Liu Wen x Vogue Thailand October 2013

Images: Pinterest.

The Skin Therapist Make Up Sessions Are Back!

Miss Euphony Kgadima AKA The Skin Therapist was kind enough to send me this invite! luckily its for everyone, check it out from Miss Kgadima herself!! check out her website here: skintherapist

Dearest Skin Lover, 

The Sessions are back and this time it is all about determining your skin type. Are you sure of the product line you are using? Do you know your skin type? Do you have skin problems that just won’t seem to go way? Are you looking to meet new people, or are you and your companion looking for a well spent afternoon? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you need to HURRY and get your ticket for round III of the Skin Care and Make-up Sessions delivered to you by Miss Euphony. Miss Euphony is a qualified and recognized somatologist, with a knowledge and passion for skin care. The testimonial’s she receives from her clients is testament to that! This Lady loves the skin and wants to teach YOU the ins and outs of skin care, introduce YOU to exciting and BRILLIANT products, and help you to understand the jargon that is used in the beauty industry to sell you products. 

What’s the cost? 

Single tickets cost R320.00, Couples tickets cost R600.00 and group packages cost R1000 (for four) there are only 30 tickets available! 

What do I get? 

You will have a presentation delivered to you on how to determine your skin type; products to buy, how to achieve that healthy glow and you will also get the opportunity to have your skin analyzed. A gift bag, succulent meal to down with two drinks is also included in this package. 

Where is this happening? 

Joburg; Rhapsody’s Bryanston Grosvenor Shopping Center, 19 May 2013, 12:00pm-16:00pm 

Pretoria; Rhapsody's Brooklyn Bridge, 26 May 2013, 12:00pm- 16:00pm 

What is the dress code? 

Dress in your smart casual attire. 

How do I get a ticket? 

You may book your ticket via email by emailing skintherapistsa@gmail.com . Upon booking a reference number and banking details will be sent to you. When payment is received, a ticket will be sent to you and your hard copy will be available on the day of the event. 

Both men and women are welcome! 

Yours in Skin Therapy 

Miss Euphony

twitter: @SkinTherapistSA

THE INTERLUDE X ANELISA MANGCU

Anelisa Mangcu, also known as "the creative", has kindly shared a rather inspiring video teaser with us called The Interlude. recognised folk in the fashion and creative industry such as Perfectly Tailored co-founder, Siyabong Ngwekazi, Urban Mosadi, Asanda Sizani and fashion blogger Aisha Baker give us an insight to the kind of person and creative Anelisa really is. I must say I am very inspired and cannot wait to see whats in store for her for the next phase of The Interlude. Anelisa is definitely a force to be reckoned with. check it out here:


 

for more information about Anelisa, check out her AMAZING website here: Anelisa Mangcu

Source: www.anelisamangcu.com

Africa's Next Top Model coming SOON!!

I am extremely excited to say that we are gonna have our own Top Model show thanks to Tyra Banks!! the show, Africa's Next Top Model will be hosted by Nigerian supermodel Oluchi Onweagba Orlandi and it turns out, she will also be coproducing it! Oluchi is internationally has graced the covers of Elle Magazine and Italian Vogue as well as being a Victoria's Secret Angel. 

Oluchi on coproducing - “I am excited to be hosting Africa’s Next Top Model and it is great to be part of the successful America’s Next Top Model franchise that Tyra Banks created and has hosted for an impressive 20 cycles thus far in the U.S. The African version of the franchise is long overdue and I expect the show to be a smashing success across the continent. My company, LuLu Productions, will be partnering with Never Machine productions with Gavin Wratten as co-executive producer and also one of the giant media houses to help make this show a big success.”

The show will be the same procedure as the other existing shows. it will have 12 contestants competing over the course of 8 weeks. nobody knows who the judges will be yet but we are definitely keeping our ears open for that!!

Miss Tyra Banks took to Twitter a few days ago to give us the incredible news:

So excited to welcome @oluchi to the “Next Top Model” fam! Welcome to @antmafrica! bit.ly/ZAMdlu
— Tyra Banks (@tyrabanks) April 26, 2013

The new show will air later this year and will be shot in Africa's fashion capitals, Cape town and Joburg on these following channels; Vuzu (Domestic), Vuzu (Africa), Mzansi Magic (Domestic), Mzansi Magic (Africa), AfricaMagic Entertainment (Africa), AfricaMagic Entertainment (Domestic), AfricaMagic Family (Domestic), AfricaMagic Family (Africa), AfricaMagic World (Africa) in addition to terrestrial rebroad.

for more information, visit the official website here Africa's Next Top Model

best looks from SAFW

 in case you missed South African Fashion Week Spring Summer Collections '13 this past weekend, here are some of my favourite looks:

 PALSE HOMME

 ROW G

TIAAN NAGEL

TWO

SAMANTHA CONSTABLE

all photos by Simon Deiner/SDR

The Circus of Fashion by Suzy Menkes

Suzy Menkes' most recent article on fashion bloggers has had some pretty nasty responses from the bloggers in the industry. Menkes goes to say that fashion weeks have focused less on the talents of the designers and more on the people who just seem to have an opinion about it, who dress in outrageous outfits, call it fashion and seek attention for it. read the article and tell me what you think, do bloggers really have a major influence on fashion? and are they really famous for just being famous?

