Posted: May 16th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: fashion | Tags: fashion, fast fashion, holidays, spring 2012, trends
Just in time for graduation, the ASOS Salon collection of dresses has arrived, and they are truly exquisite. Most dresses are around $200, so they’re not your usual fast fashion bargain, but are not outrageous for the quality of workmanship and detail. ASOS also has going for it the fact that it is not yet a big U.S. presence, so chances are if you buy one of these dresses for yourself or your daughter for graduation, you’re not likely to run into anyone else wearing the same dress. And yes, although it is a small collection, it includes a variety of dresses some suitable for a teenage girl, others quite appropriate for her mother. They are so precious that I truly don’t know how to begin to choose.
Three Dresses For The Graduating Teen
1. ASOS SALON Pretty Dress in Floral Appliqué $208.74
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Posted: May 2nd, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: fashion | Tags: designers, fashion, fast fashion, h&m, mary katrantzou, spring 2012, topshop, trends
If fall’s most mystifying trend was the mullet dress, spring offers an equally mystifying take on the idea. For spring it’s all about the peplum skirt. This is one of those trends that I am skeptical I will ever be able to get on board with. I am usually one to buy into just about any and every trend. I believe firmly in the concept so eloquently played out on Leandra Medine’s blog The Man Repeller, that women dress not for men, but largely for themselves and each other, and there is an enormous amount of pleasure to be gotten from indulging in the most preposterous of trends no matter how ugly and inexplicable men might find them. When I think about fashion and getting dress, it aspires at its best to art, not to a sales pitch for my sexuality. But a girl’s got to draw the line somewhere, and the peplum may be one of the most horrid design elements I have ever seen.
The peplum skirt was certainly a presence on the spring runways…
whether at Jason Wu
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Posted: April 16th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: fashion | Tags: designers, fabric, Fall 2012, fast fashion, shopping
I absolutely appreciate the value of the runway as a place to make a statement, to express concepts, in forms that might be completely outrageous, and then those ideas get toned down and translated for the market. But it does make me a little sad — I think often the brilliance gets lost in translation. I don’t know if it is an idea on the part of the industry about what the general consumer will buy — i.e. conservative — or the reflection of an actual tentativeness and hesitancy on the part of consumers to go outside of a limited safety zone.
The general image of Vera Wang as a designer, based on the styles which are brought to market, is one of beautiful, graceful, modern, understated elegance. She is, no doubt, incredible at that. She drapes like no one else. It is definitely not, however, the whole story. Her Pre-Fall 2012 collection is edgy and exciting and open to taking risks, without remotely pushing it so far that it should be inaccessible. I’ll be interested to see which pieces ultimately wind up in stores.
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Posted: April 5th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: fashion | Tags: designers, fabric, fashion, fast fashion, h&m, mass market, popular culture, shopping
Fashion Star may prove me wrong yet. Love this dress!
Nikki's High End Maxi Dress - Episode 4 - Bought by H&M
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Posted: March 31st, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: fashion | Tags: fast fashion, popular culture
Ten killer movie wardrobes:
1. 13 Going on 30
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Posted: March 22nd, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: fashion | Tags: design, fabric, fashion, fast fashion, h&m, mary katrantzou, shopping, spring 2012, trends
If you can easily afford designer prices, hell, go for it. The clothes are generally exquisite. If you find a designer piece on an unbelievable sale, go for that too. But in terms of jumping onboard with spring’s fabulous designer trends, the fact is it’s really not necessary to shell out for the real thing. That is, after all, what fast fashion is about — the fact that trends are changing constantly, so the clothing may as well be disposable and be priced accordingly. Beyond that, however, H&M does an absolutely unbelievable job of reproducing the designer trends. At times, it can be hard to distinguish the H&M version from the real thing.
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Posted: March 21st, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: fashion | Tags: alberta ferretti, designer collaborations, fashion, fast fashion, Macy's, mass market, shopping, spring 2012
Bargain shoppers, get your wallets ready … the next designer collaboration will be on you before you know it. The lookbook for the Alberta Ferretti for Impulse collection at Macy’s has been released. The collection is by and large subtle and understated, but extremely pretty. I imagine wearing one of the dresses would make anyone feel a bit like she was a sophisticated woman on an island in the carribean. And presuming the quality is there to back up the design, the prices are fantastic. These are my four must have pieces from the collection (I am sure if it were at H&M, the first dress would blow out in the first five minutes. I’ll be interested to see how it goes as Macy’s, but if past experiences is any indicator, you can probably get on your computer at a sane hour and still nab one.):
Alberta Ferretti for Macy's Impulse dress $99
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Posted: March 15th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: fashion | Tags: designer collaborations, fashion, fast fashion, h&m, mass market, popular culture, shopping, trends
Seriously? A third fashion post in a row? I know, I’m a little annoyed with myself for it, but I finally feel ready to address the whole Fashion Star thing. And the fact of the matter is, it’s really not a fashion post, but a retail/pop-culture/popular-mentality post. Because Fashion Star is only tangentially a show about fashion. Critics can’t resist the temptation to compare it to Project Runway, and I am certainly guilty of that inclination myself, but the fact is, they are apples and oranges. Project Runway is about the art of fashion — the process, creativity in the face of constraints, talent, blah blah blah. Fashion Star is about retail. It’s about understanding what sells, about marketing, getting clothing to market quickly and selling through even more quickly.
