“Browns,” says a prim businesswoman to Slovenian fashion designer Petja Zorec at the opening night of Between Sense and Sanity, a showcase of up-and-coming Slovenian design to Londoners at Europe House, around the corner from Westminster.

Zorec, a bright young woman dressed stylishly yet unpretentiously in a fitted bandage bodice of her own creation, looks confused.

The businesswoman is shocked. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what Browns is.” She leans in confidentially. “Your work needs to be in there,” she advises. “Absolutely. Find out who they are and contact them.”

It’s perhaps a testament to the quality of Zorec’s work that people who’ve never even heard of her think her pieces would fit in on the holy rails at uber-stylish London boutique Browns. Indeed, the reason she is here tonight is because she is one of 12 designers who were invited to participate in the exhibition as part of Young@Squat, a hand-picked collective of young designers from Slovenia.

Each asked to produce an outfit for the exhibition exploring the notion of ‘between sense and sanity’,  Zorec is displaying a hand-sewn puffer jacket made of translucent fabric. It is somewhat reminiscent of an oversized ski jacket bursting with sunshine: Zorec has used bundles of yellow wool threads as a filling in her interpretation of the theme. “Usually you can’t see the filling because usually it’s ugly or it’s not the right feathers or anything [but] here I just wanted to show it.

“[The piece is] about all the feelings you keep inside, all the bad moments that happen in your life, family matters or whatever, that at some point come out and that are visible, that are seen. So it’s actually about how it’s kept inside and at some point you reveal everything, because you cannot keep it inside. It’s very personal.”

On further grilling, the piece turns out to be very personal indeed: the wool comes from unspooled remnants from her grandparents’ old knitwear factory and the stiff black top underneath is made from a custom knit of her own design, woven – from scratch, no less – using her grandfather’s rusty machines.  “You know these big knits that are popular? I’m not interested in that,” she says. “I’m interested in those small knits that are very intricate [even though it looks like] there’s not a lot going on with them. So here you can see [the weave] goes from transparent to non-transparent, but the flow goes on and everything.

“So actually that’s my thing, to make something really creative and really fashionable with old machines.”

On the other side of the room, Nina Tomažin, studying a masters in fashion at the University of Ljubljana, has taken a more pragmatic approach to the theme and interpreted ‘between sense and sanity’ as a moment in time. To wit, the blouse and floral skirt she has made for this exhibition are made from upholstery fabrics. “The fact that you’re kind of wearing a couch, or a chair, it [comes] that idea from when you sit down and you stop for a moment,” she says.

Perfect, then, for photographer Peter Giodani, whose fashion photography - he shot each outfit in a series of dreamy photographs - stands out for its emotive lashings of saudade. “Sometimes I say I have a sad aesthetic? But it’s not really sad, it’s poetic, a little romantic, a little melancholy - but not too much, not depressing. You know these feelings. This project was made for this exhibition but otherwise I’m always in search of a poetic moment.” The moment between sense and sanity, perhaps.

Related links

Artistic genius: meet fine arts-trained designer Jasmin Shokrian in L.A

It was FEIT: handmade shoes in Australia (now available at Dover Street Market, woohoo!)

Topshop partners up with young designers

If life is all about trying to find a balance, Jesse Kamm might just possibly have the perfect life. She’s based in L.A, but spends a good part of the year in Panama (where she has an eco-friendly place in the postcard-perfect Bocas del Toro). Her place is in a part of the city that’s actually quiet and peaceful - rural, even - and yet only 10 minutes from downtown. In fact, her studio is part of her house, meaning she can split her day pretty comfortably between work and family, consisting of her young son and husband, environmental scientist Lucas Brower.

“It is a great balance,” she says, reflecting on her lifestyle in a thoughtful, sing song-y voice. She says she tried focusing on motherhood for a while - “I took the first year of [my son’s] life off and we moved to Austin, Texas and rented this cabin and had this very rootsy period of just learning about this little person,” but ultimately, “When [my son] was 11 months old, we came back to L.A, and we decided that for me to be happy meant me having my job and being a mom.”

It’s perhaps this balance that enables her to design the way she does. “I feel like fashion can be very… what’s the word, grueling or intense, and when things start to get to be too much, it’s nice to check out and go get your priorities set straight,” she says. To wit, her pieces are bold and yet thoughtful, emphasising design and creativity over trends. The soft, organic palette and dreamy prints mean there is an almost rootsy feel to her pieces - a little bit of nostalgia for her upbringing in Illinois perhaps, mixed with the brightness and modernity of the California girl she is today.