THE CIRCUS OF FASHIONWe were once described as “black crows” — us fashion folk gathered outside an abandoned, crumbling downtown building in a uniform of Comme des Garçons or Yohji Yamamoto. “Whose funeral is it?” passers-by would whisper with a mix of hushed caring and ghoulish inquiry, as we lined up for the hip, underground presentations back in the 1990s.Today, the people outside fashion shows are more like peacocks than crows. They pose and preen, in their multipatterned dresses, spidery legs balanced on club-sandwich platform shoes, or in thigh-high boots under sculptured coats blooming with flat flowers.There is likely to be a public stir when a group of young Japanese women spot their idol on parade: the Italian clothes peg Anna Dello Russo. Tall, slim, with a toned and tanned body, the designer and fashion editor is a walking display for designer goods: The wider the belt, the shorter and puffier the skirt, the more outré the shoes, the better. The crowd around her tweets madly: Who is she wearing? Has she changed her outfit since the last show? When will she wear her own H&M collection? Who gave her those mile-high shoes?!The fuss around the shows now seems as important as what goes on inside the carefully guarded tents. It is as difficult to get in as it always was, when passionate fashion devotees used to appear stealthily from every corner hoping to sneak in to a Jean Paul Gaultier collection in the 1980s. But the difference is that now the action is outside the show, as a figure in a velvet shoulder cape and shorts struts his stuff, competing for attention with a woman in a big-sleeved blouse and supertight pants.You can hardly get up the steps at Lincoln Center, in New York, or walk along the Tuileries Garden path in Paris because of all the photographers snapping at the poseurs. Cameras point as wildly at their prey as those original paparazzi in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” But now subjects are ready and willing to be objects, not so much hunted down by the paparazzi as gagging for their attention.Ah, fame! Or, more accurately in the fashion world, the celebrity circus of people who are famous for being famous. They are known mainly by their Facebook pages, their blogs and the fact that the street photographer Scott Schuman has immortalized them on his Sartorialist Web site. This photographer of “real people” has spawned legions of imitators, just as the editors who dress for attention are now challenged by bloggers who dress for attention.Having lived through the era of punk and those underground clubs in London’s East End, where the individuality and imagination of the outfits were fascinating, I can’t help feeling how different things were when cool kids loved to dress up for one another — or maybe just for themselves.There is a genuine difference between the stylish and the showoffs — and that is the current dilemma. If fashion is for everyone, is it fashion? The answer goes far beyond the collections and relates to the speed of fast fashion. There is no longer a time gap between when a small segment of fashion-conscious people pick up a trend and when it is all over the sidewalks.Now that women and men (think of the über-stylish Filipino blogger Bryanboy, whose real name is Bryan Grey Yambao) are used to promote the brands that have been wily enough to align themselves with people power, even those with so-called street style have lost their individuality.Smartphones are so fabulous in so many ways that it seems daft to be nostalgic about the days when an image did not go round the world in a nanosecond. In the mid-1990s, when I stopped having to run from the shows to the film developing lab and first saw digital images, I blessed technology and was convinced that my working life was changing for the better. I had no inkling of the role that images would play, pitting fashion’s professionals — looking at shows for their own purposes of buying or reporting — against an online judge and jury. While fashion pros tend to have personal agendas related to their work, bloggers start a critical conversation that can spread virally.Many of these changes have been exhilarating. It is great to see the commentaries from smart bloggers — especially those in countries like China or Russia, where there was, in the past, little possibility of sharing fashion thoughts and dreams — although I am leery about the idea that anyone can be a critic, passing judgment after seeing a show (from the front only and in distorted color) on Style.com or NowFashion. But two things have worked to turn fashion shows into a zoo: the cattle market of showoff people waiting to be chosen or rejected by the photographers, and the way that smart brands, in an attempt to claw back control lost to multimedia, have come in on the act. Marc Jacobs was the first designer to sense the power of multimedia. When he named a bag after Bryanboy in 2008, he made the blogger’s name, and turned on an apparently unending shower of designer gifts, which are warmly welcomed at bryanboy.com.Many bloggers are — or were — perceptive and succinct in their comments. But with the aim now to receive trophy gifts and paid-for trips to the next round of shows, only the rarest of bloggers could be seen as a critic in its original meaning of a visual and cultural arbiter.Adhering to the time-honored journalistic rule that reporters don’t take gifts (read: bribes), I am stunned at the open way bloggers announce which designer has given them what. There is something ridiculous about the self-aggrandizement of some online arbiters who go against the mantra that I was taught in my earliest days as a fashion journalist: “It isn’t good because you like it; you like it because it’s good.” Slim chance of that idea catching on among the fashion bloggers. Whether it is the sharp Susie Bubble or the bright Tavi Gevinson, judging fashion has become all about me: Look at me wearing the dress! Look at these shoes I have found! Look at me loving this outfit in 15 different images!Fashion has to some extent become mob rule — or, at least, a survival of the most popular in a melee of crowdsourcing. The original “Project Runway,” a television show that chose participants with at least a basic knowledge of fashion, has been followed worldwide by “American Idol”-style initiatives, in which a public vote selects the fashion winner. Who needs to graduate from Central Saint Martins in London or New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology when a homemade outfit can go viral on YouTube with millions of hits?Playing King Canute and trying to hold back the wave of digital fashion stuff is doomed for failure. But something has been lost in a world where the survival of the gaudiest is a new kind of dress parade. Perhaps the perfect answer would be to let the public preening go on out front, while the show moves, stealthily, to a different and secret venue, with the audience just a group of dedicated pros — dressed head to toe in black, of course.Article by Suzy Menkes

