Sumter native returns to host second-annual fashion week - Sumter Item

Bridging the gap and connecting the Sumter community with the fashion industry, model agency and magazine owner Donna "Bellah" Anderson brings the fashion world back to her roots to educate and inspire the community with Sumter's second-annual fashion week.

"I'm from Sumter, and I love the area," Bellah said. "Sumter has grown tremendously, and this was something it didn't have."

Born and raised in Sumter, Bellah resides in Columbia, where she runs Bellah Modeling Agency and Bellah Affaire Magazine. She also does a multitude of fashion shows in South Carolina and Charlotte.

"I love fashion, and I just thought bringing something different to Sumter, like our fashion week, is exactly what you'd see in New York, Charlotte and Atlanta," Bellah said. "I get people to come in from New York, Florida, Georgia and Charlotte, and they all bring their designs to the runway."

Sumter's Fashion Week is a four-day event - which began Wednesday and ends today - that shows how fashion is more than just clothing. It's a movement, feeling and expression.

On Wednesday, fashion week kicked off by introducing the Top 10 Fashion Icons of Sumter at Elephants and More.

"We always start with this event, and we get a boutique to come in and partner with us," Bellah said.

She partnered with Tina Calhoun, owner of Elephants and More and Audri J's Boutique, for this year's fashion week.

For Wednesday's event, fashion week participants nominated who they thought were the big fashionistas in Sumter and the surrounding areas. Nominations lasted from January to June, and then people voted who was most fashionable out of those nominated from July to August.

Of those nominated, the 10 fashionistas with the highest votes were announced as the Top 10 Fashion Icons of Sumter at the kickoff and presented with an award.

The winners: Tegan Riechers, Ver'Lita Green, Melissa Simmons Stinnett, Queen Pearson, Lawrence McNeil, Alisha Barker, Tiffany Eli, Burisha McKenzie, Heather Boseman Tickel and Nikki Kershaw.

Thursday's event was the Kids Beauty Spa Fashion Day, where young participants get to enjoy a spa day at Audri J's Boutique.

Friday is the model and designer meet-and-greet, where participants get to mingle and have fun at Red Dot Hookah Lounge.

The grand finale of fashion week is today, when two fashion shows will be presented at USC Sumter's Nettles Auditorium.

Doors will open at 5 p.m. and the event will begin at 6 p.m. Tickets for the show are on sale online for general admission, $25, and VIP, $35. Tickets will cost more at the door on Saturday.

For more information or to purchase tickets, visit sumterfashionweek.com.

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2019-08-31 09:16:03Z
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Four Fall Fashion Trends About to Get More Expensive as Tariffs Loom - WWD

Shoppers buying the latest fall trends may soon notice prices rising.

That’s because the Trump administration plans to slap 15 percent levies this Sunday on a hefty amount of apparel and footwear as the trade war with China continues to escalate. The former will be most impacted, with over 90 percent of apparel imported to the U.S. from China set to be subject to the new levies.

As fashion is an industry that is already grappling with high duties (51 percent of those collected by the U.S. government came from the apparel, footwear, textiles and travel goods industry in 2017), a number of high-profile brands have warned that they will have little choice but to raise prices.

Ralph Lauren Corp. was among them, with its president and chief executive officer Patrice Louvet stating earlier this year that tariffs “will result in higher costs for goods and services to the average cost-conscious U.S. family, which will in turn lower apparel and footwear sales, resulting in loss of jobs for U.S. workers.”

Others that have issued similar warnings include PVH Corp., the owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger; Forever 21; Steve Madden, and Ulla Johnson.

Here are four fall fashion items that will be hit with levies this weekend and could therefore soon see their price tags increase:

Capes

New York Fashion Week Street Style  Shutterstock

Eighties Power Jackets

Camila Coelho at Paris Fashion Week.  Grosescu Alberto Mihai/Shutterstock

Pistachio Pants

Milan Fashion Week Street Style  Shutterstock

Long Coats

New York Fashion Week Street Style  Shutterstock

Read more here:

Spring 2020 Trends From the Las Vegas Trade Shows

Top Fall 2019 Fashion Trends at New York Women’s Trade Shows

What to Watch: Trade Wars

WATCH: Your Guide to the Biggest Trends from NYFW

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2019-08-30 14:44:30Z
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Meet With Major Executives From The Most Prominent Fashion Group And Discuss Your Potential Partnerships - Yahoo Finance

Orient International to Introduce "TOP100" Program that Helps International Brands Enter the Coveted Chinese Market

NEW YORK, Aug. 30, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Designers and fashion houses seeking to launch, manufacture and sell their products in China will have the opportunity to talk face-to-face with the leaders of the iconic fashion group Orient International. The group will host a VIP cocktail reception on September 10th at Manhattan View located in Midtown to meet with fashion designers, industry professionals, and media during New York Fashion Week (NYFW). The executive board of the group will speak and network with attendees. 

Other than bringing its brands THREEGUN and LILY to the NYFW runway, Orient International will also present Taoray Wang's special collection. The collection fuses artisan techniques from an ethnic group "Yi" (彝族), a group residing in China's Yunnan Province, with contemporary designs. It utilizes ancient tones and exceptional Yi embroidery. This is an amazing crossover between Taoray's contemporary design and a barely touched cultural element. The TOP100 Designers Alliance (TOP100), a program dedicated to facilitating the commercialization of international brands entering the Chinese market, will also be introduced to all attendees. 

"Orient International has been standing for 150 years. Bringing THREEGUN, LILY and "Yi" collection by Taoray Wang to NYFW is an exciting cross-cultural experience. I hope this adds diversity to today's market," says Tong Jisheng, the chairman of Orient International. "This is the best timing for us to meet with the fashion network in the U.S. The TOP100 program is our concrete action to attract talented fashion designers who have been seeking a way to enter the Chinese market." 

Orient International had a record year in 2018 with over $16 billion in sales. It has partnered with 10 e-commerce platforms including JD, Secoo and Little Red Book and owns over a thousand retail stores in China. The TOP100 showroom will allow more designers to station and take their creativity to Shanghai Fashion Week, which is organized by Orient International along with MODE Shanghai Trade Fair. Both events gained tremendous media attention in the past years. 

