Hi all 🙂Â
I’ve condensed my blogging efforts. I always thought the things I loved were too varied to live in one space, but I’m giving it a shot anyway. I’ll be blogging at City Habit from now on, on fashion, city lifestyle, street style, design, and other things that catch my eye. Come through? 😉
Hiya.
A while ago I wrote an article on the runway trends at Mercedes Benz Cape Town Fashion Week for 6B Magazine. There were a few admin issues, but it’s recently been published, so now it’s okay to share it with you here! Yay. 🙂
Metallic Trend at MBCTFW 2013
Downtown chic High low mix trend at MBCTFW 2013
The Ladylike summer trend at MBCTFW 2013
Hair colour trend at MBCTFW 2013
Neutrals trend at MBCTFW 2013
Monochrome trend at MBCTFW 2013
Nautical Menswear trend at MBCTFW 2013
Take a look at it on 6B right here, along with the full article on Trend Forecasting with tips from Zakirah Rabaney. Toodles. 🙂
Just a few off-the-runway pictures from Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Cape Town 2013 in August to feed the fashion hungry eye. See if you can spot your favourite locals, and let me know what you think of what they wore. K, Bye.
Elle + BlackBerry Style Reporter 2013 Semi-Finalists
I had just gotten back from a Lion’s Head hike with some friends on Heritage Day when I checked my phone and saw a post from a friend on my Facebook wall, congratulating me. I was confused for a second, but I caught on after reading a tweet from the same friend a few seconds later. I made it into Elle’s Style Reporter 2013 semi-finals! Continue reading
Fashion in New York, especially this week, is something else: beautiful, innovative, & powerful. It is an amazing world, but even as an observer, you can see that operating in it really only comes down to three simple things:
1. Work hard to get your foot in the door.
2. Work harder to make sure your foot stays there.
3. Don’t mess with Kelly Cutrone.
South African designer David Tlale, albeit accidentally, broke the third rule this week when he failed to make good on a payment to Kelly’s famed fashion PR firm, People’s Revolution. Miss Cutrone being, well, Miss Cutrone, such errant practice could not go unpunished unaddressed. In an email sent to show guests (shared by Fashionista.com), People’s Revolution announced the following:
Zando.co.za
As an industry placement project my class got to take on real-world experience for a month at different establishments. We had the option of being placed by our lecturers or finding our own places to work. Some students went to retailers like Woolworths and Keedo, some went to high fashion brands like Gavin Rajah and Rosenworth, and a few even worked in couture, one of them with Hendrik Vermeulen. I decided a while ago that I’m not going to be a designer right away, so I wanted to make sure I got experience that aligned with that, widening my portfolio a bit, toward trend forecasting and fashion journalism. A former classmate is the assistant trend forecaster at South African online retailer Zando.co.za, and when I asked her to send me the contact details of their HR department so I could ask about applying for a placement there, she got back to me by telling me she’d get me the job! Thanks Zak, it was super awesome of you. So for 4 weeks, I assisted her with research and compiled trend reports, and it was great. I miss it now; the pace, the work, the orange floors. But it had to end, since we still have graduate collections to finish, history papers to write, and business classes to suffer through. So here’s what I learned at Zando:
The first of your monthly fashion news bulletins! Yay. 😀
ELLE South Africa Editor-in-Chief Jackie Burger
– Janie Bryant’s new reality show
Mad Men costume designer and general fashion legend Janie Bryant is in talks to start her own reality show: Janie Bryant’s Hollywood. Yes, it will probably bear several similarities to Project Runway, but this is a film costume design competition. Contestants will be competing to dress film icons or create costumes for Hollywood classics. No word yet on when it will arrive in SA, but this film costume enthusiast will wait patiently (Huffington Post).
– ELLE + Blackberry Style Reporter 2013 begins
Cue the madness – The second edition of ELLE South Africa’s Style Reporter competition in association with Blackberry has officially started. Changes to this year’s edition include an extended contract – 12 months, with a monthly stipend of R5000, from last year’s 7-month contract with R10,000 per month – and a tech upgrade from last year’s Blackberry Bold 9790 to this year’s Q5 and Z10. Â That’s right – both. A photography or digital publishing course, a trip to an international fashion week, and the opportunity to be mentored by Ed Suter round off the stellar deal. What’s that you ask? Am I entering? Why yes. Yes I am. (Elle.co.za)
P.S. in other Elle news, the Elle Belles will be hosting their Editor’s Breakfast next month, with dates set for Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban. Keen on joining them? Click here to win yourself a ticket.