“Growing up in the midwest was very much like… I don’t know, like so many millions of miles away from this world I live in, mentally at least,” she says. Always crafty as a child, she fell into designing after being exposed to racks of beautiful clothes as a model. “[As a model] I always felt like I wanted to be helping pick out the clothes… and so it became clear to me that I really enjoyed that process. I don’t think I ever thought, ‘Hmm, I’m gonna be a fashion designer’. When I stopped modelling I started taking sewing classes and I started drawing and creating and it became very organic.”

Fast forward eight years since she started her eponymous label, billed as ‘luxury’ and ‘artisan’ on the website, and it seems the label’s growth has stayed organic, as she focuses on maintaining the aforementioned balance in life. “I feel like if the collection were bigger and I were to have greater distribution, I wouldn’t have time to do the things I would like to do with [my son]. And maybe when he’s older and he’s in real school, maybe there will be a desire to grow in a different way. But we’re happy here having a small collection.”

Related links

See the bold designs by Jasmin Shokrian

Read my interview with fellow L.A designer Clare Vivier

See Corinne Grassini of SOciety for Rational Dress’ ultimate California girl style

Sometimes I get a kick out of looking at old photos of models; it’s like looking at your husband’s high school photos with fewer braces involved (braces = awkward teenage years). Look at Gemma! She looks so fresh. 

Gemma Ward / Troyt Coburn for Vogue Australia November 2004

Related links

Australian models take over the runway: on vogue.com.au

Meet Aussie model Melissa ‘MJ’ Johannsen

See Australian model Nicole Pollard’s damn cool shorts

Fashion is best, it seems, served with a side of music - or so goes the philosophy behind fresh menswear label Smith-Wykes. The brainchild of Michaell Smith and former Lacoste and Carven designer Rory Wykes, the label focuses on understated casual menswear while promoting music videos of up-and-coming bands, encouraging a conversation between the two, both of which are part of a “a bigger universe,” says Wykes.

So how do the fashion and the music sides work? I find it interesting that you’re trying to go through both these creative projects but under the same name, like it’s not like ‘Smith-Wykes fashion’, or ‘Smith-Wykes music’. It’s still under the same name, even though they’re still sort of separate.

Rory Wykes: Yeah. I mean it’s not a huge melding of creative projects, more of a parallel. I think fashion and music has a strange relationship and I think if you force it too much, it doesn’t really always work so well. [Music for Smith-Wykes] is a kind of add-on to style and a bigger universe and a bigger conversation… so the music is very much about bringing people into this universe and starting those types of conversations that then also inspire our collections.

Is that how you view fashion as well, as part of a greater creative lifestyle?

I do to a certain degree. In terms of how we’re trying to merge the two worlds, it’s very much how I see people interacting with fashion around me, and enjoying that, and sort of playing with that.

Just kind of going a little bit backwards, you said that obviously you guys are influenced by the music as you design. Can you expand on that? You said that it transports you somewhere, it’s a little bit nostalgic; how would you bring that into the designs?

Well for the spring/summer [2013] collection, it started off with, we were listening to just a little bit of new “new wave” that was coming through to Paris, so that got us listening to the old new wave, and then we were really liking the sound, it was really reminding us of the eighties and I started listening to a bit of early Police and a bit of Berlin-era Bowie. And it’s just like I said, it’s a conversation, and watching videos from that time, like Depeche Mode, I just sort of got a feeling of the simplicity of it all. It was very black and very stark. So it started with this kind of idea, where I would bring in [to the designs] black and white to begin with and any sort of black and white patterns. And then it got me thinking to colours from when I was a teenager, pinks and turquoises and blues, that brilliant kind of eighties colours, and I went and tried to find eighties pink and work it into a lapel or work into a shirt.

But it’s often also these conversations that Michaell and I will have, that may mean nothing to anyone else but somehow, out of it comes, you know, ideas.

And the menswear itself, it’s very elegant sportswear. Is that your niche?

It’s my area. I’ve always liked elegant, and interesting, and quirky and practical. And I do love the nuances, the technical or the interesting. Menswear, I think, is full of nuance as well as subtleties. So basically a small collar versus a big collar. Or the shade of blue in your Oxford shirt or the quality of your cotton. There’s a whole gamage of smaller details that men look to as opposed to just making sweeping statements of silhouette or colour.

Men like technical things, you know they get excited about the denim, where it’s from, how heavy is it like, you know what kind of indigo is it, what kind of weave is it. Womenswear is fascinating and exciting because it kind of goes off on little tangents but menswear is very much a smaller universe and men speak within a sort of confined area of quality and technical, nuanced detail. When a trend comes, it’s a centimetre off a pant hem or it’s not major, but it’s important.

