Fashion trends in 2013

Whether we choose to consciously compute the fact or not, how we look does impact the way we feel. It may be that we dress to a theme that evokes a mood, that we choose to pull on something that incites a certain confidence within us, or that we – for no definable reason at all – simply fall in love with a particular piece of clothing or accessory. Either way, the reality is that a large part of how our style evolves each year has to do with the clothing, hair, beauty and accessory trends sweeping fashion, sweeping the runways or the magazine pages or the streets. Not because we have to follow them, but because they inspire us. Each year we analyse what’s happening in the fashion world as a way to understand where the trends are coming from, where they’re going, and – should you so choose – how you can adapt them to your own personal style, in a way that suits you.

So for 2013 what to expect? Read on after the break to discover the latest on the year’s fashions.

Zuoan Fashion Limited Receives '2012 Product Development Award' from China National Textile and Apparel Council

Zuoan Fashion Limited (ZA) ("Zuoan" or the "Company"), a leading design-driven fashion casual menswear company in China, today announced that it was one of fifty-six textile and apparel companies awarded the '2012 Product Development Award' from the China National Textile and Apparel Council ("CNTAC").
CNTAC is a national, nonprofit federation of textile-related industries that aims to provide the best service to the modernization of China's textile industry. The Product Development Award is given to the companies which have made significant product development contributions in China's textile and apparel industry in 2012.

James Hong, Founder, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, commented, "We are proud to be a recipient of the '2012 Product Development Award' and are grateful to the China National Textile and Apparel Council for recognizing our fashion casual menswear products and Zuoan's leading position in China's apparel market. We have a strong design team, comprised of both domestic and international fashion design talent, and have incorporated the latest technology to enhance our fabric design, accessories and apparel innovation. By accepting this award, we remain committed to developing high-quality, in-demand fashion products and will continue our efforts to contribute to the overall development of China's textile and apparel industry."

Classic fashion brand Burberry goes digital

Angela Ahrendts may be CEO of Burberry, but one of her favorite accessories is an Apple iPhone5 that she's used to oversee a mobile makeover at the 150-year-old company best known for trenchcoats and tartan plaids.

"This is the biggest flagship store in the world," Ahrendts says, holding up her iPhone during an interview in Chicago where Burberry just last month opened a new store. The Michigan Avenue site immerses customers in all things digital — from iPads for children to play with to video screens streaming Burberry fashion shows.

Burberry has long stuck to its English roots, giving its look from time to time modern tweaks, but it's been Ahrendts and chief creative officer Christopher Bailey in the past few years who have pushed the brand's digital, and now mobile, boundaries.

"It's very easy to allow an iconic brand to remain true to its heritage and at the same time obsolete itself," says Marshal Cohen, chief retail industry analyst with market research firm The NPD Group. "The hard thing to do is keep the iconic brand relevant. This is about somebody at the helm deciding they're going to find a way to keep the brand relevant for the future."

Burberry has done that by making moves that it says attract a millennial consumer. That includes monthly updates at Burberry.com, where Ahrendts said more people visit every week than walk into all the brand's stores around the world combined.

The company has an internal social network called Burberry chat. And since Ahrendts started in 2006 she started hiring a team of "digital natives" with titles like mobile director and music director. The brand also has a strategic innovation council.

While some efforts were underway when she took the helm, Ahrendts says Burberry was "a manual spreadsheet organization" at the time.

"We just kept evolving the structure," she says. "We always said if we were going to target a millennial consumer then we had to do it in their mother tongue, which is digital."

Cohen says iconic luxury fashion brands have the story to attract consumers, but the challenge is finding the right means of communicating it in the digital world. "They have to turn the store into a story and the story into a site," Cohen said.

The Burberry website offers 10 times more online than what the company has in stores "because we say that is 'the world's store,'" Ahrendts says.

Mobile commerce gives customers instant access to products they aspire to own. "To me, the key is that even the luxury brands have to learn, have to evolve," Cohen says. "Without evolution the luxury brands will be overtaken by more progressive, up and coming luxury brands. Luxury has to worry about keeping their brand alive."

Burberry is interacting directly with consumers in the digital sphere too, launching projects like artofthetrench.com. The website invites users to upload pictures of themselves wearing Burberry trenchcoats, which have been made by the label since World War I. The result is a collage from around the world.

Burberry.com also features Burberry Bespoke, which lets users customize their own trench, down to buttons and belts.

Ahrendts wants Burberry online and Burberry offline to be seamless for customers. But it's not without challenges in a digital world where fashion buyers can become overwhelmed with emails, tweets and others messages.

