HAPPY EASTER FROM FEAL

We hope you have a wonderful Easter. Eat lots of eggs! We'll be back on Tuesday.

Melanie and Bethan xx

SHOW + TELL: SOPHIE HULME

Posted by Melanie Rickey, Fashion Editor at Large 

The first time I met Sophie Hulme in person was last September at London Fashion Week when I stumbled across the young designer with her Spring/Summer 2012 collection in the Elle Talent Launch Pad exhibition at Somerset House. It was quite weird because only the week before that I was standing in Selfridges' enormous bag hall looking at a large and prominent display of Sophie Hulme luxury leather tote bags thinking "Who this is this Sophie Hulme person?" From the way Selfridges bought into her label and showed it off right next to the hallowed Celine area, the Hulme brand seemed fully formed and in full flight mode. 

Then I dimly remembered, is this the same Sophie who graduated from Kingston back in 2007? I remember a Sophie Hulme who won Student of the Year, so I Googled around a bit and it was the same girl. She also won Student Collection of the Year in 2007, so a bit of a prodigy girl then. Turns out Sophie set up her label two months after graduating and has been quietly getting on with building her brand ever since. 

Her trademarks are clean, tailored silhouettes with masculine and feminine influences, with an emphasis on chunky hardware and almost childlike detailing; and as such the designer is building quite a solid business almost under the nose of the talent watchers of London.  At London Fashion Week in February Sophie did her first mini fashion showcase, sending out the models dressed in her modern young elegant ensembles every 15 minutes. The show was mobbed, and the whole thing was so overwhelming for Sophie, that by the time I caught up with her, she had cried most of her mascara off. This week she joined My-Wardrobe.com as one of their new roster of designers. I wanted to share my images of her show, and her gorgeous bags on My Wardrobe now. There'll be a second blog post very soon with a full Sophie interview.

Sophie Hulme embroidered bag £370 at My-Wardrobe

Sophie Hulme stamped tote £620

The brilliant Sophie Hulme whose LFW presentation was a highlight of the week

Sophie Hulme leather tote £535 at My-Wardrobe

CAN VOGUE TURN THE TIDE ON THE CULTURE OF "THINNESS"?

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

We, world, are messed up; on the one hand, one in four adults in the UK is obese with that figure projected to double in the next 20 years. On the other, there is a widespread obsession with 'thinness', which is almost always blamed on the fashion industry. But, do nine year-olds read Vogue? No, they watch TV, and use the Internet.

On the Daily Mail website today, a quick count down the infamous sidebar-of-shame shows 24 different stories which refer in some way to a female celebrity's body, whether she is 'showing off her tiny tummy' or 'heading to the gym after her fast food slip up'. Vogue has a circulation of around 200,000 while the Daily Mail has 52 million unique visitors each month. Nobody has boycotted the Daily Mail or Heat magazine yet, so all of us who check the site or the read the magazine, even as a guilty pleasure, are feeding the monster.

A Kardashian hits the gym today to work off the burger she ate yesterday. 

The Daily Mail today uses this picture as confirmation of Drew Barrymore's pregnancy. WHAT?

Vogue, Elle or Grazia would never be able to write a story along the "look at her cellulite", "ooh she is thin" lines;  they would be villified. So how does the Daily Mail get away with it?  The readership is complicit.  However, judging by a triumvirate of comments coming from Camp Vogue this week the power players of fashion are sick of the culture of thinness in the media and are fighting back, and to my mind winning.

On Monday, Vogue's new Fashion Editor Fran Burns told Business of Fashion," I never want to make women look ugly or depressing or too thin or miserable. None of those things."  Also on Monday, Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani told Harvard University "We will do our best, but it will be impossible to fight this widespread idea of thinness all by ourselves". In an interview which she gave to The Guardian this weekend, British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman explained the thinness problem (which she has tried to address in the past by writing to the world's biggest designers) in this way-

'I find it very frustrating and I don't know quite where it comes from, but I think if I had to absolutely nail it, [it's] probably the designers, because they're the ones who are cutting the clothes so small. And if the girl can't fit into the clothes, then they won't get booked. So then you've got the model agent saying: 'You've got to lose weight.' And then, when it comes down the wire, the photographers – and to some extent the fashion editors – want to use the girls that they think are the cool girls, and the cool girls are the ones who have got to be working with the designers, so it kind of feeds itself'

I'd like to give high fashion magazines a break when it comes to this problem- they do seem to have a done a lot to address issues in the industry over the past few years. But it's hard, when on one side they are duty bound to use healthy but slim models for their pages, yet when it comes to actual celebrities their standards slip. They need girls like of of the moment, 'cool girls' like Alexa Chung on their pages, but if she were just a model they probably would not hire her because she is too thin. It is a catch 22.