– Style.com introduces Style Map
Style.com has a new fashion blog with a global view: Style Map covers art, nightlife, food, travel, shopping, music, culture, design and fashion, with posts written by industry insiders from cities all around the world. Africa is represented by Maki Oh for Lagos, Yodit Eklund for Addis Ababa, and Themba Mngomezulu for Cape Town. Other contributors include Kylie Minogue, Courtney Love, Umit Benan, Sky Ferreira, and Nicole Richie. It’s about to get interesting. (Style.com)
– H&M is finally coming.
It’s been a long wait, but it’s almost over. Swedish retailer H&M (actually HENNES & Mauritz, just FIY) has officially announced plans to open two stores in South Africa, and as is the case with their long-awaited entry into online retail this August, may I just say: it’s about time. One store will open at the Mall of Africa in Jozi, and another in Cape Town, with no exact site confirmation yet. Like Zara before them, H&M are having a little trouble finding spaces big enough for their kind of store (so we know they’re going to be huge. Joy!). This means it could be a while (the one in Jozi is only due to open when the Mall of Africa is completed in late 2015!!!), but we continue to hope and pray, and make plans to set large car showrooms on fire so they can build an H&M there instead. I’m kidding. I am. (Business Day)
– Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Cape Town
The final spot goes to next month’s #MBFWCT, taking place from the 7th to the 10th of August. I’m not entirely sure they were allowed to, but a designer posted the schedule on Facebook [UPDATE – the schedule is officially up on the site]. I’ve already gotten a ticket to Loin Cloth and Ashes; hopefully I’ll be able to attend and cover all the shows. You, of course, will be able to read all those show reviews right here, and if you want, watch the live stream via African Fashion International’s website.
‘Til later, Lovelies. 🙂
The girls of the Tgether Blogger Network are some of my favourite bloggers. I’ve always loved The Visual Journal by Raya Rossi, Baked the Blog by Aisha Baker and Fashion Breed by Aqeelah Harron; I had just started reading Shades of Gold by Talya Goldberg when the network launched, and although I had never heard of Leluvette by Tanya Mwamwetta, I love it too! Forming a network was Talya’s idea – a brilliant one. It’s South Africa’s first fashion blogger network, and like any network the idea is to be able to find all your favourite bloggers in one place, while discovering new ones as well, I guess. The Now Manifest, featuring the beloved ADR, as well as Fashion Toast’s Rumi Neely and her BFF Brian Boy, is the only other (relevant) fashion blog network I know of. I got to thinking, this is a really good idea, so these probably aren’t the only ones out there. Most of what I found were really just websites with ridiculous blogrolls as their main feature – no curation or quality control whatsoever. Others were blogger support groups, or resources/advice/how-to sites, like IFB (love IFB so much it’s insane). No worries, I managed to find a couple for you to check out! Local is lekker, so Tgether gets to go first.
I first heard of Edith Head a couple of years ago, when my uncle started sending me fashion magazines from the USA. In one of our chats, we’d talked about fashion films; we both love movies. He said he would try to find a few Edith Head movies to send me. I looked her up immediately and I was shocked.
34 Academy Award nominations. 34.Who does that? And who actually wins 8 of them?
I found a few of her famous quotes, read a bit about her relationships with the amazing people she dressed (Everyone from Audrey Hepburn to Zsa Zsa Gabor), wrote down the names of a handful of the 437 films and TV shows she worked on, and resolved to do more investigation later. I didn’t do much; she came up in a fashion history project once, but that was it. Then yesterday, I found myself in the fashion section of my campus library, looking for something to occupy me while I get my hair done today – it’s always a whole day affair. I found this:
The Dress Doctor – an adaptation of the Edith Head bestseller.
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Perfect, I thought. It’s time I got to know the Dress Doctor a little better.Â
Hello Lovelies. 🙂
I have a confession to make: I only recently started reading fashion blogs again. I love to read, and as long as it’s not trashy or grotesque, or so badly written that I’m telepathically screaming at the author by the end of page one, I’ll read just about anything. I haven’t read a book in ages, and before I knew it I wasn’t reading my favourite fashion blogs anymore either. Time gets away from me, what with a full-time design course on my plate, but that was never really the reason. The truth is, I got bored. The blogging game is so chock-full of content now, it just became too much for me at one point. Everything had started to look the same, and once that happens there’s really no appeal anymore. I needed a cleanse – I had allowed too much mediocrity and blandness to enter my inner circle of fashion sources, so I stopped. Then I missed it – so much! I missed the funniness of Honestly WTF, the envy inducing style of the old Not So Naked blog, the confounding can’t-look-away appeal of Fifi Lapin. So I returned this year. I returned to actually reading, appreciating, and leaving thoughtful comments. I unfollowed and unliked the irrelevant and kept my eyes open for content that would keep me interested. The result? 3 of my new favourite blogs:
Fashion's Fist 