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Fashion

Threads, Fringes and Handcrafted Fashion: In Conversation with Kelsey Hutton

From passementerie to fashion adornments so extreme that the decoration becomes the fabric itself. Just when you thought we were over fringing, this is something you’ll be seeing even more of in the spring – with fringing becoming an integral part of the fabric. The frayed fabric look has been seen on the catwalks of Chanel, […]

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VV Rouleaux: A Top Spot for Trimmings

VV Rouleaux is more than just a ribbon shop. The 25 year old haberdashery emporium is an Aladdin’s cave of trimmings. From feathered birds (great for Christmas decorations as well as hats) to pom-poms, tassels and Chanel-style grosgrain ribbon, the colour filled store is a cherished resource for dressmakers, milliners and home accessories designers. Owner Annabel […]

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Sustainable Design, Climate Change and Christmas Shopping at RCA

The world’s leading university of art and design is an inspiring place to hunt for unique Christmas gifts. Showcasing the raw talent of students from a variety of arts disciplines including textiles, fine art and ceramics, the Royal College of Art Christmas Fete is now in its 4th year. All proceeds from the event at […]

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Dreamtime for Indigenous Australian Textile Designs

In anticipation of the British Museum’s forthcoming Indigenous Australia exhibition, we look at the rise of Aboriginal textile designs in fashion and interiors. Indigenous Australians’ oral tradition and spiritual values are based upon reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime – a sacred era when ancestral totemic spirit beings created the world. […]

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A Young Man’s Progress: The First Book of Fashion?

“We don’t have codpieces now, but we have pretty tight jeans,” says Tim Knox, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. There is now a noticeable interest in romantic male accessories and man-bags – a trend we pointed to in Tudor-themed Visuology Issue 1. These are the sorts of items mentioned by Matthäus Schwarz in a Renaissance […]

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Cave Paintings Inspire Primitivist Fashion

The oldest art ever discovered is now available for public viewing. But the cave paintings to be seen in the Ardèche region of France are in fact recent reproductions of the originals. The Chauvet cave, named after Jean-Marie Chauvet, one of the three people who found the treasure trove of Paleolithic paintings, is open rarely, to just a […]

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The Visuology Lecture and the Story of Sebastian Horsley’s Suit

We thought you might like to hear more about the Visuology Lecture, which took place at Viktor Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities recently. The star attraction (apart from innumerable specimens of taxidermy, twisted ephemera, macabre and medical memorabilia) was Savile Row tailor, Richard Anderson. One of the most experienced tailors in the world famous street, Anderson […]

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Freak Out: The Body as a Canvas

A far cry from bespectacled, retro-inspired geek chic – or the homogenized normcore look, is the trend for increasingly extreme tattooing and body piercing. Although tattoos have been around since Neolithic times, and 5000-year old mummified humans have been found with body piercings, the relatively recent association of such body adornments with sailors and criminal gangs has […]

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Extraordinary, Extreme, Sublime: The Savage Beauty of Alexander McQueen

Commercial yet contrarian, Lee Alexander McQueen inhabited a parallel world to most of those around him. Being so rapidly catapulted from council house kid to multi-millionaire couturier must have been psychologically unsettling, but his morbid feelings were sadly compounded by the rigorous demands of his trade, by bereavement and a bad drug habit. Referred to in the V&A’s new exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty […]

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