So far (and admittedly it has only been one episode) Fashion Star is getting mixed reviews as entertainment. As reality television it is not likely to garner anything resembling the cult following of Project Runway. But it seems to be succeeding where it counts — maybe not for the network, but for the designers and above all the stores. Consensus is, the format plays like one long infomercial and leaves plenty to be desired. But bottom line, the show aired, the winning designs became available online and in stores, and the clothes sold like hotcakes. No, not in the blow out in 2 hours fashion that Versace for H&M sold. But still, the show aired Tuesday and by mid-day Wednesday H&M online had sold out of the winning dress. If you ask me, that’s pretty impressive. Karl Lagerfeld for Macy’s didn’t sell that quickly. The inevitable question is “Why?”.
Fashion Star Ep 1 Blue Dress Designed by Sarah (really, just look at the description, you can't get much more generic than that)
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Posted: March 14th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: fashion | Tags: designer collaborations, designers, fabric, fashion, fast fashion, haute couture, shopping, spring 2012, trends
Prints don’t have to be bold — this spring we also have prints for the faint of heart and for children. (For the style-obsessed — and others — today is above all the day to discuss last night’s premier of Fashion Star. I dutifully watched it, but I can’t begin to imagine what to say … speechless (dumbfounded more like) … so I’ll just leave it at that.)
As discussed yesterday, I think the strongest trend for spring is prints, but another – as epitomized by Louis Vuitton – is saccharine sweet, candy-colored pastels. Pastels are hard to pull off without seeming like too much, so lace dresses of pastel pink have taken on boxy shapes, unexpected sheerness, or accents of black accessories to balance things out. Not surprisingly, when everything gets thrown into the mix, a number of designers have produced pastel hued prints. If the D&G thing is feeling like a little much, these more subtly hued prints present a reasonable alternative.
Perhaps my favorite of these collections came from Erdem. Every dress is impossibly refined and lady-like, but something makes them irresistible none the less (since refined and lady-like are definitely not clear-cut positive terms in my book). Perhaps it is the black in the patterns which in the midst of blue and white flowers on silken fabric is somehow completely unexpected.
Erdem Spring 2012 collection via Style.com
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Posted: February 18th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: fashion, stuff to buy | Tags: British style, designer collaborations, designers, fast fashion, shopping, spring 2012, trends
This is going to sound like bitching. And it’s not meant to be – honestly – because it doesn’t really matter in the end. As addicted as I may be to shopping, I desperately need outside controls, so when something gets in the way of my throwing away money, it’s just as well. As seriously as I might take fashion, I know that the world doesn’t rise and fall over one pair of shoes. What aggravates the hell out of me is when large scale businesses can’t figure out how to operate in an organized manner. Certain issues just shouldn’t be that hard.
I have been looking forward to the new Aldo Rise shoe collections arriving at ASOS.com for some time now (see my January 24 post on Affordable Designer Capsule Collections). It has been available through Selfridges, but they don’t ship to the US. The Aldo Rise website states quite clearly that the shoes will be available on ASOS (which does ship to the United States) on February 15. They weren’t. The shoes appeared slowly but surely on the site throughout the course of the day on February 16. In the morning (US time, so later than that in London) four styles were showing up on the site. By afternoon there were more, but if you did a normal search for them, you were likely to find most of them. I found that if I googled “Aldo Rise ASOS Libertine” I could get to the page with the shoes I was looking for but could in no discernible way access from within the ASOS site. Finally, by Thursday night they were all there. As I say, no big deal, but why not just say that some of the shoes will start to be available on ASOS around February 15 — or something — or else actually have all of the shoes up on February 15? This plan has been in the works for some time. It’s not like the two companies couldn’t see it coming. Is it really that hard to get the information right? It cracked me up that as of last night, as February 15 drew to a close, every site affiliated with Aldo Rise still stated that the shoes would be available on ASOS.com February 15. There’s no one in the office there that checks on and corrects these things?
The other really big miss — and this is the one that’s getting in the way of my buying the shoes — is the pricing. The Aldo Rise website lists pricing for all of the shoes in both pounds and dollars — they are priced at either $175/£135 or $155/£125. When I initially saw the dollar pricing a month ago I was surprised, since it is below what has been the exchange rate. As of the 16th, £135 would be roughly $213 and £125 would be $197. But, ha, fooled ya, on ASOS.com the dollar pricing to order these shoes from the United States is $241.72 and $223.81 respectively. So my questions are a) why put the wrong price on the Aldo Rise website (is this going to be the price when the shoes arrive in Aldo stores on March? was it the price given the exchange rate at the time that someone typed up the web page? if either of the aforementioned, could they really not have been clearer about it?)? and b) why is the dollar price on ASOS.com notably higher than that dictated by the exchange rate? Is it to compensate for shipping costs since ASOS provides free shipping to the US? I understand why they would handle it that way, but it seems pretty slimy to me. The inconsistencies are of very little consequence, but why be sloppy?
I was so excited for the shoes in large part as consolation for the fact that I was sure I wasn’t going to succeed in getting the Mary Katrantzou pieces I wanted. And shoes are kind of a nice source of solace anyway when you find yourself in the midst of oh-my-god-it’s-february-and-I’m-still-overeating-from-the-holidays-will-I-ever-fit-into-anything-cute-again. The good news is that the trend for this spring seems to be in really fun and brightly colored shoes, so cute shoes are pretty easy to find. If you can’t afford to go designer, here are some fun alternatives. This is one instance in which I would say, get three really fun pairs of shoes rather than the designer ones — it will cost you less money anyway.
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