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Travel: Singapore Retail
Whilst in Singapore, a local taxi driver was telling me that many people come to this city-state purely to shop. I can understand why, with an overwhelming amount of luxury designer stores dominating the landscape. Many brands even have more than one store – I came across three Louis Vuitton stores in just a couple of… →
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Fashion as Armour: Wallace Collection
“Fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life.”- Bill Cunningham As one of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection I feel fortunate to have the pleasure of visiting this inspiring place on such a regular basis. The Wallace Collection owns one of the finest collections of fine and decorative arts in the… →
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Travel: Florence
Florence is a truly beautiful city. Famous for it’s history, its not just the stunning architecture that reminds us of it’s historical importance as the birth place of the Renaissance. The human scale is something missing in many of our 21st century cities. Not to mention the encircling hills, the river, the quality of light… →
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INTELLIGENT LIFE: Inspiring Innovators
Last night I attended a private supper hosted by the Economist’s Intelligent Life Magazine for contributors to the ‘Inspiring Innovators’ feature. For this feature I wrote about Yohji Yamamoto. Other contributions were from the likes of David Lynch who wrote about on Mikhail Gromov, James Lovelock on Charles Harington and Melinda Gates on Mother Teresa.… →
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Nightclubbing with Richard Young
Last night I went to the launch of Richard Young’s book ‘Nightclubbing.’ Richard has always been so supportive of the College and the students, and this book is a wonderful representation of his work over the past 40 years. His very first job was gatecrashing the party that Elizabeth Taylor had thrown for husband Richard… →
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A New Vision for Design and Technology
New Vision for Design and Technology – How Can D&T Meet the needs of the Creative Industries? “Creativity is possible in all areas of human activity, including the arts, sciences, at work at play and in all other areas of daily life. All people have creative abilities and we all have them differently. When individuals… →
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“Perhaps in reaction to this onslaught of globalisation, regional and national identities are now cherished as never before. This is especially evident in ‘the West’, where we crave sushi from Japan, batik prints from Java, kung foo movies from Hong Kong, tango from Argentina, beaded jewellery from East Africa etc precisely for their cultural otherness,the… →
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The Wallace Collection
I have always been aware of the Wallace. Looking at reproductions of master paintings by Rembrandt, Velaquez, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titan, Van Dyke or Rubens – to name but a few – I was intrigued that they were credited as being part of the Wallace Collection. When I first came across it, I hadn’t appreciated that… →
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“ The work of art is a complex but continuous single system within which parts fall into place, and without which the particular judgements can have no validity.” →
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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… →