Fashion media, buyers, influencers, and businesses will gather in New York City to communicate opportunities in contemporary design insights and future collaborations. 

Event details

• VIP Cocktail reception: M Club, Manhattan View at MiMA, September 10th, 2019. Check-in starts at 7 pm. 
  460 West 42nd St,  New York, NY. 
• RSVP: https://forms.gle/8gcrq2Y5K6QeV94r8  (The RSVP is selective. You will receive a follow-up email and an invite once you're confirmed.)
• Media Inquiry: guoran.y@apexcomm.us 

For more information: info@apexcomm.us  

About Orient International (Holding) Co., LTD (OIH)
Orient International (Holding) Co., Ltd. (OIH) is a reorganization of Shangtex with a history of 150 years and the former Orient International with a history of 70 years. The multinational group specializes primarily in advanced manufacturing and modern service industry. Its core businesses include fashion, health and supply chain services, which are backed up by science and technology manufacturing, industrial real estate and financial investment. OIH has a total of $10 billion in assets, 87,000 employees (among which 50,000 are based overseas), and 480 affiliated enterprises. Under the OIH umbrella, four companies (Oriental International Enterprise, Shenda, Dragon Corporation, and HK Luen Thai Holdings) are listed. In 2018, OIH has reached $16 billion in revenue, $342 million in profit and $1.2 billion in imports and exports. 

About TOP100 Global Designers Alliance (TOP100)
TOP100 Global Designers Alliance, initiated by Orient International (Holding) Co, Ltd., brings together fashion designers from all over the world. The alliance integrates resources from the whole fashion industry ranging from design, production, sales and more, and leverages the innovative omnichannel marketing model to create a designers' garment release and sales platform featuring "European and American design, Chinese market, affordable price, and trendy fashion". The alliance aspires to lead more international designers to enter the Chinese market and to cater to Chinese consumers' preference of international fashion. 

Contact: Guoran Yu
APEX Communications
Email: guoran.y@apexcomm.us

 

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2019-08-30 12:30:00Z
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Trump's Tariffs Push More US Manufacturers To Look Outside China - NPR

Enlarge this image

Designer Isaac Mizrahi (left) embraces Robert D'Loren, CEO of Xcel Brands, which once manufactured 70% of its clothes in China. Today that's down to about 20%. The company now manufacturers in a variety of countries, including Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka. Brendan McDermid/Reuters hide caption

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Brendan McDermid/Reuters

A lot of American companies that make or buy products in China are starting to rethink that, as a new round of tariffs takes effect this weekend. But Robert D'Loren doesn't have to worry. As CEO of the Xcel Brands clothing company, he began moving production out of China some time ago.

"You never want to have all your eggs in one basket," D'Loren said. "China was easy. In retrospect, probably if you had 90% of your production in China, that wasn't good risk-management planning."

D'Loren, who sells clothing under the Isaac Mizrahi and Halston labels, among others, once manufactured 70% of his company's clothes in China. Today that's down to about 20% — a byproduct of D'Loren's effort to find faster, more flexible suppliers that can jump on fashion trends and turn out clothes in as little as six weeks.

"Sometimes there are things that by design and by luck ... you do that serve you well," D'Loren said.

Xcel now manufacturers in a variety of countries, including Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka, and it's exploring production in Central and South America. But building that flexible network wasn't easy. Clothes from the new factories didn't fit right at first, or the fabric wasn't what D'Loren expected.

"It took us five deliveries to get it right," he said. "Everything that could go wrong did go wrong."

Many companies are now going through a similar process of trial and error, as they look for ways to avoid the president's tariffs.

"The truth is that the trade war is a little bit of a wake-up call for many companies," said Gerry Mattios, a Singapore-based vice president with Bain & Company consultants.

He says rising labor costs in China were already causing some companies to look elsewhere for suppliers, and the Trump tariffs have accelerated that. But other countries will need a lot of investment to match the expert manufacturing base and robust shipping network that China has built over the past two decades.

A survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China says most companies that do relocate look to Southeast Asia. Vietnam's exports to the U.S. jumped 33% in the first six months of this year, compared with the same period last year.

Mexico is another popular destination for companies shifting away from China. Roberto Durazo works for a company called Ivemsa that helps manufacturers set up shop in Mexico. He held three conference calls with potential clients in a single day this week. But for now, he says, most companies are keeping their options open.

"Not many of them are pulling the trigger," Durazo said. "My feeling is that many of them are gathering information and, if the trade war continues for a long time, just making the decision of coming into Mexico."

Mexico offers the advantage of much shorter delivery times to the United States. But it was only three months ago that President Trump was threatening tariffs on goods made there. Trump ultimately dropped that threat.

Trump has urged companies worried about tariffs to move production back to the United States. But only about 6% of the companies operating in China are considering that, according to the American Chamber survey.

Harry Moser, who runs the Reshoring Initiative, estimates that about 25% of those companies would find manufacturing in the U.S. competitive if they took tariffs, transportation and all other costs into account.

"Probably they made the right decision going to China when the wages [there] were so low," Moser said. "Probably they should have reevaluated it five years ago. But now that they feel they have to bring a lot of work out of China, now is the perfect time to reevaluate the U.S. as an alternative."

As the trade war drags on, more companies may rethink their presence in China. But for now, most are staying put. That includes Crown Crafts, a Louisiana-based company that makes baby blankets and other products in China. CEO Randall Chestnut told investors this summer that he looked into shifting production to a half-dozen different countries. But ultimately he decided it was cheaper to stay in China and simply pay Trump's tariffs.

"So we think that we're going to have to bite the bullet and, you know, pass it on," Chestnut said during a quarterly earnings call.

According to the American Chamber survey, 60% of the U.S. companies now operating in China have no plans to relocate.

