How Designers Are Getting Inventive With Arts And Crafts Skills To Create New Fashions

How Designers Are Getting Inventive With Arts And Crafts Skills To Create New Fashions

THE line between art and fashion is often blurred, or at times non existent, with much haute couture fashion certainly describable as works of art and with a growing emphasis on handmade fashion also starting to compete with the High Street, crafty creations are also working their way into the fashion scene.One example of this is Towcester designer Lizzi Bucklow-Holt’s collection of accessories and children’s wear, BizziZizzi, featuring many ways to get creative with your look.

Among Lizzi’s crafty range are children’s clothes inspired by fictional characters, and creative clay buttons and beads, hats and crochet fascinators.I have been been crafting one thing or another since I was really little,said the 41-year-old mum to three.I was the child trying to create things out of the wrapping paper rather than looking at the presents.I have practically tried every craft over the years, teaching myself through reading books, going to workshops, YouTube...

Crafts were always my hobby, but when I turned 40, I started to reassess the priorities in my life and wanted to try and make that hobby into a business.”BizziZizzi started in April, and is now stocked in A Most Marvellous Place to Shop and sold through the website www.bizzizizzi.co.uk.It has also featured on Kirstie Allsopp’s ‘Homemade Home.

I tend to create things that are really colourful, as well as looking at the seasons coming up and things that are on trend.
I do some styles of crochet slippers and I’m going to be do an Ugg boot style in those, which is obviously picking up on a very popular trend.But I also do more classic things like a dolly shoe style.

I also take inspiration from fiction. I do A Hungry Caterpillar outfit for kids...I can’t seem to make enough of those.I am also looking at doing a Where’s Wally? and Dennis the Menace outfit.

I do a lot of baby things, which take quite a lot of time to make, but I think that make them more special.I hope the things that I make can be kept and passed on.I create buttons and beads from Polymer Clay, and although I don’t make jewelry from them, I sell them to other people who do like Fifth Element.

The buttons are unusual and a great way to jazz up an outfit or make something a bit more unusual.I hate throwing things away, so if you can add something and make something a little bit new with a small change that’s great.I made some Union Jack buttons, which have been really popular with all the events going on this year.

If you like Lizzi’s creations, there may be a chance to pick-up some of her creative skills in the future I would like to start teaching some courses about how use Polymer Clay, so that people can make some of their own things, which I’m thinking of doing in September.

Valentino Has Reportedly Been Sold For €600 Million Euro

Valentino Has Reportedly Been Sold For €600 Million Euro

The Italian fashion house was bought by private equity firm Permira five years ago. The company worked hard to improve Valentino’s finances and is now selling it to an investor.According to British newspaper The Telegraph, the sale will be worth €600 million.The buyer has not been identified yet, with the publication only saying it is a “sovereign wealth fund”.

Last year, Valentino’s sales had soared by 20 per cent when compare to 2010 and totalled €322.4 million. The before tax earnings had gone up 300 per cent to €22.2 million. At the time Permira bought the fashion house, things weren’t so good. The label’s namesake designer Valentino Garavani left which plunged the company into problems.

Designers Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli were brought in to try and open up the brand to a wider audience. The move worked well, with the pair’s forward-looking designs praised when they were presented at Paris Haute Couture Week this month.

Amazing Fashion Fairytale Of light And Colour

Don't miss this remarkable fashion show by French designer Franck Sorbier, who used just two designs and stunning visual effects to narrate a medieval French fairytale on the ramp in Paris last week.

It's not often that a couturier showcases just two of his creations on the runway, particularly in Paris, the fashion capital of the world.

But that's just what designer Franck Sorbier did at his haute couture fall/winter 2012-2013 fashion show on July 4.

Using just two dresses and hi-tech lighting and projections, he sought to retell a popular 17th century French literary fairytale, Donkeyskin by Charles Perrault.

The story revolves around a beautiful princess, whose father the king wants to marry her. Having made a promise to his queen (her mother) that after her death he will not marry anyone who is not her equal in beauty and virtue, the king is left with little option other than to seek his daughter's hand.

The princess seeks her fairy godmother's advice to avoid her father's marital overtures and she is told to make impossible demands of him if he wants her consent. And so she asks for a dress the colour of the sky, a dress the colour of the moon, a dress as bright as the sun and finally, the skin of the king's special pet, a miraculous donkey whose droppings are of gold.

The desperate king fufills all her wishes and the princess keeps these riches safe in a chest provided by her fairy godmother. When she finally obtains the donkey's hide, she wears it as a diguise and escapes to a royal farmhouse, where she is hired as a kitchen maid despite the hideous appearance of the donkeyskin she wears. On special occasions, however, in the privacy of her own quarters, the princess removes the donkey skin and dresses in the beautiful dresses gifted her by her father.

On one feast day, the prince whose household she works for and who is currently visiting the farmhouse, spies on her through a keyhole and is so taken with her in her finery that he falls ill with longing.

In his ailing state, he asks for a cake made with her own two hands and claims nothing else will cure him. Despite being advised that she is ugly and dirty (no one else knows of her beauty beneath the donkey's hide) he insists and so the princess bakes him a cake. As she does so, one of her rings falls into the batter.

The prince discovers this ring when he eats the cake and insists he will only marry the woman whose finger the ring fits perfectly. After all the women in the kingdom fail to get it on, it is finally the princess' own turn after he requests that 'Donkeyskin' try it on as well.

Once it fits, she finally sheds the animal hide and dresses herself in one of her fine gowns. The prince's parents are delighted with her beauty and her own father, who has remarried a beautiful widow, attends their wedding and seeks his daughter's forgiveness.

For his special interpretation of Donkeyskin, Sorbier presented just two gowns -- a voluminous white ballgown worn by his princess and the black dress and matching headdress of her fairy godmother.

Images and light were then beamed onto the princess' gown, from an open road signalling her desire to escape and morning dew and underwater reeds to represent her waifish beauty. Then she falls in love with the prince, a beating heart appears on her blood-red dress.

Haute Couture Fashion Week 2012

 

On the final day of Haute Couture Week, Maria Grazia Chiurli and Pier Paolo Piccioli were back in the saddle for another round of couture for the house of Valentino. For their Autumn / Winter 2012 Haute Couture Collection, the designer duo opened their show with a stream of midnight blue evening dresses in silk chiffon, sheer panelling, and soft pleats. These were enclosed by matching long and short capes made from crepe.

Each look stuck to a fairly minimalist approach, and included hints of sci-fi and futurism. Inspired by French symbolist painter, Gustave Moreau, Chiurli and Piccioli made particular note of his "love of dark colours." This influence worked in contrast to elegant ethereal gowns created from sculptured brocade, beading detail, painted floral prints, embroideries and fur. Then there was the fairy floss pink and Valentino's signature red ball gowns which were clearly aimed straight at the red carpet crowd. Other highlights of this collection were the tailored yellow trouser suits, beaded cardigans, embellished jumpsuits, knee-length shift dresses, low-heel square-toe ballerina pumps, and a plethora of velvet pieces transformed into wearable clothing - something that is rarely seen on a couture catwalk.