ELLE Fashion Journey – All about Denim Drift

Apart from countless colours in the world, there is always a need for a new one. International colour trends are changing as per the choices of people. Hundreds of colour based researches are conducted every year by different brands to cater the needs of their customers but there is always a call for one special colour for the completeness be it food, fashion or interior.
In order to announce colour of the year and highlight colour needs, the fashion world experienced the one very moment when Elle Fashion Journey 2016 provided a platform to the young and experienced designers to showcase their talent in Vietnam.
The journey was an achievement of Vietnamese fashion designers in collaboration with AkzoNobel. The theme of the collection revolves around Denim Drift which is chosen to be the colour of the year 2017.
The colour of “Denim Drift” is expected to see everywhere in 2017 (also known as Smoke Grey). Fitting into all life and interior styles, ‘Denim Drift’ is the perfect choice for reflecting people’s new perception for 2017 and is the mandatory colour for the year ahead. Denim Drift is a versatile grey-blue and is used perfectly capturing the mood of the moment and embodying our lives.
At the Elle Fashion Journey 2016, Designer Dieu Anh opened the show with her collection on the first night inspired by the Denim Drift. Dieu Anh is an old player in the Vietnamese Fashion industry. Her designs and cuts are unique and awe inspiring. The way she played with colours is a depiction of her talent and artistic qualities, and thus her brand is fairly picky to wear. Every creation of Designer Dieu Anh is breathtaking from the indigo textile, eco-friendly bamboo denim material to the timeless design.
The finale was closed with the spectacular collection of Designer Giao Linh on the newcomer in Vietnam fashion industry. Her off the rack designs are simple but stylish and luxurious. She has given a new vision to the Vietnamese upcoming Fashion trends through the depiction of the contemporary spirit of European fashion to the traditional pattern of the Orient in the collection.Read more at:formal dresses melbourne | formal dresses adelaide

Why Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress designer was fashion’s ‘best kept secret’

