New York based luxury brand Thuy launched their e-commerce site and started things off with a 30% off Fall sale and one-off offerings. The site will soon expand and include hard to find samples, a blog, and a section for styling tips. Vietnam born designer Thuy Diep graduated from Parsons School of Design and launched her brand in 2006. To see the Spring 2009 Thuy collection as shown during New York Fashion Week, click here.
The fashion industry lived large for a weekend at the Victoria's Secret 2008 fashion show in Miami at the newly restored Fontainbleu hotel. Aside from the lavishness of a pre-show concert and the hotel itself, the fashion show had an estimated budget of 15 million dollars. Check out our runway gallery, right here.
Meanwhile, in New York...rumors are swirling that Nylon will fold and Blackbook has fired their Creative Director, Bryan Erikson, and replaced him with Jason Daniels who comes from a luxury background.
Lutz & Patmos has recently launched their e-commerce site and it is, thankfully, straightforward and easy-to-use. Perhaps their wise decision to keep things simple stems from the fact that the brand has yet to open its own freestanding store. As a result, the site pivots on line sheet drawings (those which are given to buyers so that they can see what the garment actually looks like) and other intuitive selling functions.
British designers Jasper Conran and Mulberry, among others, are campaigning for increased funding to London's design schools so that students can learn how to actually, well, make things. An ever-increasing focus on conceptual design (rather than production) has left many students without the skills necessary to work for a fashion company after graduation.
We're off to a press preview for some amazing London designers, so stay tomorrow for all our coverage and, until then, check out our London Fashion Week Spring 2009 videos, photo galleries, and reviews. Also, some of our favorite fashion happenings...
Odin's e-commerce site launched! This morning we brought you a screen shot of the site and now you can feast your eyes on the whole interactive process. The list of designers might be small but it'll keep on growing as the weeks go on.
Last night marked a fashion-studded event at the New Museum and Refinery 29 has all of the party photos. The footwear alone make it one of the best parties this month.
Beloved guest Coutorture photographer and all around great gal published a shoot on Blackbook Mag this afternoon and boy, has it geared us up for Spring. Check out Sinclair's photo shoots and New York Fashion Week coverage right here.
This morning we received screen shots of the Robert Geller page on Odin's soon-to-launch e-commerce site. Using Robert Geller as the sample page was a fine idea indeed. The designer, whose Spring 09 show was packed with New York's finest male fashionistas, is just one of many menswear designers responsible for making the genre cool again and it's no doubt that he would be prominently featured at Odin and now, Odin online. Despite rumors of a rough-launch earlier this week, the site, as of this morning, is stagnant. Soon enough, gentlemen, you will be able to make women all over this fine country swoon with desire--and from the comfort of your desk. Ladies, you might have to wait a little bit longer, we hear that womenswear won't hit the site at first. Maybe next season? Judging by how well Pas de Deux is doing--we'd say it's imminent.
If we posted every sample sale flyer and retail happening in New York we'd be up to our ears in work and our non-New York readers would be rather upset, but, when it stands as an excuse to talk about a designer we love then we let it slide. Anya Hindmarch's art deco-inspired bags have been on our mind since the moment we first saw them. Her handbags have high marks in the glamour department but have yet to become shallow status bags--which should probably explain why Hindmarch's diffusion line sold out on Target.com in just two minutes. So, New York ladies, visit the sample sale happening next week and non-New York ladies never fear, Fall styles are starting to be marked down online and on Hindmarch's website. What's more, the famed Target collection has been recently replenished--and that's lucky for all of us. To see the Fall 2008 Anya Hindmarch Look Book, click here.
A record number of shoppers will do their holiday shopping online, causes range from the inanity of black Friday, to gas prices, to an overall growing confidence in e-commerce methods. The numbers, as reported by consultancy Deloitte, should be up to 71 percent with apparel reaching the second most popular gift giving category.
Speaking of Black Friday, H&M's New York and San Francisco flagships will be open 24 hours on the biggest shopping day of the year. H&M attributes their decision to the success of last year, when the New York store held around the clock hours.
(Speaking of the success of H&M, Rei Kawakubo drew a three-day wait this week when her collection for the mass retailer opened in the Harajuku district of Japan)
In other news...Michael Kors took his contemporary shoe business in house, Harold's (not Harrods), the high-end Dallas based retailer, filed Chapter 11 and a 24 hour Paper pop-up (say that three times as fast) in Los Angeles hosted in-demand vendors such as Rodarte and Jeremy Scott--no news on whether they sold everything but they did have a 1400 dollar sale at 4am during the event.
Congrats on another Monday survived and your interest in our brilliant group of network partners and sister sites--as your reward, we bring you links to the finest...
Fashionalities has look book images from Lauren Conrad's Holiday collection which will satisfy a very many young fashionista. These frocks look far more sophisticated than what we saw on the Spring 09 runway. Or perhaps that's just curation.
It's been a week, but we wanted to shoutout Fabsugar's YSL field trip. After all, photo galleries of Yves Saint Laurent frocks are, in fact, timeless.
Fashion Copius clues readers in to the more exclusive of online sample sales--as if shopping could get any more tempting this season.
The fashion items you love to hate: fur & pvc get a little attention in this photo spread for 10 Magazine and f&art posts images from the book.
Fashionologie gives us all a reason to stay home and watch television this evening which couldn't make us happier, really.
Yesterday, in spirit of wanting to get through one New York day without spending what most people spend in a week, we parked it in Barnes and Noble and read all afternoon. In the end we got a lot of fashion and we only had to spend $40 to bring it home with us. We haven't finished the book so far but the second edition of "Fashion Brands: Style From Armani to Zara", released this year, is a book we can already say we do recommend. To be completely honest, we usually gravitate towards old fashioned fiction when it comes to our extracurricular reading but this book might just turn that around for us. Nicholas Coleridge, the managing director of Conde Nast in Britain, called the book "An essential primer for anyone wanting to make it big in the fashion biz." and so far, it seems to live up to that reputation. One chapter we found particularly insightful told the story of how Net-a-Porter came to be. If that doesn't pique your interest, we don't know what will. Our only regret is that we didn't buy the book online, right now you can purchase it Amazon.com for nearly half the cost. Alas, we should have known better.
We've been so caught up with Spring 09 happenings and elections and holidays that we nearly missed our chance to report on the Rodarte Archive Sale on Presse Boutique. If you remember, we reported that the online store was to release seven Rodarte items resurrected from previous seasons and, if you remember, that release date was this afternoon. So far (7:21pm EST), the studded gloves ($580) and mohair scarf ($375) have sold out but the rest are still up for grabs (granted, in limited sizes). We're not quite as blown away as we hoped we'd be--there's definitely some color missing, or some extraspecialwow-factor but, alas, Rodarte can do no wrong in our minds. Check out the gallery below for the seven archival pieces included in Presse Boutique's sale. They might not be available forever but you could call it another page in e-commerce history.