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2019-08-30 09:08:00Z
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Decades of Georgia gameday fashion - Red and Black

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Decades of Georgia gameday fashion  Red and Black

When you shift your gaze off the football field to the over 90000 fans gathered in Sanford Stadium each home game, you'll encounter a sea of mostly red, black ...

https://www.redandblack.com/culture/decades-of-georgia-gameday-fashion/article_885936fa-ca00-11e9-9f49-bb5eb057a9c9.html

2019-08-29 12:00:00Z
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‘The illusion of deceit’: The success or failure of fashion memberships hinges on the fine print - Glossy

Fabletics, for example, took a big risk by requiring customers to either be fee-paying monthly members or purchase clothes at significantly higher prices. While this approach may be helpful for driving initial revenue spikes and maintaining a prestigious aura around a brand, the long-term sustainability is not guaranteed. Fabletics alone received hundreds of complaints against it through the Better Business Bureau in its first three years of business. Its membership policy requires that customers pay every month or notify the company within the first few days of each month if they would like to skip that month. 

“In general, having a membership fee can drive value if the programs are simple and there is a significant value returned for the fee,” said Perry Kramer, senior vice president and practice lead at Boston Retail Partners. “In the online fashion business, however, it is a delicate balance between getting a quick revenue boost and enjoying long-term success.  With few exceptions, when a membership fee is required to shop, the initial revenue spike drops off significantly and falls short of customer loyalty and lifetime value in programs that do not require a membership fee. The long-term growth, membership size and membership growth rate is usually substantially higher in programs with no fees.  The bottom-line risk for companies that have a high membership fee is that they will alienate customers who do not see a significant value every month.”

Still, Fabletics has managed to grow considerably. Forbes reported that Fabletics’ revenue was over $300 million in 2018 and is growing each year. The company has opened more physical stores this year, including its first New York store last April.

Savage x Fenty does not require a customer to be a member, but when checking out, a membership is automatically added to the customer’s cart and must be manually removed. Once a membership has been purchased, there is no option to cancel it online. Customers must call over the phone in order to remove themselves from the program.

Fabletics and Savage x Fenty are both part of the TechStyle fashion group. Fabletics declined to comment for this story. 

“If a brand feels that a fee-based program is needed to either differentiate a select set of products, or ‘guilt’ a consumer into shopping monthly, they need to deliver significant differentiation and value each month,” Kramer said. “But this is something that is very hard to do in the highly-competitive fashion industry.”

Outside of TechStyle brands, rental platforms like Rent the Runway and Nuuly tend to have more forgiving and easy-to-navigate membership models. Customers can pause their membership for up to three months at any time on either platform, without the complications of having to notify the company at the beginning of each month whether they will skip or pay that month.

“Issues arise when brands make it difficult to redeem points and when extraneous fine print keeps a customer from being able to cancel or pause their membership,” said Syama Meagher, chief retail strategist at Scaling Retail. “Poor customer service could lead to negative net promoter scores as customers will amplify their bad experiences over social media and word of mouth.”

This doesn’t mean memberships are a bad idea. The consumer loyalty market was at just under $2 billion in 2016 and has since jumped up to almost $7 billion, with 3.8 billion loyalty memberships being held in the U.S. alone. Brands like Stitch Fix and Rent the Runway have popularized the idea of the circular closet, of which membership models are a key part.

“Membership programs are a great way to get recurring revenue and increase transactions and sales,” Meagher said. “Most consumers are looking for experiences as well as discounts/points. Membership programs should be designed to engage customers, as this increases the likelihood of them actually continuing to use the program. These brands need to keep their membership programs simple, and staff up customer service to help loyal members understand how to use their program and what the benefits are.”

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2019-08-29 04:01:16Z
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How ThredUP is Driving the Circular Fashion Movement with AI - Forbes

Enabling Sustainability in Circular Fashion

ThredUP

Circular fashion is part of the circular economy, an economic system that at its core is embedded with an ideology of reuse, recycle and refurbish in order to eliminate waste, stop items from going into landfills, and extend the lifecycle of products by keeping them in use and in circulation. The fashion industry is notorious for its wasteful and environmentally damaging practices accounting for over 10% of global carbon emissions a percentage which is slated to increase to account for 24% of the global carbon budget by the year 2050 at current demand. 

Much of this is due to the synthetic fibers and fabrics primarily used in fast fashion,  70 million barrels of oil are used to produce polyester every year and wasteful practices exacerbate the impact, it turns out that the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or incinerated every second!

Enabling Sustainability in Circular Fashion

Fresh on the heels of a $175 million raise, ThredUP is poised to capitalize on the growing $24 billion second-hand market through its use of artificial intelligence to bring efficiencies and scale to every area of its operations , while fueling the circular fashion trend among traditional retail brands with the launch of its “resale as a service” offering.

The company’s mission is to inspire a new generation of shoppers to think second hand first, keeping clothing out of landfills so that people can look great without being part of the problem. 

ThredUP intends to find a home for every item that comes in through our closet cleanout kits. Whether that is a resale to another eco-conscious or budget inclined consumer, resale to physical thrift stores, donations to charity or having items recycled into othertextile forms, our goal is to keep those items out of landfills entirely. Last year, thredUP saved shoppers billions of dollars and diverted nearly 100 million items from going into landfills.”

ThredUP Cleanout Service

ThredUP

says Chris Homer Cofounder and CTO of ThredUP.

Just last year, ThredUP upcycled 576,000 fast-fashion items and the numbers show a steady growth path year over year with second-hand purchases slated to double in the next 10 years as more consumers embrace recycled fashion. If everyone bought one used item instead of a new article of clothing this year, we would minimize carbon emissions to the tune of half a billion cars being taken off the road for a year.

AI for Pricing

With over 35,000 brands represented and close to 100 million unique items processed, the company uses AI provided by Vue.ai to process inbound items via image recognition that enables automated visual tagging and assigns attributions based on necklines, patterns, label name, color, fashion edginess, and more. Tapping into its extensive database, the company uses AI-driven visual recognition which includes attributes that define wear and tear enable the company to assign resale value at scale for each one of its millions of unique items.  