/ Smith-Wykes spring/summer 2013

Related links

Meet Nick Wakeman of menswear-inspired womenswear label Studio Nicholson

How to get dressed for a music festival, on vogue.com.au

Interview with Kiwi singer Bic Runga for Vogue

Vogue’s ‘Storm Troupers: Celebrating Hurricane Sandy’s First Responders’: some say it’s a degrading comparison between high fashion with those saving the rest of humankind from natural disasters. “Is the models’ presence supposed to suggest that Oscar de la Renta’s spring collection is equally heroic?” Time magazine asks, while the Huffington Posts ridicules the spread for “a photo shoot intended to celebrate Sandy’s heroes [that] ends up paying tribute to the same pouty models — and high-fashion ideals — that does every other issue of Vogue.”

Uh, yeah. Because Vogue is a fashion magazine, and has never pretended to be anything else. Clothes (and advertisers) first, setting second. Indeed, the magazine should be commended for thinking outside the box and working with the heroes of Hurricane Sandy. No, pretty girls in expensive clothes is not as heroic, or anywhere even in the same league, as providing food, water and medical assistance in the wake of a natural disaster. But that’s not what this is about; it’s about New York: its vanity and its frippery, but also its people - good, hard-working folks, many of whom it would not be the city it is today. 

Related links

See the quirky, beautiful designs of New York-based jewellery designer Vera Balyura 

City girl dressing by 3.1 Phillip Lim

Fashion photographer Elle Muliarchyk shoots different facets of the New York woman

Pieces to transport one to the surrounds of Byron. No wonder I’m feeling homesick. Looking forward to a magical Christmas here in England filled with lights & hot roasted chestnuts, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss the sun… 

1. (clockwise from top left) Bassike t-shirt, $144, bassike.com; Zimmermann bikini, $195, zimmermannwear.com; Petite Grand silk bracelet, $130; Petite Grand beaded bar bracelet, $180, both petitegrand.com; Witchery short, $69.95, witchery.com.au; Country Road sandals, $69.95, countryroad.com.au; Rachael Ruddick backpack, £308, rachaelruddick.com.

2. Tigerlily hat, $69.95, tigerlilyswimwear.com.au; ELKE sunglasses, $279, elkekramer.com; sass & bide jumper, £190, sassandbide.com; apartamento magazine; Witchery short, $99.95, witchery.com.au; Lonely Hearts bra, NZ$65, lonelyheartslabel.com.

3. Country Road t-shirt, $69.95, countryroad.com.au; ELKE ring, $100; ELKE necklace, $240, both elkekramer.com; Anna & Boy bikini, £145, annaandboy.com; Witchery ballet, $99.95, witchery.com.au; T.R Ensemble short, $325, thereserawsthorne.com. 

/ Rachel Carey X Oyster

Belated Day of the Dead-inspired fashion. There’s no point in being punctual anyway; no one’s there to appreciate it. 

Corinne Grassini of Society for Rational Dress reworks California style with architectural inspirations and a rich sewing heritage.

It’s a rare rainy day in L.A and the Society for Rational Dress studio provides a welcome reprieve from the wind and rain outside. A visually interesting one too: an industrial space with concrete floors, the overcast light streaming through the wide, expansive windows dances around the showroom/lobby, creating a chiaroscuro effect amongst the clothes and the sparse burnished leather furnishings. The space is at once sturdy, strong and sheltering; yet open, light and comfortable.

These are themes that could also be used to describe Society for Rational Dress itself. Started in 2007 by Corinne Grassini, the label produces California luxury James Perse-style basics with an intellectual, architecturally-inspired twist. Sculptural, industrial details such as thick leather straps and weighty antique brass chains are worked in with viscose t-shirts, knit sweaters and silk dresses, offering the same plane of comfort as track pants (or if you really want, tracky-daks) but with much more visual interest and style.

Like many of her SoCal cohorts, Grassini aims for stylish simplicity. Unlike many, however, she draws inspiration from both the ethos of architecture - “I always say that an architect builds a space to be comfortable in and feel comfortable in, and that’s kind of how I approach clothing too” - to the shapes and patterns found in the built landscape - her spring/summer 2012 collection took inspiration from the brickwork found in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in L.A.

Despite this leaning towards architecture and an initial foray into humanities at the University of Washington, her current career is no surprise, least of all to her family. A tradition of sewing and craft comes through both sides and on the Society for Rational Dress website are photo-and-questionnaire profiles of women who inspire Grassini and her team; one features her grandmother, Marie Grassini.

