2013年02月26日
Liora Lassalle's upcycling alchemy 【Telegraph.co.uk】
When Liora Lassalle won Re-Source , a competition run by the British Fashion Council's eco platform, Estethica, last year, she was handed a pile of discarded bin men's uniforms and told to create a catwalk collection. Lassalle, 24, a Central Saint Martins graduate, was thrilled. "It was really exciting when I got the delivery. I was given hi-vis reflective and padded jackets, navy sweatshirts and T-shirts, and plastic stretchy jackets. I love using bright colours, so the fact that I could recycle luminous fabrics was brilliant." Her 10-piece capsule collection for autumn/winter 2013 was unveiled at the Estethica stand during London Fashion Week earlier this month, and an accompanying video showed the clothes in motion. Limited numbers of the collection will go on sale this month at yoox.com, from £153.
The competition, run in conjunction with Central Saint Martins and Veolia Environmental Services (a recycling and waste management company), stipulated that students create clothes from sustainable sources for their graduate collections. Twelve students entered. Lassalle impressed the panel with her energetic designs, convincing them that she deserved the prize of Estethica mentoring and the opportunity to produce an upcycled collection. "I wanted to use natural fabrics, so I worked with hemp and jute," she says of her final collection for Central Saint Martins. "I used a thick hemp canvas from Cornwall, a beautiful fabric that felt down-to-earth, and hand-printed it with fluorescent paints."
Liora's designs for her autumn/winter 2012 using offcuts of luxurious fabrics alongside upcycled bin men's uniforms. Photos: Liora Lassalle.
Recycling is second-nature to Lassalle. "We have a lot of antiques dealers in my family. My dad is a hoarder - doorways in his house double as hanging spaces for rows of shirts, his corridors are rammed - and I like to use things that are lying around." For her graduate collection Lassalle embroidered natural raw hessian jackets with plastic bags. "I had so many plastic bags in my house, so I cut them into strips and used them like raffia, as a thread." Empty beer cans abandoned by housemates in her east London flat were cut up, embossed, and sewn on to dresses.
Her Re-Source '18th-century-inspired' capsule collection, produced under the guidance of the ethical fashion designer and Estethica curator Orsola de Castro, employs similarly ingenious methods. Each item upcycles Veolia-donated materials and combines them with offcuts from de Castro's fabric collection, amassed over the course of her career from design houses all over Europe. A quilted navy jacket, originally a lining, has been combined with Lycra panels and restitched in neon-yellow thread, with vintage French lace appliquéd over stains on the shoulders. A pair of trousers fashioned from reflective strips sits alongside a jersey T-shirt embellished with neon ruffles and pearls.
"I thought the contrast of the bin-man fabrics with the pearls was interesting. It was a challenge because although the items had been cleaned they were covered in stains, so I had to find the best bits," Lassalle says.
Her biggest test has been adapting from creating one-off pieces to a line of 50 near-identical pairs of jeans as a separate exercise for yoox.com. An Italian manufacturing company donated 104 pairs of faulty jeans, which Lassalle shredded and sewed back together in horizontal strips. De Castro says her idea is "genius. It can be done with any material, and it's a creative way to use unsold garments." Filippo Ricci, the co-founder of Estethica, agrees. "Liora integrates materials from different origins to make everything fit in a single piece. That is not an easy achievement."
http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG9887935/Liora-Lassalles-upcycling-alchemy.html
投稿者 unicon : 11:06
2013年02月19日
Central Saint Martins MA Fashion Show 2013: Elish Macintosh, Jaimee McKenna & More 【graziadaily.co.uk】
London's deserved reputation for nurturing more 'big new things' per square mile (or season!) than any other fashion hub in the world was again proven last night with the Central Saint Martins MA graduate show. The course is infamously no breezy picnic in the park, and the living legend of fashion teaching, Professor Louise Wilson, is the woman who has made it happen for the likes of Christopher Kane.
The popular Scot designer was in attendance on the front row yesterday evening (alongside Lulu Kennedy, Tim Blanks and Hilary Alexander) to present the L'Oreal Profesional Bursary Chloe Award. If you aren't familiar with some CSM's prestigious alumni, let's recap: Alexander McQueen, Jonathan Saunders, Simone Rocha, Mary Katrantzou... you name a top designer on the LFW schedule this season and it's most likely they've undergone the CSM MA treatment. But who stood out as future talent on this February's runway? Well, in terms of menswear, you'd find plenty of Muslim-style 'thobes' over trousers, but we'd quite happily run away with one of Elena's Crehan's savagely beautiful lace, tufted furry, frilled knits - they seemed to be organically growing away from the body with every step.
Womenswear was of course a highlight for the Grazia team - and Elish Macintosh, with her black jersey column dresses adorned and harnessed in expertly knotted white ropes, was the evening's most triumphant, winning the L'Oreal award. But, you'll want to see the whole shebang, right? Scroll down for the womenswear designers in contention...
As explained above, Elish was the winning designer of the evening. And even made the fash pack chuckle, as one of her rope-covered peepholes that sat within the various black maxi dresses featured on the bottom! Oooh, cheeky.
