In preparing for the Beauty of Age debate tonight, a number of themes have emerged that have really set me wondering as to where our contemporary emphasis on...
Writing
The Psychology of Consumption
Gaby Hinsliff writing in the Guardian (11 April 2012) challenges us to consider the “viability of the everyday habits to which we feel blithely entitled” and...
Diana Vreeland
Looking at a series of quotes by Diana Vreeland, one of my favourites is where she celebrates vulgarity- “ Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life....
SUBLIME: Beyond Duty
Duty: that which one is bound by any obligation to do I have become increasingly interested in how certain actions become first acceptable to society and...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
SUBLIME: Sustainability and the Curriculum
Top designers do not emerge fully formed from nowhere. They have learnt their craft with rigour and fashion is as integral to their life as getting up in the...
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...
SUBLIME: Drying Out Fashion
It takes 2700 litres of water to produce one cotton t-shirt from ‘crop to shop’. Just imagine how many full swimming pools it took to manufacture the contents...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Yohji Yamamoto
This is a video of me in conversation with Yohji Yamamoto, one of my favourite designers.
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...
SUBLIME: Education as Alchemy
‘There ain’t going to be a next big thing because it’s all spinning off into a magnificent diversity for the first time in our tribe’s history…. There’s an...
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...
Opinion: C P Snow Revisited?
Recently Higher Education has been in the news not only because of the debate around fees, and whether the state or the individual who benefits from the...
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...