AI for Personalization

Additionally, while many companies can and do leverage AI for personalized user experiences based on previous shopping and browsing behavior - the sheer volume of unique items ThredUP processes daily magnifies the challenge, because it is all about finding the perfect needle in a haystack item for that consumer at that time. The AI can also create different service levels based on customer loyalty, historical spend and inclination to participate in other service offerings such as its box services, or special retail partnerships.

AI for Styling Services

One of ThredUP’s product lines is a box service that sends 10 items that are hand-picked by a stylist. The service leverages Vue.ai’s technology here as well to both help stylists fulfill orders based on the consumer’s previous history, as well as enhance those curated suggestions with predictive analytics and trending data to find seasonal and up to date fashion trends. 

Resale as a Service

According to ThredUP’s recent resale report, resale is poised to overtake fast fashion within 10 years! This means retailers need to come up with a resale strategy to encourage brand loyalty and keep market share. ThredUP has set up a number of partnerships with brands such as Reformation, Everlane and Cuyana that encourage their customers to clean out their closets sustainably and earn credit to shop back on their sites.

Finding a Home for Every Item

Some surprising insights Chris points to as part of the ThredUP journey include learning that every almost every item has a home to find, regardless of its shape, whether its an outdated style or if it was bought ages ago. Leveraging the power of AI, ThredUP has been able to optimize every stage of its operations from sorting clothes and pricing them efficiently at scale, to providing personalized experiences to developing fulfillment practices that optimize its delivery.

I decided to give ThredUP a try and as of this writing made two purchases (less than $40) and ordered a Clean Out Kit, as I am eager to jump on the circular fashion trend in favor of sustainability and saving our planet.

Why buy new when you can buy used?

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/08/27/how-thredup-is-driving-the-circular-fashion-movement-with-ai/?ss=ai-big-data

2019-08-27 14:18:37Z
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River + Wolf Highlights Exceptional Fashion Brand Names in Honor of New York Fashion Week - Yahoo Finance

The gallery of exceptional brand names includes creative, edgy, and playful apparel and fashion services names, including NYFW Dirty Pineapple and Noon by Noor.

NEW YORK, Aug. 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- River + Wolf, a leading brand naming agency based in New York City, announces that its September gallery of exceptional company names will feature fashion brands, to coincide with New York Fashion Week (NYFW), which begins September 6.

Each month, the online gallery, called Names of Distinction (NOD), highlights 12 names from a different industry or category. Previous categories include wine and artificial intelligence.

River + Wolf created NOD to bring awareness to the importance of brand naming, to celebrate creative names, and to inspire people tasked with this important but often misunderstood element of branding. September's collection includes two brands taking part in NYFW.

"The energy and beauty of Fashion Week reverberates throughout the city. Honoring fashion brand names is a way to pay tribute to the cultural power of the event, as well as to the art and science of brand naming," says Margaret Wolfson, the founder and chief creative of River + Wolf. Wolfson, who recently lectured on fashion naming at the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris, explains that "the names showcased in our naming gallery range from edgy to playful, opaque to forthcoming."

Shanghai-based clothing brand Dirty Pineapple wins a spot. The brand creates genderless designs that meld cultural influences with high fashion. Its name encapsulates the brand's belief that novelty is born from collision and contrast. For those in the know, it conveys multiple slang meanings, from a type of martini to a weird use of fruit on pizza.

Noon by Noor is also showcased in the River + Wolf gallery. The Bahrain-based womenswear label is known for luxurious designs with intricate patterns and artistic embellishments. The name of one of the founders is Noor, meaning light in Arabic.  Spelling out her first initial (pronounced "nune" in Arabic) as the English word "noon," evokes warmth and brilliance. For the full exhibit of featured names, visit NOD gallery. 

For more information or to inquire about speaking to fashion brand naming expert Margret Wolfson, contact Jacqueline Lisk at info@jrlisk.com.

About River + Wolf
River + Wolf is an award-winning brand naming and writing agency based in New York City, but with clients across the globe. For more information, visit https://riverandwolf.com/.

Media Contacts
Jacqueline Lisk, PR partner, River + Wolf
914-325-2152
220369@email4pr.com

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2019-08-22 12:35:00Z
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Regular Kids Roll in the Dirt All Summer, Rich Kids Go to Fashion Camp - Jezebel

Image: Getty

As a teenager with ambitions of making my own clothes (when your teen bible is a DVD of Pretty in Pink, it happens) I took a sewing class with a helpful grandma at my local Jo-Ann fabrics. But these days younger, fancier children with dreams of becoming a designer have a much better place to cut their teeth: fashion camp.

What is fashion camp, exactly? The New York Times reports that it’s a week-long program for Los Angeles rich kids aged six to 18 who learn to build their own clothing line from the ground up. That includes designing and sewing outfits and fun activities like forming “a customer profile for their target demographic” and marketing. Because, of course, it’s never too late to get your youngest family members #hustling. Attendees of the camp, named The Unincorporated Life, include the spawn of Kim Kardashian West, artist Shepard Fairey, and James Van Der Beek, and prices for the camp run $850 for the week.

Frankly, the clothes sound incredible. “My customer will wear my garment to a Halloween party and they will feel like they’re in a horror movie,” a nine-year-old said to the NYT. Okay, I’d wear it immediately.

Other kids can learn personal branding or DJ-ing, so the camp is basically an incubator program for future influencers, as if being the child of an extremely famous person doesn’t ensure that enough. Get to working, babies!

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2019-08-21 15:00:00Z
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Here's how to pick the perfect job interview outfit, according to a 'fashion psychologist' - CNBC

Don't know what to wear for your upcoming job interview?

We've heard the same advice over and over again: "Dress for the job you want, not the job you have." But how do you go about doing that?

Browse the internet and you'll discover countless advice on things like what colors and accessories to wear (e.g., black to convey power, red for passion and energy, a splash of white for simplicity, a bold tie for authority).

But what if red makes you feel angry and white looks depressing to you? If wearing the "conventional outfit" doesn't quite feel like you, chances are that you'll have a hard time bringing your most authentic self to the interview.

As an fashion psychologist and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, my mission is to help people dress in a way that energizes, uplifts and encourages them to bring their best foot forward.