Like Pierot the clown, these beautiful pleated and layered cornflower blue and navy creations practically danced and bounced down the runway.
In a modern take on Issey Miyake, Jessica's earthy tones and clever leather bonded sections made super-size accordion pleats look new and fresh.
Cubist 3D shapes adorned these loose-fit draped dresses in a classic colour wheel of black, red and white.
Rachel's dramatically ruched, folded and slit outfits were striking in black with slashes of bright cobalt blue.
Like 1970s Christmas tree angels, Sadie's cone dresses were one part sci-fi, one part retro in the most sparkly of lurex, embossed and layered with leather.
Also playing with 3d shapes away from the body Toma layered abstract moulds underneath her silky jersey colour blocked dresses.
http://www.graziadaily.co.uk/showreports/fashion-reports/central-saint-martins-ma-fashion-show-2013
投稿者 unicon : 12:03
2013年02月07日
It's Mine: crime prevention now cheap as (micro) chips 【wired.co.uk】
"It's a dog's life" has long been a phrase for hardship, but Alan MacFadyen believes your prized possessions are envious. MacFadyen is co-founder of new UK crime prevention company It's Mine Technology and he claims the common practice of microchipping now has the potential to turn the tables on petty crime.
It's Mine means this in a remarkably literal sense. It is taking the latest revision of tiny rice-size 8mm x 1.4mm pet microchips and shipping them with an applicator that allows them to be fitted into clothing, bags, briefcases, laptops, phones, tablets -- just about anything. The chips have a unique ID which customers register on Immobilise.com (the national mobile property register used by the police) and each chip has a 20-year lifespan. A tamper proof label is supplied with every chip as a deterrent to potential thieves and a cue to police officers.
This seemingly oddball idea has actually been a long time in the making. "More than 10 years ago I was a consult to Orange's Futurescape team which looked at technology up to 10 years out," says MacFadyen. "We looked at chipping then, but the technology wasn't there. Chips were 3-4x the size which made them obvious and risked damaging items. They were also too expensive."
Price is what It's Mine hopes will at last take the original vision mainstream. Whereas microchipping costs up to £30 per pet, It's Mine ships a chip and applicator for £12.99 with a subsequent additional chips costing £11.99.
But does it work? Certainly in pets the results are very strong, with the Dogs Trust reporting in 2011 that microchips were responsible for 32 percent of all owners' reunions with their lost animals. By contrast the current outlook for reuniting owners with their possessions is bleak. Transport for London (TfL) says on average one in four items found on the network is restored to its owner and the National Bike Registry points out that while 48 percent of all stolen bicycles are recovered only five percent are successfully returned.
Other perks? MacFadyen says if chipping became ubiquitous it would make thieves think twice because the chips are extremely hard to find, difficult to remove without damaging an item and would greatly impact the black market where a fear of chips in items would weaken demand. There is an upside to law enforcement too with officers easily able to prove items are stolen after an arrest and use their origin to better track crime patterns.
Paul Ekblom, professor of Design Against Crime at Central Saint Martins College and a former crime researcher for the Home Office, says the logic behind chipping is sound. "The product is an interesting and encouraging one because of the quality of the thinking and development process behind it," he explains. "It has been designed with close attention to the theories underlying crime science and the psychology of consumers and criminals. [There is] an interest in using research evidence and in generating further hard evidence of effectiveness and cost effectiveness, which is quite unusual for commercial products."
That said Ekblom argues crime prevention works best when people simply get the message that they must be more conscientious in their daily behaviour; something he says is a direct consequence of our relatively recent obsession with portable gadgets. "Undoubtedly there is now a steady movement towards property protection," he says "although it has taken a long time for manufacturers and service providers to admit [their role in] the problem and that their products have been 'complicit with crime' by being too easy to steal."
For It's Mine the battle will be in attaining wide acceptance, but the company is off to a good start. In its first full month's trading it has chipped £20m worth of instruments at the Royal College of Music, secured discounts for customers who chip items insured by Lark and New Moon insurance companies and agreed a deal to pre-chip all Jobeeny designer handbags. In addition to chips, It's Mine is also offering product lines in personal GPS trackers plus bracelets and key rings which alert you to separation from a paired Bluetooth device.
"The task of crime prevention can never stand still because we're in an arms race with adaptive offenders run against a backdrop of social and technological change," concludes Ekblom. "The only strategic response to keeping crime under control in the long run is to give designers… the capacity to out-innovate the criminals, and the manufacturers and organisations who may inadvertently or recklessly generate crime opportunities the motivation to make their products secure."
As it turns out diversifying use of pet microchips appears a surprisingly good place to start.
Correction: Article previously stated a bag of ten chips costed £11.99. A single additional chip costs £11.99, while a bag of ten costs £67.99
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/05/crime-preventing-microchips
投稿者 unicon : 11:37
LCF debut at London Fashion Week
This month, LCF’s MA Catwalk Show will be part of London Fashion Week for the first time. The show which features ten graduates from our MA womensear and menswear courses, will be streamed live on the LCF website. It forms part of a festival of events running until 18th February 2013, including management breakfasts, film screenings and an exhibition.
投稿者 unicon : 11:27