FINALLY!! Topshop/Topman comes to CT

i'm sure Capetonians have been waiting FOREVER since the store first opened in Johannesburg last November. well you certainly don't have to wait any longer!

TOPSHOP/TOPMAN opens this Friday  18 April. the UK based store will launch at the V&A Waterfront shopping centre this Thursday and be open to the public from Friday. perfect timing to stock up on some winter wears this weekend isn't it?

So Capetonians, be prepared to whip out your credit cards because you wont be able to resist whats in store for you this week!!

Valerie Steele: First Ph.D in Fashion

"Once I knew I wanted to do fashion I just did it — even though I wasn't making any money at it and I think that if you do love fashion and you want to go into fashion, you have to be immensely self-directed and just do it. I think that's the main thing."

Valerie Steele (Ph.D., Yale University) is currently the Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (MFIT). She has curated more than 20 exhibitions in the past ten years, her most notable being; Gothic: Dark Glamour; Love & War: The Weaponized Woman; The Corset: Fashioning the Body; London Fashion; and Femme Fatale: Fashion in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. She is the Editor-in-chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, which she founded in 1997. Her books include anything from shoes to the intersection of Eastern and Western modes of dressing.

She was editor-in-chief of the three-volume Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion. Her latest book was Isabel Toledo: Fashion from the Inside Out, which she co-authored with Patricia Mears. This is incredible as she has literally, LITERALLY defined fashion and is widely known for the first Ph.D in fashion.

Steele says she was "completely unemployable" for years after she graduated and this is a major eye opener because the fashion industry is a 9 billion dollar industry. As much this industry is still growing, it’s sad that it has to be a struggle to showcase our talents or anything that we love, have a passion for.

The Washington Post described Dr. Steele as one of “fashion’s brainiest women.” as well as being listed in the New York Daily News “Fashion’s 50 Most Powerful.”

in an interview with Fashionologie, Steele stated that her upcoming exhibition for this year is called Queer Style: From the Closet to the Catwalk, which will focus on gay designers and their influence in the industry."I think that's kind of one of the most important and fascinating shows that I've ever worked on because it makes you look at the whole history of modern fashion from a new angle," Steele said. "Everybody knows that there's lots of gay people in fashion, and there have been lots of gay designers: Dior, Saint Laurent, Versace etc. But nobody's ever really thought consciously to put the gayness back into fashion history and say, 'Why are there so many gay people in fashion?' and 'Is there a gay aesthetic?' and 'What have been the influences of having so many gay people in fashion?'

Dr Steele is such an inspiration because regardless of her struggle of being unemployable for many years she still stuck by what she wanted to do. Fashion is what she loves and never chose another direction for money is this is why she is so recognised for her works today. She has made people realise that fashion is not just about clothes or the runway, there is a cultural history and certain aspects of fashion have become a revolution.

She has certainly lived by her key to being successful in the business of fashion: to keep at it.

PROJECT TONIK x NEO BAEPI

THE MOST amazing photographer and friend Neo Baepi took some portrait photos of me last night and they came out pretty well if i may say so myself. Neo Baepi is definitely a force to be reckoned with. currently studying photojournalism, Neo is a growing talent and wont be disappearing anytime soon. TRUST ME, she is definitely one to keep an eye out for. 

the concept behind Neo taking portraits is that she gets to capture real human expression, evoke feeling and get a real, authentic side to her muse. take a look at the photos below and tell me what you think:

:to see more of Neo's talent check out neobaepi.tumblr.com

bookings: neobaepi@hotmail.com

twitter: @neonohetero

London Fashion Week Roundup: STREET STYLE

Before we start our focus on Milan Fashion Week, here's some of my favourite looks from London Fashion Week:

images: VOGUE UK