Cape Town Fashion Week

SA's got talent. I just wish the designers were as big a deal as the likes of Gucci and Stella McCartney. Maybe they should also have twitter accounts.

Here's a selection of my favourites.

Stefania Morland.

Wild Fig.

Kluk CGDT's take on female dandy. Just as good as Dolce and Gabbana.

Tart

Suzaan Heyns Collection

The Graduate Show. Designs from graduates selected by The Cape Town Fashion Council.

Pics courtesy of www.capetownfashionweek.com

The Male Skinny Jean

There isn't much I can say about the male skinny jean, other than the fact that it's reached it's expiry date. Once viewed at the must have item for any rocker, the likes of Zac Efron and Chace Crawford rebranded them to fit into mainstream culture. What started out as risky, became cool then moved to not so cool and now I've had enough.

This poor fashion victim looks very restricted by these incredible tight jeans. What part this looks crazysexycool?

New Gucci Stores

After Tom Ford left Gucci, I was rather anti-Gucci. The man rebuilt the brand, made them lots of money and who could forget that Charlize Theron dress she wore when she won the Oscar? He made Gucci sexy and in turn they fired him. But current creative director Frida Giannini has lived up to Tom Fords' standards and her new designs for Gucci concept stores are bad.

Clinton Wedding and Burberry?

As a Burberry fan, I've developed this peculiar ability to spot Christopher Bailey in any situation, kind of like "Where's Wally." The last place I expected to see Mr Bailey was at the Clinton wedding though. Dubbed the wedding of the year, Chelsea Clinton's wedding has caused a stir for the past 3 weeks with major topics like who's been invited or snubbed debated in the New York times, just last week. So who got snubbed, so that Christopher Bailey could get a seat? From when does creating the grooms suit guarantee you an invite? Same for Vera Wang?

Yes, a bit of me may be jealous that Chelsea got to enjoy the presence of Mr Bailey but another party of me is disappointed in him. Call me an idealist but I've always liked the idea of an illusive fashion designer. Someone who just appears to showcase their work at fashion week and then disappears into an impeccably decorated room until their next show. The old school designers- Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy and even to some extent John Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld. Their aloofness was intriguing, every collection was like a glimpse into their worlds.

I feel that designers of today have fallen in love the idea of celebrity and yes, some may be addressing this issue slowly, I wish I we could go back to the old days, when I knew nothing about my favourite fashion designers and any magazine interview featuring even one designer framed.

The F in FTV

Originally launched as Fashion TV, FTV would be the channel to tune into for the latest in fashion straight from Paris, you’d see interviews with Karl Lagerfeld, sneak peaks into Daria Werbowski life and occasionally see Elie Saab working in his studio. For animal lovers they had Animal Planet and for music lovers there was MTV and fashion lovers, we had FTV.

But fast forward to now and FTV has clearly lost its appeal. In an age where Burberry chose to have a live screening of their runway show over the Internet earlier this year and when you get to follow designers like Stella McCartney on twitter, who gives links to her latest collection immediately after her shows, where does a channel on television fit in?

What makes FTV different from the likes of MTV and Animal Planet is most obviously the consumer. Fashion can rightly be described as a fad and in accordance with fad behaviour- FTV was in today and out tomorrow. There are over a hundred websites on the internet that can give you all the information FTV used to exclusively offer. Vogue.uk and Style.com have become the go to places for all my fashion info and FTV has lost its appeal.

Too bad though, they offered an intimate glimpse into the world of fashion and instead of evolving with fashion, they chose the Ftv Bar as the new frontier.

@StellaMcCartney

@StellaMcCartney has become my favourite twitter account, let me rephrase, has become my favourite fashion related account. Not only does Stella McCartney, yes the real Stella McCartney- verified account and all, tell us not to eat meat on a Monday (a suggestion I ignore, but with the intention of one day attempting to try), she offers links to her latest collections and videos, the latest news about her brand and best of all a sneak peak into her latest advertising campaign for Winter 2010/2011. Not bad.

Now if I could only pluck up the courage to ask her to open a Stella McCartney store in South Africa.