When choosing what to wear for a job interview, it's not about staying in the safe lane. Instead, it's about creating congruency between how you feel and how you want to present yourself to potential employers. Because guess what? Personality matters more than you think in a job interview. 

Here's how to choose the perfect interview outfit — without blowing all your cash:

1. Don't have a dress rehearsal

Most people tend to pick out what they'll wear a few days in advance. But overthinking things will only make you feel more stressed and nervous.

Instead, on the morning of your interview, ask yourself: How am I feeling today? How do I want my potential employer to see me? What items will help bring out my best traits?

If you're feeling down and tired, for example, wearing a grey blazer might make you feel even groggier. So you'll want to dress up and pick out an item that will uplift your mood and a color will energize you. That might be a yellow pleated skirt or a funky tie.

2. Do your homework

Of course, you'll want to be somewhat prepared.

Before the day of your interview, check out the company's website (or consult with friends who have worked there) to get a general sense of the dress code.

Whatever you do, don't dress up as a carbon copy of the company's current employees. The idea is to understand what to go for and what to avoid.

For example, if the dress code is more formal than casual, don't show up in a graphic t-shirt and sneakers. Doing so will only make you look misinformed and feel uncomfortable throughout the entire interview.

(Pictured above: Dawnn Karen; C/O: Dawn Karen)

3. Do choose a 'focal accessory'

Many people will advise you to keep it simple — and there's some truth to that: Wearing something outrageous, even if it makes you feel ultra confident, can backfire by making the interviewer focus on your clothing, instead of your personality.

But avoid keeping things too simple. Consider picking out what I like to call a "focal accessory" — an item that enhances your mood and holds sentimental value because of the memories (or other some other positive association) it evokes.

That might be a unique tie or brooch that once belonged to a great, great grandparent. Maybe it'll catch your interviewer's attention and lead to a quick conversation that will give them more insight to who you are as an individual.

4. Don't feel pressured to look older

I often hear people say that dressing one level above the position you're applying for will make you look more mature, responsible and capable. 

Here's my response to that: *Yaaawwwwn*.

You should never feel obligated to wear something that makes you look older.  Of course, it's ultimately about you and how you feel — so if you're in your mid-20s and wearing a super dark pantsuit and red lipstick has always been your thing, then go for it.

But don't feel obligated to dress older because you think it'll give you an advantage. In fact, one study found that formal clothing on younger people (for both men and women) makes them look less approachable, while formal clothing on older people makes them look more approachable.

In other words, try to dress your age and wear what feels right to you.

5. Do wear perfume or cologne

Employers want to hire candidates who look clean and polished — and that means smelling good.

According to one survey, 90% of participants said they feel more confident when wearing their favorite scent. That's because our olfactory system (our sense of smell) is connected to our limbic system (the part of the brain responsible for interpreting memories and emotions), according to the researchers.

So pick out a scent that you connect to positively. (Just don't choose something too strong and pungent; a small spritz of something light and pleasant will do just fine.)

Dawnn Karen is a fashion psychologist and the CEO of Fashion Psychology Success. She teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology and her work has been featured in The New York Times, Women's Wear Daily, Harper's Bazaar and The Washington Post. Dawnn holds a Master of Arts degree in counseling psychology from Columbia University. Follow her on Twitter here.

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2019-08-19 16:52:32Z
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The Man Turning European Fashion Into Something Raw and Real - The New York Times

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Video by Kristin-Lee MoolmanCredit

The Man Turning European Fashion Into Something Raw and Real

Jonathan Anderson’s creations for Loewe and his own brand have made him one of the most forward-thinking designers working today.

By

Aug 19, 2019

“THERE MIGHT BE no other place in the world as good as where I’m going to take you,” says Jonathan Anderson, with a final drag of his cigarette. We are standing on the vast stone steps of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses one of the world’s most extensive repositories of decorative arts. He grinds the cigarette out with his heel and hurries inside, bolting past reception and bounding up the marble stairs to a series of high-ceilinged rooms.

The ceramics galleries on the top floor have been relocated since their 1868 inception and were reconfigured a decade ago. The 11 rooms house over 30,000 vases, platters, cups and tea service in porcelain, earthenware and stoneware from 2500 B.C. to present day, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Cotswolds. Only a few of the anterooms contain the sort of edited, thoughtfully labeled, artfully lit displays found in modern museums; most of the floor space here is occupied by rows of 12-foot-tall glass cases, each ignominiously stuffed with stacked pieces. The contents’ origins are written in plain letters on the surface of each case, almost too high to see: China, Japan, the Middle East. You can glimpse the royal blue and marigold iridescent lip of a platter here, the rough neck of a sand-colored hand-turned vase there, but not much more: You would have to stand for hours — as Anderson has — day after day, to absorb it all. It resembles less a museum than a series of oversize storage closets of the sort you’d find in a Georgian countryside mansion, packed with generations of heirlooms secreted away to weather the Great War. “There’s so much here because families keep all this history,” Anderson says as he walks the aisles, stopping occasionally to look up at one of the cases. “Yes, it would probably be easier to put much of this in storage to make a better viewing experience, but you would never want to tamp down the love.”

Although he was recently named a trustee of the museum, Anderson himself is not a historian or a gallerist but the 34-year-old creator of strange, beautiful clothing and accessories that occupy the liminal space between the rivetingly avant-garde and the satisfyingly wearable, and among the most forward-thinking designers working today. He first visited the Victoria and Albert Museum as a teenager with his mother and now goes at least twice a month, traveling by cab from his Victorian house in East London or the headquarters of his namesake label in Hoxton. In 2008, he launched JW Anderson, his off-kilter, androgynous men’s line, introducing tissue-light leather dresses and ruffled hot pants in duffel-bag cotton fabric in an era before such gender transgressions became common. A couple of years later, he added a line of well-crafted and witty women’s wear (a mod silk paisley pajama suit with a white rubber clerical collar, square-toed studded boots balanced on a steel-barrel heel), all of which he produces from an airy 3,000-square-foot atelier. A 2012 collaboration with Topshop brought him mainstream attention, and a year later, LVMH bought a stake in his company while also naming him creative director of Loewe, a venerable but sleepy Spanish leather-goods company that neither Narciso Rodriguez nor Stuart Vevers, now the creative director of Coach, had been able to awaken.