Barely a week goes by when images of her wearing exactly the kind of fashion Vogue needs to feature are beamed around the world. Alexa in a Chris Kane dress or J.W Anderson paisley PJs are gold dust for British fashion. Alexa has become scarily thin of late yet she is still in Vogue and nobody dares mention it. There's a lot of skirting round the issue, like interviews which mention her playing with her food and sort of forgetting to eat it.

I think it IS terrifying that Alexa is the girl every fashion obsessed teen and twenty-something wants to be, but also that someone isn't making sure she's being looked after. We have to separate the fashion from the girl.

I hope people remember Alexa is not just a clothes horse (image from www.glamourmagazine.co.uk)

If you have an eating disorder, then you ARE ugly, depressed and miserable. And I know, because I had anorexia for four years when I was a young teenager. I'm no psychiatrist but I would hazard a guess that my problem, and that of hundreds of thousands of others, is not really rooted in fashion magazines but in our relationships, genetics and personalities. In fact, I'd be quite offended if someone had tried to explain away my problem with a prescription of fashion cold turkey. As Hadley Freeman said in her brilliant column on this subject last year, 'eating disorders have existed for hundreds of years, predating, amazingly, Kate Moss'.

Maybe designers need to use a bit more fabric so that they can make their sample sizes more realistic. But that's not going to un-fuck-up a world where a normal sized person thinks they're fat or where it's fine to say 'oh my god, you're looking so skinny' but unheard of to tell an obese person that they're doing themselves no favours. I am really happy that Vogue is taking up this issue, but I hope that everyone else doesn't think it's just Vogue's battle to fight. It's really patronising to those suffering with eating disorders to tell them that their life threatening, debilitating illness has been brought on by them looking at some pictures of thin people in nice clothes.

SHOW AND TELL: RELATIVE MO AW12

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

This time of year is all about press days. We could spend all day every day attending those hosted by various brands and PR companies for several weeks if we wanted to. One of the highlights of today's batch was Relative MO which looks after some of London fashion's biggest names including Mary Katrantzou, Giles and Erdem. They hold their press day in the Elms Lesters Painting Rooms, a great gallery space with rooms which jump from starkly white to multicoloured and paint splattered. That means that there were lots of interesting nooks we could use to photograph some of our favourite things from our visit today.

Cedric Charlier
 

A.F Vandevorst

James Long

Maria Francesca Pepe

Ostwald Helgason

DISCOVERING PALLADIUM

Posted by Melanie Rickey, Fashion Editor at Large

In the middle of last year I got a call from my old friend Priyesh Shah; I've known Priy for as long as I have been a professional journalist. When I met him in 1995 I had just graduated from uni and he was fresh from Saint Martins and causing a London fashion storm as Antonio Berardi's business partner. While Tony designed his beautiful clothes, Priy was the more public face of the label. More recently Priyesh has become a brand consultant and one of his projects is a rather fabulous one - namely to build a world of wonder around Palladium, a precious metal from the platinum group and the most recent high value metal to be hallmarked in 2009. The metal, as you can see below, is lustrous and white. What you can't sense is something I have experienced first hand, which is how light and strong it is.  

I know that last nugget of information because I was lucky enough to be asked to assist in the pre-judging of a competition set by The International Palladium Board at Saint Martins School of Art last summer, with a second round of meetings and crits with the students early this year. Following that second round of discussion with the students on form, function, inspiration and idea the jewellery world  judges including jewellery editor Carol Woolton of Vogue and jeweller Stephen Webster rode in and chose the winner and runner-up, and in February the winning work was put on show at Rock Vault, the new jewellery showcase at London Fashion Week. Working with the students was utterly inspiring. 

Here are my favourite pieces, which include the neckpiece from Yuki, the winner and the ring from Vance the runner up.  Keep an eye on Palladium, with gold at such a premium, it has room to take hold of a slice of the precious market. To me it looks more futuristic than platiunum and white gold, which fits with the way fashion is going, and the latest designer to work with the metal is none other than Mr Modern himself, Hussein Chalayan.

Yuki Agriardi Koswara's winning Palladium piece "Essentia" 

Kate Sibley's brooch "Eye of the Storm": My favourite piece

Juanjuan Hu's sculptural neckpiece "Flying Lines"

Vance Ng Sze Wing "Flower Ring" took the runner up prize

Caroline Esmeraldo "Geometries" cuff

The International Palladium Board and Central Saint Martins’ collaboration is part of the ‘Palladium Visions’ campaign, which will see the International Palladium Board working with some of the world’s most visionary artists, designers and jewellers throughout 2012.