"How do we keep the brand so cool and so pure and so relevant so it cuts through that clutter?" she wonders — then answering her own question. "But by the same token how do we keep the marketing and the communication much more customized and personalized."

Fashion model drives success of hot restaurants

It's only when you analyse Australia's hottest restaurant, the Thai-inspired Chin Chin, as a retailer more in common with Spanish fast-fashion chain Zara than other chic eateries that colonise the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs, that you truly realise the global ambitions owner Chris Lucas has for his cool diner.

Lucas, who opened Melbourne's Chin Chin last year and its stablemate, Italian trattoria Baby, only two months ago, talks of business models not menu options, consumers not eaters, he ponders over social media rather than napkins and table settings, and speaks about retail products rather than food.

''I think the food game is a retailer, basically you come in here and buy a retail product - rather than wearing it you are consuming it.''

And it's a business philosophy that seems to be working. While a typical restaurant might turn over 200 to 300 customers a day, Chin Chin and Baby are racking up 800 diners from breakfast to dinner, and still turning away hundreds more each night. It's ''no bookings'' policy has people queueing for hours for a table.

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''This is not a gentle evolutionary change,'' says Lucas, ''this is a revolutionary change going on in the food business and there are a lot of restaurants that are sitting empty, literally empty, while we are doing on average 800 customers a day.''

Jetting off to New York and London last week, Lucas now wants to take his restaurant - or business - model to the world and is seeking fresh capital and partners to turn Chin Chin into the template of an international chain to rival upmarket Japanese franchise Nobu or global noodle bar Wagamama.

''There is a massive gap in the market for what we are doing,'' he says. ''The top end is catered for, the mass market at the bottom end is catered for. But it's that everyday quality experience at affordable prices that hasn't been catered for, a la retailers like Zara or GAP or Top Shop. I like to think of Chin Chin and Baby as the Zara of the food game.''

The link to Zara is apt. The Spanish fashion retailer, described by one industry executive as ''possibly the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world'', has built a cash cow empire on the concept of fast fashion. Imitating cutting edge designs straight from the catwalk, using good quality fabric but priced at affordable levels, has made the 1700-store Zara a billion-dollar fashion juggernaut.

Lucas has simply twisted and reshaped that model for food. He buys his produce from the same suppliers as his upmarket city competitors, but where they might charge $50 for a main course he is spinning dishes out from the kitchen at $15 to $25.

From his vantage point running two successful restaurants, Lucas sees the same destructive forces that are shaping and shocking the retail sector now turning their power on the restaurant game.

''What's been going on in the retail sector for the last five years is going on in the food business right now, and that is the consumer is dramatically changing their behaviour in a number of ways.

''Our object was to do what has happened to a certain extent in retail, that is go from a low volume/high margin model, to a high volume/low margin model. Most top end restaurants just aren't making enough money, hardly any margin, and for many their profit margins are around 5 per cent.

''We are probably tracking at two or three times the standard industry return, so 10 to 15 per cent [profit margins] and climbing. Our brands are so successful that our volumes are continuing to grow month on month.''

The change in restaurants is being driven by younger consumers, argues Lucas, empowered by iPhones and tablets, people working non-traditional hours and eating at non-traditional times.

''It's not like the old days where our mother and father would go out at 6 for dinner, eat, have one drink and be home by 8 - which is why probably nobody is watching free-to-air TV these days. We have become the new social hub, the kids instead of going to the grungy nightclubs are now coming to places like this, having a drink, some great food … and it's fun.''

He claims there are nights where he has turned away up to 1000 customers, although many plot a course for the bar beneath Chin Chin for a drink - another nice little earner for sure.

Social media has replaced word of mouth, and advertising is done via platforms such as Facebook and twitter. Its no surprise then that among his 250-strong staff of chefs, waiters and dishwashers, Lucas employs a social media officer.

The ''no bookings' tactic is another example of the loosening of traditional formalities and while it might have ruffled the feathers of some traditionalists, Lucas believes it is a luxury (as well as a nuisance) that the restaurant sector can no longer afford to support.

Sitting at his hip and humming Chin Chin restaurant - it's not even noon and already there is a queue of hungry city workers lining up for tables - Lucas says he has learnt from the shockwaves pulsing through retail and is copying those brands that are beginning to dominate the new reality.

''So our model basically follows the same sort of principal which is, I felt, that five or six years ago the restaurant business wasn't really delivering to the consumer what they wanted - which was value, a more relaxed fun, environment, less stiffness, less formality.