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Loewe OV coat with leather collar and cuffs, $4,750, and wings hat, $1,300, loewe.com.CreditPhotograph by Kristin-Lee Moolman. Styled by Suzanne Koller

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Loewe top, $2,350, and sweater, $950. JW Anderson bracelets, $650 each, jwanderson.com.CreditPhotograph by Kristin-Lee Moolman. Styled by Suzanne Koller

After moving Loewe’s design studio from Madrid to the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris (an easier commute to London, yet far enough to allow a creative distance between those collections and his own), Anderson set upon establishing his Loewe: collections of clothes and accessories that possess both a couture level of craftsmanship and a distinctly raw, handmade energy. It’s a conflicting, friction-producing combination that has come to define — and propel — his vision for the brand. The decisions he has made for Loewe may seem counterintuitive — there are no flashy logos, and he’s unafraid to show the figurative hand of the artist in his garments (a multicolored striped angora sweater, for example, looks as if it has been sewn by an amateur, and his popular calfskin handbags bear a signature exposed cotton top stitch, a plain-spoken touch). But Anderson’s concepts resonate because he has managed to speak to our moment, to our inchoate and inarticulable yearning for the earthbound, the slow, the imperfect and the anthropological.

For fall, the surface of a wool sweater is covered with luminous pearls of varying sizes, like barnacles, paired with raw, oversize, wide-legged jeans. A three-quarter-length patchwork coat with a traditional check has bell sleeves and a stand-up collar of natural-hued calfskin. A dress that begins as a soft wool turtleneck morphs at the waist into a white cotton organdy peasant skirt stitched with spare scalloped bands. Bags include iterations of Anderson’s best sellers — the geometric Puzzle; the Gate, with its rakish tie — but also faux-naïf one-offs like a knit mini-purse in the shape of an otter: something that could be mistaken for a child’s toy. There are also hats that suggest a nun’s wimple or bat ears, and headbands topped with dandelion-colored marabou feathers.

But what makes Anderson so radical — and explains why the ceramics collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in all its fusty, cluttered, rough-edged glory, is a diorama of his magpie mind — is that his vision includes much more than only things to wear or carry. “I love fashion,” he says, “but I will not let fashion dictate me.” It is a statement that’s both pronouncement and promise, and accordingly, he doesn’t labor to show unified collections, consciously attempt to follow the zeitgeist or even bother accentuating the human form — his muses are not models or actors. Instead, his primary sources are the people for whom clothes were generally something worn beneath a smock: the masters of early 20th-century craft. Both JW Anderson and Loewe have become his mad-scientist experiments in returning traditional handiwork to high fashion. It has proved to be a prophetic but provocative notion, partly because craft has always had an uneasy place in the world of fashion. Every now and then, a designer cultivates the genuinely homespun — Natalie Chanin, who in the early 2000s launched the sustainable American line Alabama Chanin, with its fine beading and embroidery on T-shirt cotton and denim made by local women in Florence, Ala., comes to mind — but it can often wind up feeling insincere or genuinely homely.

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Jonathan Anderson, photographed in his London townhouse.CreditKristin-Lee Moolman

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The designer’s collection of tea bowls by the English artist Ewen Henderson.CreditKristin-Lee Moolman

In 2016, Anderson made his connection to craft official by founding the juried Loewe Craft Prize for artisans from around the world working in everything from glass to leather to paper. It has become a cornerstone of the brand and of the designer’s aesthetic. His clothes are subversive because they suggest that craft ought not exist in the service of fashion but that fashion should exist to support craft. Under his hand, the wearer becomes a vehicle, one meant to display what the human hand can do. “Some places use ‘craft’ as a synonym for ‘exclusivity,’ to convey a sense of eliteness,” he says. “But for me, craft is a stripping back to the roots, a fidelity to something raw.”

ANDERSON WAS RAISED in Magherafelt, an Ulster town of about 8,800 people in Northern Ireland, the son of a schoolteacher and a professional rugby player turned Irish national coach. When he was in primary school, he was diagnosed with severe dyslexia. Along with coming out at 18, during the year he spent studying to be an actor at Washington D.C.’s Studio Theater, his dyslexia has profoundly shaped his life. Even now, he avoids writing simple emails. But he believes that having to visualize, contextualize and translate has heightened his ability to live in both future and present tenses, a necessary skill when creating 18 well-differentiated collections each year — six for his own label, 10 for Loewe and two for his ongoing collaborations with Uniqlo.

“Limitations can actually be really freeing,” Anderson tells me the day before our London museum foray, when I meet him in Paris, in his spacious office at the Loewe design studio overlooking the Église Saint-Sulpice. He splits each week between the two cities (his boyfriend works in fashion in Paris) and visits Loewe’s Madrid headquarters twice a month. The room, at the top of a grand, winding stair, is reflective of how he ricochets between the excessive and spare: His huge desk, clear as a cutting board, stands before a bulwark of flush, frameless wooden closets; on the opposing wall are long floating shelves displaying a collection of more than 27 late 19th- to early 20th-century French ceramic mushrooms that he bought at auction. “I can sometimes go into hoarder mode,” he says. “And then I’m suddenly sick of it all and wonder what I’m doing.”

