(A belated) what’s hot and not – a guest post by Aoife Valentine
Hot
Brown Sugar Better Fashion Week
Dublin may not host nearly enough fashion events, but the Brown Sugar Better Fashion Week is shaping up to be quite a good one. Organised by Re-dress, a ‘Better Fashion initiative’, the week places quite an emphasis on sustainability and ethics within the fashion industry, with a wide range of speakers and events squeezed into the line-up. Should you find yourself with a fashion shaped hole in your life next week, this certainly looks like an interesting way to fill it. [Editor's note: And the winner of my competition is in! #12 Jenny, you're it! Email winging its way to you shortly.]
Designer Collaborations
There is the occasional announcement of a collaboration between designers which leaves you wondering who ever decided it would make any sense at all. However, the recent unveiling of the collections of Kenzo x Vans and Lulu Guinness for Uniqlo has us quite excited. The patterned Vans are gorgeous, and Lulu Guiness’ iconic handbag designs make for quirky tshirts; both the products of collaborations done good.
While the celebrity offspring hanging out in the ‘Not’ section of this list should perhaps be distanced considerably from their apparent sartorial interests, in the vast majority of cases, dressing small children is often not an arduous task. With adorable summer clothes everywhere you look, stopping yourself picking up everything is likely to be more of a problem than finding the perfect outfit, especially for people so likely to have holes in the knees and grassstains on their elbows before the day is out. Why bother with a Dior babygrow when you can have roughly a million cute outfits instead?
Not
Turns out, being a five-year-old child isn’t an impediment to designing your own clothing range when you are the niece of Gisele Bundchen. Taking her first steps down a catwalk last year, she’s no stranger to the industry. Look, no five year old cares about how ethically clothes are made, nor do they care how clashing prints and colours work. They care about playing outside, eating coma-inducing amounts of sugar, and not going to bed early. Leave her be!
Tallafornia Merchandise
TV3, which is currently recruiting the cast for the second season of Tallafornia, is following the same path the makers of Jersey and Geordie Shore, and has planned on taking advantage of some, eh, apparent gap in the market for Tallafornia branded sunglasses and perfume. There is no one who needs to smell like eau de Nikita and co, unless you enjoy smelling cheap and more than a little like desperation.
Maryna Linchuk in Vogue Russia
Maryna Linchuk is next month’s cover-star for Vogue Russia and star of the attached spread, entitled How I Met Your Mother. Featuring clothes from the spring collections of Burberry, Victoria Beckham, Azzedine Alaia, Fendi, Nina Ricci, and Tom Ford that will make you wish you had somewhere to wear them and the money to buy them, it makes up a stunning editorial, save for the hair. In every image she’s wearing a very long, very high ponytail, which is incredibly distracting and manages to take over every photo. So unnecessary.
I must, by the way, clear Aoife of any tardiness; the delay in posting this post is because the past couple of weeks have kind of got on top of me and, as a result, I’ve been pushing all not-entirely-necessary tasks to the back of my mind. I think it’s called stress; I have, over the past week, referred to it as a “major meltdown” a “minor meltdown” and a “slight breakdown”, although, might I add, without medical diagnosis. Slowly crawling back to real life by my fingertips – I’m accepting the fact that we all have days (weeks? months?) like these, and I just need to, cliché or no, keep calm and carry on. [Encouraged to share this with you all due to a moment I "overheard" on Twitter; someone said that they'd overheard a man in the chipper telling the girl behind the counter that he'd been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. The tweeter in question - hands up if it's you - seemed pleased by the normalising of such a revelation. So here I am, normalising mine.]