In 1953, when Ann Lowe received a commission to create a wedding gown for society swan Jacqueline Bouvier, she was thrilled. Lowe, an African-American designer who was a favorite of the society set, had been hired to dress the woman of the hour, the entire bridal party and Jackie’s mother. But 10 days before Jackie and Sen. John F. Kennedy were to say “I do,” a water pipe broke and flooded Lowe’s Madison Avenue studio, destroying 10 of the 15 frocks, including the bride’s elaborate dress, which had taken two months to make.
In between her tears, Lowe, then 55, ordered more ivory French taffeta and candy-pink silk faille, and corralled her seamstresses to work all day. Jackie’s dress, with its classic portrait neckline and bouffant skirt embellished with wax flowers, went on to become one of the most iconic wedding gowns in history, but, decades later, Lowe would die broke and unknown at age 82.
Now, the country’s first black high-fashion designer is finally getting her due. Three Lowe gowns are on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC. On Dec. 6, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan will display several Ann Lowe gowns in an exhibition on black fashion. And there are two children’s books about the designer in the pipeline.
“She was exceptional; her work really moves you,” says Smithsonian curator Elaine Nichols.
Lowe was born in Clayton, Ala., in 1898. Her grandmother was an enslaved dressmaker who stitched frocks for her white owners and opened her own business after the Civil War. Little Ann learned to sew from both her grandmother and her mother. Even at age 6 it was clear that she was quite talented.
“She would gather the scraps from her mother’s workroom and go to the garden and create these beautiful fabric flowers,” says Elizabeth Way, a curatorial assistant at the Museum at FIT, which has three Lowe dresses in its collection.
When she was 16, Lowe took over the family business after her mother died and left an unfinished order of gowns for the governor’s wife that needed to be finished. Around this time, Lowe also married an older man named Lee Cohen and gave birth to a son, Arthur, but the union was short-lived. About a year into the marriage, the wife of a Tampa business tycoon invited her to come to Florida and create dresses for her and her daughters. Lowe jumped at the opportunity.
“It was a chance to make all the lovely gowns I’d always dreamed of,” Lowe told the Saturday Evening Post in 1964. “I picked up my baby and got on that Tampa train.” Cohen, who disapproved of her ambition, sent her divorce papers.
Lowe, however, wanted to be more than a dressmaker. In 1917, at the age of 18, she took a sabbatical from her job in Tampa to enroll in a couture course in New York City. When she arrived, the head of the school was aghast that he had admitted a black woman, and he tried to turn her away. Her white classmates refused to sit in the same room as her, but she plugged away and graduated early.
Ten years later, Lowe moved to New York for good with $20,000 she had saved working in Florida and settled in Harlem with her son. She started taking jobs as an in-house seamstress at department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and for made-to-measure clothiers like Hattie Carnegie. It didn’t take long for word of this young, talented artist to spread.
Through the 1940s to the end of the ’60s, Lowe was known as society’s “best-kept secret,” designing outfits for famous socialites like the Rockefellers and du Ponts and Hollywood stars like Olivia de Havilland. When Christian Dior first beheld her handiwork, he exclaimed, with probably a bit of envy, “Who made this gown?”
“She had excellent technique,” says costume historian Margaret Powell, who is working on one of the kids’ books about Lowe. “Even the insides [of her dresses] are beautifully finished . . . Her clients realized that they could get the same quality as Dior at a much lower price.”
In 1950, two customers persuaded her to open her own salon, and her white business partners helped her snag a space on tony Madison Avenue. “It was difficult for a black woman at that time,” says Powell.
Unfortunately, Lowe’s business sense did not match her design acumen. She charged clients barely enough to break even, and her commission for the Kennedy wedding nearly bankrupted her.
“She bought more fabric, hired people overtime and just swallowed all the lost money [after the accident],” says author Deborah Blumenthal, who is writing another children’s book about Lowe.
Plus, Lowe was already unknowingly giving the family a bargain, charging just $500 for Jackie’s ensemble, compared with the $1,500 the dress likely would have cost from a competitor. She ended up incurring a loss of $2,200. “She never told Jackie or her family . . . It’s just heartbreaking,” Blumenthal says.
Worse, when Lowe took an overnight train to Newport, RI, to hand-deliver the dresses herself, the guards at the wedding venue told her she had to use the service door because of the color of her skin.
“She said, ‘If I have to use the backdoor, they’re not going to have the gowns!’ ” says Blumenthal. “They let her in.”
For a period of time in the 1950s, her son, Arthur, managed her books, and he helped rein in his mother’s lavish spending and keep the company afloat. But in 1958, he was killed in an auto accident, and she was frequently broke once again.
In 1962, Lowe was in a bad spot. She had closed her salon due to outstanding costs, taken a job as an in-house dressmaker at Saks, quit that, lost her eye to glaucoma — an operation she couldn’t afford and which the doctor provided gratis — and owed $12,800 in back taxes. But then she got a call from the IRS saying an “anonymous friend” had taken care of her costs. Lowe told both the Saturday Evening Post and Ebony that she believed it was Jackie, who Lowe had remained close with.
“[She] was so sweet,” Lowe told the Saturday Evening Post in 1964. “She would talk with me about anything.”
That generous gift allowed Lowe to reopen her business, and it was soon bustling. In a typical six-month period she and her three to five pattern-cutters and seamstresses would complete 35 debutante gowns and nine wedding dresses. But she was still bleeding money, and losing her eyesight, to boot. “I’ve had to work by feel,” she told the Saturday Evening Post. “But people tell me I’ve done better feeling than others do seeing.”
Around this time, Ann Bellah Copeland commissioned Lowe to create a dress for her wedding to Gerret van Sweringen Copeland, the son of Lammot du Pont Copeland.
“Her assistants hovered around her to be certain that she got it all right,” Copeland, now in her 70s, wrote in an e-mail to The Post. “No one made dresses as beautifully.”
Lowe retired in 1969, at age 71, and moved to Queens to be with her so-called “adopted daughter” Ruth Alexander — who had helped Lowe at her shop for years.
“She lived a very quiet, serious life. But everyone says that she was very sweet, very patient. Around her family she could be a funny person. And she was very determined,” says Powell. “She showed that an African-American could be a major fashion designer. She made it to that highest level. She’s an inspiration.”Read more at:formal dresses | bridesmaid dresses

Why the Queen was told not to marry Prince Philip

That’s according to biographer A.N. Wilson who told a crowd at the Cheltenham Literary Festival that the Queen was warned Philip was “the wrong person”.
“When she made it quite clear from the age of about 14 that she was in love with Prince Philip, who was a beautiful German Prince with blond hair, all the courtiers said he was entirely the wrong person to choose,” he said, according to The Telegraph.
“They said it for lots of reasons, but the fact is he was wrong. The Queen is very reserved, diligent person. He isn’t. He was a naval officer and he was also quite funny.”
The couple were married in 1947 when Elizabeth II was just 21 years old and she ascended to the throne five years later after the death of her father, King George VI.
The biographer described Prince Philip’s jokes as “extremely funny” and gave an example by revealing what he said to the Queen right after her coronation.
He allegedly said, “where did you get that hat?”
“The fact that he makes all these so-called gaffes, well I don’t think they are gaffes,” Wilson said.
“They are the kind of jokes a naval officer of a certain age might make. I think [they are] made rather wonderfully.”
Here are some classic lines that Prince Philip has uttered in the past:
In 1967 Prince Philip was asked if he’d like to visit the Soviet Union. He replied with, “I would like to go to Russia very much, although the bastards murdered half my family.”
In 1981 during the recession he said: “Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed”.
In 1986 he told some British exchange students living in China: “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
In 1999 he told a group of kids from the British Deaf Association who were standing next to a Caribbean steel band: “If you’re near that music it’s no wonder you’re deaf”.
In 2009 he told a young male fashion designer: “You didn’t design your beard too well, did you? You really must try better with your beard.”

When he met the President of Nigeria, who was dressed in traditional robes, Prince Philip said: “You look like you’re ready for bed.”Read more at:formal dresses