Happy Holidays!
I just wanted to wish my readers and passerbys a Happy Holiday!
I am currently in Houston with my family for the next couple of weeks. Reporting on fashion here will be a little difficult considering that this city is the Disney World of chain stores.
Here’s one peculiar thing I noticed here: there is only ONE American Apparel store in Houston. In Montreal there is at least 4 American Apparel stores in the near downtown vicinity. But I can understand why this chain may not be very successful…Houston is considered one of the fattest cities in America. From my understanding, AA is a chain that caters to a certain demographic, and that seems to exclude the overweight.
My recent experience at Banana Republic had the store assistant literally dismantle a mannequin sporting this really nice slate gray cardigan because it was an XS - the only one left in the store.
BCBG is also carrying slightly tamer versions of their Hervé Léger bandage dresses oddly enough. Making real Hervé Léger dresses less special. Why would you want to pay $1000 on an Herve Leger dress when you can get something similar, owned by the SAME company, for a fraction of the price? A look at the online website doesn’t reveal this, you would have to shop at Dillard’s to see the knock off collection. Max Azria is shooting himself in the foot with this move.
Bakers, a Montreal equivalent to Aldo shoe stores, carried a trendy line of shoes, but made of the worst quality. The leather looked cheap and tattered on the edges and the soles stiffer than cardboard.
Speaking of Aldo, they’re also turning more and more like Nine West and Steve Madden by copying a pair of Michael Kors’ Berkley T-strap sandals, with their Tavira shoes. What’s funny is that the MK version is only $129, and the Aldo shoes are $90.00. Knock offs are getting more and more expensive!
More updates to come soon hopefully.
Enjoy your holidays!
Sent For Scent
Chandler Burr, where art thou when I need thee?
As you may know, although I am not a big fan of beauty in products in general, I did have my curiosity piqued when I was asked to stop by L’Artisan Parfumeur at the Ogilvy this week. Most notably this wasn’t just any perfume company asking me to give their atelier a whiff, this was a specialized company who focused on creating perfumes hors commun (out of the ordinary).
Though I knew nothing about perfumes, I was curious. I was given a slight glimpse of the complicated process in Dana Thomas’ “Deluxe”, but I was eager to learn more about this niche industry.
L’Artisan Parfumeur Since 1976
Over the last 30 years, the French company has created over 40 different perfumes, 31 of which I received a sample of (that’s a lot of perfume to inhale!). It’s to be noted that this company have signed a deal with two venerable luxury brands - Bottega Veneta and Burberry. They’ve developed 4 unique “home styled” scents for each company according to the seasons, more on that to follow.
I met with Ciara Tang, a representative of L’Artisan at the Olgivy, Canada’s sole boutique. She graciously gave me a tour of roughly 15 different scents and explained to me the vast world of perfumes. In half an hour, I was immersed, curious and surprised at the range of fragrances presented to me.
Party ‘Flavors’ A Little Too Graphic
I hate to be crude…but this is just a terrible picture.
It looks like they’re peeing. WSJ., you disappoint me again. And please…fire your photographer.
Image credit: WSJ. Magazine
Clear Finally Relaunches Its Website
After waiting 2 yrs and some odd months for Clear Magazine’s website to reconstruct, it’s finally back up. Originally, the magazine’s website was made entirely of Flash with flippable pages (way before Adobe CS3 came to town with their built-in flash flip pager program) and a somewhat arty layout. Now their new site is much more user-friendly with amazing photographs and preview pages of the current issue.
Perhaps the most eye-catching part of their site is their blog. Although it’s not quite elaborate on words, the pictures they post are quite simply flabbergastingly beautiful. Although it’s quite difficult to find a good source of the latest designers without the site being convoluted, Clear’s posts for underground (yet amazingly talented) fashion designers pull me in for a double take. The magazine does fixate upon luxury brands thus would only be fitting they’d pick the cream of the crop of unknowns.
Take for example Kisa, a Russian-brand with its eyes set to be the next Gucci, according to the International Herald Tribune. I don’t particularly care if they want to be the next Gucci, what I do care is if any online store carries (or will carry) their line. I love the subtlety of their details and the styles are certainly very wearable. The Russians are indeed coming.
The crux of the content can, of course, only be found in the print version, which I once again highly recommend in getting. A glimpse of their well thought out layouts are posted on the site’s front page and really, who doesn’t want to read about mechanical structures when you have an intriguing image like this:
Image credits: Catwalk.com, Clearmag.com