“When [Marie] moved here with my grandpa from New York, my grandpa said, ‘You can’t bring everything, you can bring a quarter of it all, that’s all you can bring, we’re moving our entire lives across,’” recounts Grassini. “And so she hid everything, in like her shoes and in the couch and in the trunks and everywhere she could find to hide these notions and these fabrics and stuff and then they got here and she was like, ‘Surprise!’ She had her entire collection.” Returning to grad school to study pattern-making at the famed Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, Marie was the first person Grassini turned to. “When I started design school, I went over to her place and sort of looked through all her fabrics and she gave me a bunch of buttons and you know, stuff that she had collected. So yeah, [sewing] definitely runs in the family. [Also] my mom’s a big sewer, an incredible quilter, and she knits.”

Knitwear is another specialty of sorts of Grassini’s; on display in the showroom are a selection of hand-woven pieces from Peru. “Each little bobble is made in Peru,” says Grassini, who was initially reluctant to expand manufacturing overseas but fell in love with what she saw as the country’s connection to its textile heritage. “[In Peru] you can see where the manufacturing economy was built. There’s people sitting on the side of the road making rugs and blankets and little dolls and stuff, and then you go to the factories and they’re using the same stitch techniques. There’s a connection to the history of knitwear there, which I really like. And you can see that in the pieces I think.”

Grassini’s appreciation of production comes from that pattern-making background, knowledge of which both hinders and helps the label, she says. “There’s certain times where it’s good for me to know patternmaking and then certain times where I wish I could just forget it because I’ll design something, I’ll draw something, and then I’ll think, there’s no way, like nobody’s going to be able to figure out how to make a pattern out of this. And I try to visualise the pattern, and if I can’t figure it out I just cross it out.

“Designers who don’t know the technical side, they can come up with the craziest stuff they can imagine which isn’t always the most cost-effective way to design or, but it’s a really fun way to design. So it works for me and against me; it’s a different thing every day.”

Not that her technical expertise seems to have hindered her creativity; she has collaborated with New York’s Museum of Art and Design twice, creating one-off pieces for their Paper Ball and Metal Ball galas. The David Letellier-inspired finial (re: architectural ornament) flower base she created for the latter has since been reimagined as a small vase currently available on her website, as part of a home furnishings line introduced in 2011. These limited edition pieces allow Grassini to focus in the design process, she says, and indeed the Serra chair’s sturdy base and suspended leather seat with antique brass metal details and a sculptural semi-circle cut out appears to epitomise the elegant sculptural aesthetic and industrial finishes of Grassini’s main collection.

Given how often she returns to architecture and interiors as inspiration and now as a designer, is there a chance that perhaps Grassini really did enter the wrong industry? She considers it carefully. She would have liked to be an architect, she says.

“[But when I consider] all the pre-planning that goes into architecture, and not being able to tear it down and put it back up…  I like the design process of clothing because we can tear it down and build it back up and create a sample.

“[So] I think that if I take that into consideration, the way that I design, I would have liked to be an architect,” she says, “…. if I had the patience for it.”

Related links

See inside fellow L.A designer Clare Vivier’s Silverlake studio

Shop local Californian design in L.A

Meet Garance Doré and learn how to live colourfully

US Vogue, September 2012 issue. That’s one heavy mutha that could potentially hurt someone. Who needs a gun when you’re got this baby?

Related links

Read about Vogue New Zealand’s decade of existence

My story on classic black-and-white elegance at Paris Fashion Week, as published on Vogue.com.au

My report on Vogue.com.au on the classic Chanel bag, Australian-style

Garance Doré loves sport, and since she’s only arrived in London a day ago, it’s definitely not because of the city’s Olympics fever. “I’m very sporty,” she says in her charming French accent. “I love sports and I like snowboarding and like mountain biking and like hiking and all this kind of stuff. Maybe that’s not something you would expect from somebody in fashion…”

It’s not, but it’s precisely this sort of unpretentious, un-fashion-y behaviour that has the ragtrade industry falling in love with her, and that Kate Spade New York have tapped into. For their autumn/winter 2012 collection, the US label’s girly-polished dresses, skirts and patent-leather beauty cases have been tagged with the fashion illustrator, photographer and blogger extraordinaire’s vivacious drawings, handwriting and of course, her impish sense of humour. After all, meeting Doré is like running into your best friend from when you were 12 who has turned out to be impeccably stylish and successful, but, thank goodness, still has that same sense of mischief, making for a potently wicked good time. Case in point: she whips out her iPhone to show her favourite piece in the collection, a case covered by her own tongue-in-cheek illustration of a chintzy cocktail party. Mostly, this is her favourite because she really, really loves her iPhone. “Once you have one, you can’t go back, it’s so addictive, like a toy!” she says, suddenly noticing my woefully scratched Blackberry-wannabe Nokia. “What is that?” I don’t know, I say woefully and we both laugh.  

