Category: fashion

Her Majesty The Queen made a surprise first ever visit to this month’s London Fashion Week to present the inaugural Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design to emerging fashion designer Richard Quinn. This new prize will be awarded annually to a talented new British fashion designer of womenswear, menswear, or accessories who also demonstrates value to the community and/or strong sustainable policies. Richard Quinn’s colorful English floral prints on puffer and biker jackets were standouts while a floral trenchcoat was sure to have appealed to Queen Elizabeth II.

Rising star Sadie Williams is a London-born designer who is quickly developing a reputation for creating innovative, textile-driven fashion. Strong prints, often with the addition of her signature use of metallic featured in her sporty new collection. Sadie was listed in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list for the Arts in 2016, alongside fellow Brits, Simone Rocha and Grace Wales Bonner. Following a hugely commercially successful capsule for Other Stories, Sadie launched her own label, which is now available internationally at stores including Machine-A, Boon the Shop in Seoul and Beams in Japan. This year Sadie will also be working on an art piece for The Royal Academy/Christies Auction House.

After debuting at London fashion week two years ago in a group show with Fashion East, Amie Victoria Robertson presented her first solo show at London Fashion Week this month at a Christopher Wren designed church in London. In a nod to her Scottish roots, Amie’s pieces included Prince of Wales check and a series of traditional plaids, including the designer’s family Tartan. This collection has a 1980s feel with pairings of clashing fabrics, metallic lamé panels, plaid, satin, sequins and silk organza. And I loved the designer’s hand-stitched Swarovski crystal floral embellishments adorning many of the garments. Before launching her own label, Amie worked for Marc Jacobs in Paris and New York developing embroideries and prints.

Two very different kinds of royal women came to mind during Tory Burch’s flowy, feminine and delightfully retro New York Fashion Week show on Friday morning.

The first was Lee Radziwill, the socialite sister of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whose “effortless style” helped inspire Burch’s fall/winter 2018 collection, according to the show notes.

And the second was Duchess Kate, who has made Burch’s effortlessly feminine designs a staple of her wardrobe, and whose brightly-colored floral formalwear during the royals’ recent Norway trip shared much in common with the designs on the runway Friday.

Burch is the latest designer to cite Radziwill, now 84, as a muse, a woman who palled around with Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs and inspired Michael Kors’ February 2016 Fashion Week show.

“It was a light reference to Lee Radziwill,” Burch told Vogue about her collection. “I know her very well. I like her character and her wit and her resilience. Obviously I like her style but I didn’t want to reference it too literally.”

Set amid rows of pink carnations in imitation grass, highlights of Friday’s show included the sumptuous fabrics and caftan-esque silhouettes, accessorized by patterned silk scarves and booties with just enough lift to escape the kitten-heel category.

Cardi B is planning the wedding of the century!

The 25-year-old “Bodak Yellow” rapper opened up to PEOPLE about her upcoming wedding to Migos’ Offset at the Grammys red carpet on Sunday — and she says the love birds plan to pull out all the stops for the big event.

“It’s gonna be extravagant. You know, we’re both rappers,” she says. “We’re both artists, so it has to be a very extravagant wedding.”

Offset popped the question to the Grammy nominee at Power 99’s Powerhouse concert in Philadelphia in October 2017 with a massive eight-carat tear-shaped diamond engagement ring.

Although the star seems elated to wed her rapper beau, she shares that they haven’t been able to put a dent in their wedding planning just yet.

“We are taking our time to plan it, because we really just don’t have the time,” Cardi says. “If we was to have at least one month, three weeks off, it would be easier. But we don’t have it.”

Still, there’s one thing that’s set in stone for the “Bartier Cardi” emcee: “I’m gonna go more Cinderella vibes for my wedding!”

Pablo Ramirez runs a small embroidery business called Stitch Me in West Hollywood. He keeps up an Instagram but doesn’t have a website, unless you count a Yelp page with solid reviews. Like any screenprinting and embroidery shop, Ramirez remains in business primarily by making bulk custom orders for corporations—I Survived the ‘17 Company Cookout! That’s about 50 percent of his business, he tells me. In that regard, Ramirez is about as removed from the world of high-fashion as an apparel business can get. But the other half of his business, the stuff on display in the pictures on Yelp, gives a different impression: there, embroidered on denim jackets, are slithering snakes, tigers bellowing in between branches of roses, and butterflies fluttering near a full English garden. You don’t have to look hard to find the comparison: it looks like a Gucci lookbook. That, Ramirez tells me, is the point.

The trends have been a boon for businesses with stylish customers. “When fashion magazines put something in their magazine with embroidery that picks up business,” says Max Louie, the owner of New York-based embroidery business ABCDE (short for Any Body’s Custom Design Embroidery). Across the board, every embroiderer I spoke to said they felt a bump in business over the past year or so (Michele was appointed as Gucci’s creative director in 2015). Design Like Whoa, a San Francisco-based shop specializing in screenprinting, recently started offering embroidery “due to higher demand and requests,” general manager Sabrina D. Brown tells me. And the embroidery gold rush isn’t just limited to the Guccis of the world, or your local shop down the street recreating Gucci designs. There’s also a wave of extremely hip embroideries like Fort Lonesome—making pieces of “embroidered, wearable art,” its website reads—and Lot, Stock and Barrel, which customizes vintage clothing.