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JW Anderson windowpane wrap cape, $2,050, circular paneled jersey turtleneck, $290, wide-legged wool gabardine trousers, $950, wide-waist belt, $350, and sandals with tulle ties, price on request.CreditPhotograph by Kristin-Lee Moolman. Styled by Suzanne Koller

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Loewe pearl sweater, price on request.CreditPhotograph by Kristin-Lee Moolman. Styled by Suzanne Koller

When Anderson was named to head Loewe, some wondered if a polymorphous niche designer whose only experience beyond his own company was a year or so in merchandising at Prada could manage to reconceptualize a moribund legacy brand (while also coping with internal politics and economic realities). But in addition to his endlessly fecund imagination, Anderson has a quality that few young talents of his stature, especially those in the vanguard, seem to possess: a head for business. Instead of chafing under a corporate master, as other renegade designers have — Alexander McQueen, famously, for one — he seems to savor the balance of commerce and culture; Loewe has experienced strong growth during his tenure. “No designer today can be completely detached from the realities of business. Maybe a decade ago, but no longer,” he says. “It’s about surviving, of staying around long enough to say all the things you want to say.” This embrace of the practical has inspired his latest project: remaking many of the brand’s 111 stand-alone stores into what he calls Casa Loewe, a showcase not only for his designs but also for the artists, artisans and even floral designers he admires. The New York City store opens in SoHo this fall, but you can see the result of his most recent efforts in London’s three-story flagship on Bond Street in Mayfair, which opened in April. There, the clothes and accessories share space with colorfully pocked vases by the Japanese ceramist Takuro Kuwata, Anthea Hamilton’s drippy blown-glass stop-sign-red 2014 Vulcano table and baskets woven by Hafu Matsumoto. Throughout the shop are obvious inflections of Kettle’s Yard, Anderson’s self-described spiritual home, the Cambridge gallery that was once the four-cottage residence of the 20th-century art collector Jim Ede and his wife, Helen (they donated it to the university in 1966), a model for hybrid domestic-retail environments. There, works by the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore and the painter Helen Frankenthaler are displayed amid the Edes’ original furnishings, as well as with rotating shows of contemporary and modern artists.

But while the stores may be reflections of Anderson’s tastes and vision, the designer himself is not. It’s common these days for creative directors to embody their own aesthetic — think of Gucci’s fanciful Alessandro Michele, for one — but Anderson, whose uniform consists of loose jeans and a sweater or button-down, his sandy blond hair askew, is not a peacock. “I’m trying to dress better, but it’s hard for me,” he says. At home, he can’t bear the presence of anything he’s made. At both brands, he relies heavily on teams, perhaps more than some designers; they are enfranchised to transform his constant stream of inspirations — such as a 16th-century portrait miniature, which is translated into the puritan collar of a wool coat or the cravat-style flourish on a white silk blouse — into looks that can parade down a runway. Although he sketches well (his maternal grandfather, who worked as a manager at a textile firm and collected delftware, made Anderson and his younger brother sit at the kitchen table when they were children, drawing various teacups and vases over and over to teach them about volumes and dimension), he sees himself more as a curator than a designer. His working relationship with Benjamin Bruno, his longtime stylist, is closer to that of a partner, he says. He may be the only women’s wear designer who starts from men’s wear and adapts the shapes from there. “I’m a man who’s attracted to men,” he says. “So that’s where the energy is.”

That he has been able to maintain JW Anderson’s acute weirdness over the seasons as he rewrites Loewe’s long, sober story with leather into a tale both effervescent and enduring is, notes Amanda Harlech — an old friend and muse of Karl Lagerfeld, who brokered a friendship between the two men before Lagerfeld’s death this year — “a mark of a rare kind of genius, the sort of intelligence you saw in Karl, the sort of voraciousness.”

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A porcelain bowl by the English ceramist Mary Rogers, photographed in the designer’s London townhouse.CreditKristin-Lee Moolman

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Anderson’s accrual of glazed ceramic buttons by the midcentury British potter Lucie Rie.CreditKristin-Lee Moolman

“THE UNDERLYING IMPULSE is the same with the clothes, to make something that can stand on its own terms,” Anderson says. He’s gesturing toward a tall, slender, gray stoneware vase by William Staite Murray, a celebrated English studio potter who worked after World War I and was associated with the Seven and Five Society of progressive artists, which included Hepworth and Moore. “Look at that piece. It’s both incredibly simple and incredibly intricate,” he says. “It was made to be used but also amaze.”

Ceramics obsess Anderson, certainly, but so do virtually all crafts — knitting, braiding, weaving, wrapping. Most recently, he acquired at auction a tiny 18th-century embroidery of people tilling a field, simply because he was intrigued that the artist had been able to convey the subjects’ plaintive oppression with mere stitches.

In conversation, Anderson veers easily into other eras and art forms (he is especially entranced by New York City in the early ’80s, including the work of the multidisciplinary artist David Wojnarowicz), but he is most truly the defender of the peculiar propriety and eccentricity of British craft from the Medieval and preindustrial eras, which saw a renaissance in the late 19th century as a reaction to the rise of machine manufacturing and cheaply rendered ornamentation. Back then, William Morris, the philosopher and designer who might be Anderson’s most direct forebear (Anderson used his patterns for a November 2017 Loewe capsule collection), became a crusader for artistic integrity in the decorative arts, championing the intellectual and social status of crafts and challenging the dehumanization of labor that characterized the Victorian Industrial Revolution. Morris famously mastered textile weaving on a loom in his bedroom as well as the block printing of cloth and wallpaper, which had been obliterated by shoddy mass production. At Morris & Co., his Oxford Street emporium, he offered the work of traditional artisans with small-scale countryside workshops, whose hand-hewn pieces in glass, straw, cotton, paper and molten metals had been shoved aside by cheaper, flashier, factory-made reproductions. Inspired by the writing of the Victorian-era critic John Ruskin, who posited a connection between the way in which goods were produced and the social, economic and emotional health of a nation, Morris codified the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1880s as a bulwark against what his biographer Fiona MacCarthy called “the cynical proliferation of the useless,” in hopes of returning to an era in which beautiful, well-made objects were created for everyday life, produced in a way that allowed their makers to remain connected with their product and those who used it. It is a message that is not lost on Anderson, whose first piece for his own line, more than a decade ago, was based on an Aran Irish fisherman’s sweater he saw in a museum; it had been dredged, he recalls — hundreds of years after its 18th-century creation, its beauty intact — from the bottom of a peat bog.

