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Archive for November, 2007
Taking a season off is always going to be a tricky affair especially in a town where there’s more talent than you can throw a stick at and every season throws up another ’saviour of British fashion’. So we were relieved that our SS08 show at the Vauxhall Fashion Scout was packed to the rafters and well received. Here’s a few links to some blog reviews:
Fuk.co.uk
Fuk LFW Roundup
Amelia’s Magazine
Fashion156.com
Koodos.com
Irish Independent Online
We have just been returned some pieces that were on loan to the new sci-fi thriller ‘Franklyn’ for the female lead played by Eva Green. Still don’t know if they actually used them as there were some contractual issues with a much bigger fashion house that were none too pleased about little Aganovich sneaking in the back door! TBC
I attended an invaluable talk at Rodnik studios on Thursday with Imran Amed and Mary Gelhar.The latest instalment from Alison Whelan and Courtney Blackman’s Fashion Business Club the talk served to address some issues that are crucial to the running of a fashion business.
One of the things that bothered us the most as we put our own business together over the past few years was the terrible lack of good, reliable business advice for designers. In a relatively short space of time we have come across some very useful (and, in retrospect, accurate) initiatives. Imran Amed has an excellent website called The Business of Fashion with a particularly succinct section called ‘Setting Up a Fashion Business’ that every struggler should read. We know its good because point for point we have lived everything he covers. He is in a very good position to offer advice as his own bio points out:
“Imran advises emerging fashion designers, global fashion houses, and online fashion companies on strategy, business development and operational issues and works with emerging fashion businesses on raising venture funding.”
Mary Gelhar is Vice President and Head of Brand Strategy at GenArt the American “arts and entertainment organization dedicated to showcasing emerging fashion designers, filmmakers, musicians and visual artists” and has advised some of the top US success stories.
The Fashion Business Club is an independent initiative and is providing an amazing service that is attempting to fill a huge gap in our UK industry. We hosted the last talk and were particularly impressed with Alison and Courtney.
Mary was in town to promote her new book the ‘Fashion Designer’s Survival Guide’. Charming and down to earth her perspective was simple and articulate as only the most experienced advice can be in the ‘of course, why didn’t I think of that..?’ vein.
London could use more of this. Much more.
We have never been particularly forthcoming on this site about what we do. Many of our heroes in the music, literature and street-art worlds play with hidden identities like Banksy, Aphex Twin or J.D.Salinger in an attempt to make people judge the work by its own merit, whic means we have always had an issue with the ‘bio’ sections of designer’s websites. But…we work in fashion and in fashion people want more flavour. Furthermore, we live in the age of web 2.0, Google and Wikipedia and people just want to know. We will be addressing this on the site but in the meantime here is a link to an interview with Michele Obi from My Fashion Life. (Still couldn’t get Nana to answer the questions though…!)