glad you’ve still got one? For students and workers in the creative industries, raw talent on its own will never be enough to get on. For the rest of us, we probably could do better. We see a lot of talent at the… →
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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. →