Emerging Fervour

We did a piece on Jeni Jaques and Harlow in Chains not too long ago; and we’ve gone one better and managed to get an interview with her. There are few designers who move me with their stories behind their reasons to become designers…Jeni Jaques from Harlow in Chains is one of the very few. Her anwers to my questions are filled with so much passion and love that she would even inspire Gordon Brown to become a jewellery designer. This lady is incredible…take a peek at our interview with her.

EF: Jeni, we absolutely love your style…what inspires you to create these big statement pieces?

Jeni Jaques: Thank you!! I’ve always loved art and creation in all forms: painting, illustration, sewing/fashion design & construction, writing, photography and in recent years constructing one-of-a-kind jewelry and accessories… I’ve also always had a love for older vintage and antique items and have been collecting those since I was a young child. I love the history, mystery and sense of wonder that each and every piece holds: ‘What kind of woman wore this brooch?’; ‘Was this locket a gift from a loved one?’; ‘Did it hold a special meaning?’; ‘What journey has this piece followed to end up in my hands, to use in part to create an entirely new piece?’ It’s mysterious and slightly haunting; I love that…

Emily Bosence studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design focused on recycled textiles.
Before she started her own label oops!, she worked for Red Mutha. oops! fashion recently celebrated its first birthday.

Your style reminds of the late 80ies Hip Hop fashion. I remember for instance, Salt n Pepa used to wear those hats with African prints on it. So, where does your inspiration come from?

oops fashion: A mixture of things, mainly vintage streetwear. Old hiphop videos, rave footage, video games, stupid 80s films with futuristic street punks and gangs, comic books… anything and everything!

You are using vintage fabrics for your capes and they are designed to be multifunctional.
So your clothing is both ecological and efficient. Coincidence or philosophy?

oops fashion: I specialised in recycled textiles and eco fashion so it’s really important to me to recycle as much as possible and to create high quality garments that people will not get bored of.
However, the design is most important and I do not use the fact that I recycle as a selling point as I also use a lot of new fabrics and 99% of people will always buy clothes purely based on what they look like.

We’ve met Beautiful Soul at the London Fashion Week and have been following her ever since.

Her eco-friendly approach is inspiring and we wanted to find out more about Beautiful Soul and how it all came about.

How did it all start?

Beautiful Soul: As a young girl, my dream was to be a fashion designer and I even remember writing to ‘Jim’ll Fix It’,  to make this possible!

Life has twists and turns and as a head strong at 16 year old, I just wanted to leave school and earn my own living. I ended up working in the Insurance Industry, and soon became wrapped up in the rat race.

I worked as an Insurance Broker for 11 years and the lifestyle it provided me seemed to outweigh my lack of passion for my work. I dressed in a suit daily and the most creative duty I had was producing PowerPoint presentations for my clients! …Crazy!

As Nathalie and I are strolling through the designers’ stands at 180 The Strand for London Fashion Week, we’re instantly drawn to the Kron by KronKron stand. The first thing I notice are the couple, Hugrún Árnadóttir and Magni Þorsteinsso, then we all clock the beautiful SHOES! We go up and ask if we can take shots of their collection for our fashion blog. I couldn’t get over how lovely they both were – so happy to pose for the camera and talk to us about the their label.

Here’s a few questions Hugrún and Magni answered for me post LFW…

How did you both meet and how did it all start?

We are couple who met on a blind date 9 years ago, started to live together on the 2nd day, opened our fist store, Kron 3 months later, and that then followed with opening our 2nd store, Kronkron and then last year we launched our shoe collection Kron by Kronkron.

You’ve been a very busy couple!

I met Amr, the cute designer behind BodyAmr, at Somerset House where he was exhibiting at LFW. I was so blown away with the vibrant colours and figure-hugging outfits. The display was especially eye-catching…I loved the contrasting simplicity of the concept against the luminous creations. LOVE LOVE LOVE.

Amr Ali is a London based designer who studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and Middlesex University, set up his own label in his final year at college and blew everyone away with all of his collections.

We’re in the middle of writing more pieces on the designers exhibiting at Somerset House and we will of course be giving you all a snapshot of designers that caught our eye. In the meantime, we received images for S/S 10 from BodyAmr so we thought we’d start off our one of many designer profiles from LFW with this label.

Here’s the S/S 2010 Collection we saw at Somerset House…

I was lucky enough to get a quick interview with Amr…

I know you all loved my piece on emerging talent Fflur Owen so it brings me huge delight to write more about this lovely designer…even better, she’s given me an interview…

Sara: Since what age did you feel the urge to design?

Fflur: I have always been interested in creating, ever since I was very young.
My father is a carpenter by trade, so I guess I was bought up in quite a crafty house. One of my first memories is working with my father in his shed making little wooden objects. Both my parents have always supported what I do. They have been my inspiration along the way.
I’m one of those people that have to have something to do all the time; I’m constantly fiddling with something or other. I enjoy the process of trying to create beautiful objects out of very plain or unimaginative materials.

Sara: Nice, your pieces look like a lot of love and thought went into them – where do you get your inspiration?

A few weeks back, I did a piece on some talented t-shirt designers I came across. One of them, Cole Blotcky has agreed to give me some much needed answers to a couple of questions I had for him.

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Sara: I’ve introduced you as some t-shirt designer – what else is behind the the pretty face?

Cole: Wish I could say I live some extravagant life. I really don’t though. I’m just a normal college drop out that spends his day drawing in his underwear until it’s socially acceptable to start drinking… and I usually start much before that. My whole life even since highschool has revolved around the t-shirt industry. My cousin hooked me up with a clothing line  based in Jacksonville, Florida when I was a freshman in highschool. It was my first design job and I was way in over my head. What kind of jerkoff hires a 15 year old kid to be responsible for designing his shirts? Regardless, I had about 5 or 6 really solid designs printed by them and it was  the most rewarding thing in the world to see your art on the backs of kids. Skip ahead like 5 years to me dropping out of college to be a full-time merch boy for a band called The Junior Varsity.