Indeed, nothing could sum up Doré more appropriately than the collection’s sartorially oxymoronic ‘slouchy-chic’ sweater featuring the words ‘joie de vivre’ scrawled in her elegant lettering. Her love of fashion is enthusiastically infectious - “[Fashion is] part of the things that make life more… fun, more light, more easy; it’s one of the pleasures that we have in the morning, like food,” - and despite being inspired by the graphic grandeur of the Cour d’Honneur at Paris’ Palais Royal for the collection, she turns the notion of the haughty parisienne completely on its heels with her endearingly unpolished manner.

Indeed, unlike some of her countrymen, she openly professes a love for those on this side of the channel - “People have a really great sense of humour [in London], and they are not too serious about too themselves, which I really really love.” She would like to stay longer, but must head back to New York - she has work to do, she says. Does the unofficially crowned Miss Globetrotter have any travel tips or better yet, any travel rituals she would like to share then? “I, um, what do I do?” She pauses to think. “I buy a ton of magazines. Uh…any magazine! There’s a moment when I will buy any magazine, even the one that you don’t wanna show in your apartment, because I’m a magazine freak.

“The gossip ones, Oprah magazine, all the stuff! Like everything. So I’m very happy you know…” she says, then with that oh-so-charmingly guileless laugh adds, “and then I leave it all on the plane.”

Kate Spade New York stores are located at Covent Garden, 104 Langley Court, London WC2 and Sloane Square, 2 Symons Street, London SW3 2TJ; www.katespade.com

p.s. When asked if she had one last thing to add, she wanted to say, “Scott, I miss you!” Sweet, no? 

Related links

See Garance Doré in the front row at Milan Fashion Week (on vogue.com.au)

Live colourfully indeed, with this paint-splattered umbrella

Garance Doré does a make-up tute and meets Emmanuelle Alt

The perfect t-shirt should be like wearing your favourite blanket: soft, comfortable and completely enveloping yet revealing at the same time. Those who have such a t-shirt will know what I mean. Thank you Cos.

Related links

White suede shoes by Feit

Nick Wakeman, of British label Studio Nicholson, gives menswear classics a sense of femininity and Italian quirk in her London studio.

Nick Wakeman has a soft spot for Italy. Not only does she makes several trips there a year, she cannot give enough praise to their fabric industry, and reveals she has a thing for Italian males - or their style, at least.

“[Italian men] are just so incredibly, impeccably well dressed,” she says. “I think the young guys are are a little flashy, but then you can go up to guys who are like 60 and 70 in the street, and [they have this sense of] sprezzatura, which means kind of like, quirkiness in how they put an outfit together. It’s like, okay I’ve got a shirt on, but I’ll roll one sleeve up and I’ll keep the other one down. Or… I won’t wear a shirt under my jacket, I’ll just wear a little scarf.

“It’s a quirk, do you know what I mean, and I think that’s really interesting.”

Indeed, she holds Italian male fashion in such high regard she considers it the main inspiration for her label Studio Nicholson, itself based on the British menswear canon (Oxford button downs, relaxed chinos, etc…) but ultimately infused with this sense of sprezzatura.

This ability to imbue clothes with personality is part of what the Nottingham-born, now London-based designer does. Her first label before Studio Nicholson, Birdy, was a streetwear label targeted towards a younger audience (Wakeman started the label in her mid-twenties), full of prints and vibrancy, and finished with a “f*ck off attitude, do you know what I mean?” she says. She says sorry straight away, almost sheepishly, but the apology is almost unnecessary; the cussing hardly registers, tempered as it is by her very proper British accent.

Much like Wakeman herself, Studio Nicholson melds strength, feistiness, class and gentle femininity all into one. Add to this Wakeman’s passion for textiles - she studied it at the Chelsea College of Art and is a self-confessed aficionado; “my biggest love in the world is fabric. It’s what gets me really excited,” she says - and the results are deft explorations of form, line and silhouette through cloth, even as she seeks to re-work those chinos she spent years creating as a former Marks & Spencer menswear designer (she never said she admired the Italians for their relaxed lifestyle). Her latest fixation is viscose, with the material’s soft fluidity providing a counterbalance to her pieces’ masculinity.  

Eee, rainbow! / via Harper’s Bazaar