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Loewe Pompons sweater, $1,650, striped pleated trousers, $790, boa, $3,500, and pointy moccasins, $890.CreditPhotograph by Kristin-Lee Moolman. Styled by Suzanne Koller

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Loewe top, $2,350, and sweater, $950. JW Anderson bracelets, $650 each.CreditPhotograph by Kristin-Lee Moolman. Styled by Suzanne Koller

The cult of the handmade as purveyed by Morris, who died in 1896, held sway until after World War I — the movement’s influence can still be seen in places as far-flung as Pasadena, Calif., where the Arts and Crafts bungalows designed by the architecture firm Greene and Greene in the 1920s remain — but by the middle of the century, the design world, enamored of unadorned Modernism, came to dismiss handicraft, once again, as mere decoration. Over the past decade and a half or so, however, a contemporary English aesthetic, one that rejects the confines of polished minimalism, has announced itself. With raw energy, puckish intelligence, local materials and fine handwork, it invokes the region’s pastoral agrarian roots, echoing Morris’s call to return to preindustrial workmanship, with ceramists, basket weavers and textile designers as the drivers of innovation and creativity. The British design ethos has turned from a whitewashed, sharp-edged spareness intended to clash defiantly with the country’s historic architecture toward a craggy, hand-turned naturalness that seems at peace with it. Showrooms such as the New Craftsmen in Mayfair, which opened in 2012, have elevated hand-spun artistry into a fine art, representing the East Midlands-based British potter Bronwen Grieves, whose vessels are made from flattened coils of stoneware clay that have been grogged (fired and then ground up), and Catarina Riccabona, who works in southeast London, hand-weaving wall panels from paper yarn.

For Anderson, no technique or material more fully embodies the complex evolution of the English aesthetic than ceramics, the ultimate earthbound art, conjured from a clay pit in the ground itself. His principal obsessions as designer and collector are the British studio potters of the postwar era. They were inspired not only by the Arts and Crafts movement but by the Wiener Werkstätte, Josef Hoffmann’s Vienna-based precursor to Art Deco, as well as Bauhaus and the Omega Workshop, the Bloomsbury Group’s craft-focused offshoot, which produced textiles, murals and furniture. Clustered around London’s Camberwell College of Arts till the ’70s, this loose collective of ceramists included the Austrian-born Lucie Rie and the German immigrant Hans Coper, who began as her studio assistant. Though Anderson has never tried making ceramics himself — such artistry, he feels, can’t be attempted as a hobby — you can find allusions to the British studio potters’ rough glazes, aggressive shapes, unorthodox proportions and textural juxtapositions in the designer’s intellectually provocative creations: the swagger and curve of Loewe’s Hammock bag, say, or a JW Anderson dress patched together from contrasting panels of fabric, decorated with mismatched buttons.

ANDERSON HAS STUDIOUSLY ignored his phone during our time together, but now it buzzes and he looks down at it. It is not business that breaks his concentration but the latest salvo in an online bidding war for a set of six rare pale pink porcelain Rie buttons that he’s hoping to add to his collection of over 100 (he also owns dozens of pieces of her pottery). He loves them not merely for their delicacy but for their back story: Rie, who died at age 93 in 1995, escaped the Nazis and supported her early work by selling the buttons — tiny sculptures unto themselves, shaped like bowls or knots or mushrooms — to Harrods in the fallow years after the Blitz. With their imperfections and lack of refinement, they are a reminder never to forget the scrappiness of beginnings. “You used to be able to get them for nothing, but not now. Some guy in China is jacking them up,” he says, his eyes narrowing. “This is not good.”

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Video by Kristin-Lee MoolmanCredit

But a few minutes later, as we wind our way out of the museum, he glances again at the screen: victory. He will add the buttons to the others he has had sewn in patterns onto lengths of vintage African cloth. Some of them are framed and hang in his weekend home in Norfolk, a two-hour drive north of the city. Others are draped over Axel Vervoordt tables beside the stacks of illustrated volumes on Chinese pottery and Egyptian glassware in his rowhouse.

On the steps, he takes a cigarette from a pack in his back pocket. One long inhale before he heads to a cab bound for his studio, where, pinned to white boards, dozens of fabric swatches, pebbly to silken; lengths of crocheted trims; and even bits of lamé will, in the coming weeks, become the JW Anderson spring 2020 collection. All he will say is that it will be “subtly fragile, collaged.” What is certain is that it will be as free of self-reference as it is feisty. Like the artisans he venerates, Anderson’s influences become unrecognizable after he’s respun them. In an industry built on jittery speed, quicksilver trends and the endless (literal) referencing of past decades, cultures and movements, his aesthetic stands alone as an artful, ragged quilt of ideas, stitched together in an order that only he could imagine — a product, perhaps, of his dyslexia and his unique way of filtering beauty.

But ultimately what makes his work transcendent is that it forces us to slow down; indeed, it gives us little choice. Esoteric yet primordial, the best of his creations are not instantly appealing nor easily likable; Anderson will never be mainstream. Instead, his clothes beckon, bewitching us, if we allow them to, synapse by synapse, as they bid to be touched and seen and felt. They allude to the past with their deliberate mix of ancient techniques and posit a future of a winsome, off-kilter mosaic beyond the reach of time and haste. And what emerges, season after season, is this: not merely a crocheted sweater for a crisp afternoon in Kensington or TriBeCa, nor a jaunty patchwork handbag, but a jagged poetry that is perfect and imperfect, modern but also unevolved. It’s not fashion, as he might argue — it’s something else. It’s another way to see the world.

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Glasses throughout courtesy of Pour vos beaux yeux. Earrings throughout courtesy of Karry Gallery. Model: Assa Baradji at Cover Paris Model Agency. Hair by Cyndia Harvey at Art Partner. Makeup by Janeen Witherspoon at Bryant Artists using Chanel Beauty. Set design by Andrew Tomlinson at Streeters. Casting by Helena Balladino for DM Casting Agency. Production: Brachfeld. Manicure: Alex Falba at Artlist Paris. Digital tech: Philippe Billemont at Imagin. Set assistants: David Konix and Samantha Lanteri. Stylist’s assistants: Charlotte Thommeret and Laëtitia Leporcq.

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2019-08-19 09:00:23Z
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