Ones To Watch
Designer: Siv Stoldal
Siv Stodal uses the relationship between clothes and the wearer as the basis for all of her designs. She graduated from Central St Martins in 1999, years before its more recent high calibre students such as Gareth Pugh and Christopher Kane. Her latest designs promote wearibility, physicality and have a sense of mute, industrial despair about them. Her hotly anticipated shows at last year’s London Fashion Week were well recieved and she features in i-D and Dazed and Confused on a regular basis.
Model: Masha Tyelna
As close as a human can possibly get to looking like the girl from Chris Cunningham’s Playstation advert, Ukrainian Masha Tyelna stands out from the current crop of Eastern European models. ‘Otherworldly’ is a much abused word in fashion vocabulary, but Masha’s eyes and pale features justify its usage here. Rival model Egle has been touted as the model to watch for 2008, but Tyelna is an interesting prospect. Last year she walked for McQueen and Nina Ricci, and is Miuccia Prada’s new muse.
Shop: Octopus
Located on York’s Coney Street, Octopus provides colourful variations on products found in places like Utility, marking it out as a lifestyle shop. Astroboy T-shirts, watering-can handbags, Dolly Brollies and Pop Art-esque bags, however make it seem like a Harajuku den.
Trend: Architecture Clothing
Perhaps not so much a trend for the season as a concept slowly becoming part of most high fashion. The idea of clothes as architecture originated in Japan with designers Yohji Yamamoto (currently known for the more subdued Y3 line with Adidas) and Junya Watanabe of Comme Des Garçons fame. They created clothes that draped in a way both elegant and without regard for the body’s natural contours. Vivienne Westwood and the Prada collections last year both reduced the top half of the figure to a rectangular box. Current darling of the fashion media Gareth Pugh further tested the concept with alien-looking outfits inspired by DNA and extraordinary geometric shapes.