''It's about the way we conduct ourselves and the space we fit out, and the same is true for retail.

''So, no longer do customers want to walk through marbled Versace-style retail spaces that costs developers and retailers millions, they are happy to walk into a warehouse stripped back to its bones as long as it has got the product that they want - in other words, they actually don't give much of a damn anymore about the physical space.

''My view is that you embrace change or you get trodden over by the hordes that are driving the change.''

Fashion Eyewear Introduces New Featured Section to the Website

Fashion Eyewear's exclusive insight on geek glasses, transitions lenses and varifocal lenses.

From quirky glasses to varifocals lenses, the featured pages from Fashion Eyewear offers the latest news on speciality eyewear and trends.

GEEK GLASSES
The geek-chic look is a very popular and fashionable trend that is followed by many. From trendy celebrities to well-known fashionistas around the world geek glasses have become a style staple accessory people cannot be seen without. Glasses shouldn't just be an investment to eye health but should also be a fashion statement to one's personality and style.

TRANSITIONS LENSES
Photochromic lenses adjust according to the amount of UV exposure. For example, on a day where there is a lot of sunlight, photochromic lenses will automatically darken and vice versa. Transitions are the world's leading manufacturer for photochromic lenses. Transitions lenses can adapt to UV exposure in a matter of seconds. The only time the photochromic technology doesn't work is in cars because the windscreens have built-in UV protection and in houses or buildings.

VARIFOCAL LENSES
For those who need more than one pair of glasses for reading or watching TV, driving, or distance may want to invest in varifocal lenses. These lenses have several powers for near, far and in-between distance. There are four different types of varifocal lenses; basic, advanced, premium, and elite. The premium and elite lenses offer optimal visual clarity and the ultimate ease of adaptation which makes them the ideal choice for first-time users.

Fashion merry-go-round brings Paris new faces for 2013

Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga: three top Paris fashion houses kick off 2013 with a new designer at their helm.

What better way to whet the appetite of fashionistas and keep sales ticking over?

“There comes a point when a brand needs to renew itself,” said Serge Carreira, a luxury industry expert and professor at Sciences Po University.

Change can come about involuntarily — as in the case of John Galliano, sacked by Dior over a racist outburst in February 2011 and succeeded last spring by the Belgian minimalist Raf Simons.

Or it can be deliberate, as at Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, where Hedi Slimane and Alexander Wang were named to replace the outgoing designers Stefano Pilato and Nicolas Ghesquiere respectively.

“Taking on a new designer has become the new way for brands to whip up consumer appetite,” said luxury industry consultant Jean-Jacques Picart.

For the fashion world, this much change in one year spells the end of a cycle and the start of a new one, as seen in the early 2000s with the arrival of Slimane at Dior Homme, and Tom Ford at Saint Laurent, Picart said.

Ghesquiere spent 15 years at Balenciaga, as did Galliano at Dior, while Pilati was at YSL for 12 years in total, starting under Ford, said Pamela Golbin, curator at the Paris museum of decorative arts.

Long enough for the industry to change, and the job of designer too.

“The number of collections has gone from four to eight, 12 or more if you include capsule collections,” she said.

Brands increasingly look to designers to act as their public face, opening stores and attending galas.

‘Couturiers have to sell clothes’

Golbin captures the outlook in today’s fashion industry with a quote from the late French designer Madeleine Vionnet:

“‘Artists are here to make us dream — couturiers have to sell clothes, or they go out of business.’“

“Today it’s no longer enough to be able to design a dress,” Carreira said. “Having a strong identity and a distinctive product are the keys to success.”

At a time when luxury houses are looking to shore up their prospects for future growth, they need to strike a balancing act between creativity and business imperatives.

“And history tells us that it pays to be bold,” Carreira said. “If you ask talented creatives to produce standardised products, there is no reason it should work.”

Consumers have changed, too, in the past 15 years.

The industry is now addressing switched-on customers who are far from the fashion novices of the 1990s. Today’s clients go back and forth between big and niche brands and more or less expensive offerings.

This spring will bring what is widely awaited as Slimane’s first “real” shows for Yves Saint Laurent, after last October’s spring-summer collection by the cult designer seen as a homage to the house’s late founder.

Dior’s new designer Simons has already made a mark in Paris with two collections, one couture and one ready-to-wear, that reworked the house’s iconic nipped-waist silhouette with a clean-lined, contemporary twist.

And Wang, the darling of the New York fashion scene, will be taking his first steps at Balenciaga at the autumn-winter ready-to-wear shows this spring.

At 28, Wang is already a seasoned businessman, at the helm of an own-name fashion house that has been pushing into Asia, where the Taiwanese-American designer has his family roots.

His arrival at Balenciaga may or may not herald a more aggressive market strategy, but whatever direction the house takes, for Picart, Wang’s appointment “seals the arrival of a new generation” of designers at the high table of fashion — in the style capital of the world.

Fashion books: Their styles stack up

Books that examine the world of fashion can make for good reads. Here are some of the latest.—By Booth Moore and Adam Tschorn

Alexander McQueen: The Life and the Legacy

Harper Design, $35.

It's hard to think of someone better qualified to tackle her topic than Judith Watt. In addition to being a personal friend of the fashion designer — who took his own life in February 2010 — Watt happens to head the fashion history department at Central Saint Martins (where McQueen studied).

Wyatt traces the trajectory of McQueen's life primarily through his work, collection by collection, filling in the lesser-known parts of his creative CV that tend to get lost between the high-profile bullet points of things like his infamous "bumster" trousers or his Highland Rape collection. She touches on his early work on the Romeo Gigli spring/summer 1991 collection, for example, as well as his Central Saint Martins graduate collection (titled "Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims") and includes detailed photographs of same.

Extensively footnoted, the book does pull from a good deal of previously published magazine and newspaper articles, but it also serves up first-person observations and insight from those he worked for, studied under and collaborated with.

Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland

Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

Harper Collins, $35.

Legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who died in 1989, has been celebrated in a number of mediums this year — Lisa Immordino Vreeland's documentary "The Eye Has to Travel;" a museum exhibition in Venice, Italy; a Rodeo Drive Walk of Style Award in Beverly Hills and now Amanda Mackenzie Stuart's biography.

With cooperation from Vreeland's family and access to Diana's private diaries, Stuart creates a complete portrait of Vreeland, drawing particular attention to her lifelong "complex" about her ugly duckling looks, her self-invented persona and her efforts to bring "pizazz" (a word she coined) to American fashion. By working with designers to get around wartime restrictions on fabric and materials (putting models in ballet slippers and fabric espadrilles, for example), Vreeland helped define a vision of American style that endures to this day.

The King of Style: Dressing Michael Jackson

Michael Bush

Insight Editions, $45.

For more than 25 years, L.A.-based costume designers Michael Bush and the late Dennis Tompkins were the men behind the man in the mirror, designing tens of thousands of pieces of Michael Jackson's personal and tour wardrobes and helping to craft his image.

"The King of Style" is a glossy scrapbook of stories, sketches, patterns, still photos and performance shots that detail their collaboration with Jackson (including eight pages about that glove alone). The book reveals that everything was designed to enhance Jackson's performance or to create mystery and playfully tease fans.

Among the looks and styling tricks that are explained? The "Smooth Criminal" Lean shoes, which had a device inside that bolted to the floor to let Jackson lean forward 45 degrees; the "Billie Jean" pants, which had extra deep pockets, so Jackson could lift the material inside to raise his pant legs and draw attention to his dancing feet; and the infamous armbands, which had no meaning other than to make Jackson instantly recognizable, as if that were ever a concern.

Graffito Books, $24.95.

Even if you've never heard of "steampunk" — the retro-future mash-up that marries science fiction and the Victorian era (think Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" or H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine") — you're likely to be intrigued by what's depicted on the pages of "Steampunk Fashion."

Part source book for emerging and established designers dabbling in the oeuvre and part glossy, coffee-table art book, it showcases 21 people and brands and their wares. Among the featured items are underbust corset belts and bustle skirts for the ladies, swallowtail jackets and brass-filigreed top hats for the gents.


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Toms Shoes: A Venice shoe-in

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A trove of choices
It's hard to know why the author chose to end the book with a separate, one-page appendix listing designer contact details (instead of simply including the information with each entry). We're just going to guess it's a steampunkish thing to do.

Titanic Style: Dress and Fashion on the Voyage

Grace Evans

Skyhorse Publishing, $24.95.

The 2,223 passengers and crew of the ill-fated Titanic as insects trapped in amber? That's the kind-of conceit of "Titanic Style," with author Evans describing them as "a microcosm of post-Edwardian society," each dressed according to his or her station, from the uniforms of crew members to the elaborate hats, corsets and dresses of the genteel women who occupied the first class cabins.

The book is text-heavy and most of the photographs that appear depict what those aboard would wear, rather than what they did wear. There are a few notable exceptions, specifically the apron worn by one of the survivors — the maid and secretary to first-class passenger and fashion designer Lady Duff Gordon.