Global Economy Ousts Luxury Goods Executives

Spring cleaning in boardrooms and ateliers are ongoing for European Luxury-goods makers.New Presidents, Chief Executive Officers, Chief Financial Officers and Creative Directors started at European companies, including Mulberry Group, and PPR, in the first quarter alone.

“Companie sare reorganizing for the next growth cycle,” said Giovanna Brambilla, a partner at Value Search in Milan. “If they’re not convinced of having the best leaders, they’re changing generals.”

Luxury companies are looking for new talent and ideas as they compete with a slowing economy in China and a cut in high-end spending by Europeans.

LVMH Moet Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, the world’s major luxury-goods maker, selected Sebastian Suhl, credited with motivating competitor Prada Group’s expansion in the Asia Pacific region, as CEO of Givenchy fashion and leather goods brand.

A good number of appointments come from within the same company. Mulberry, the Somerset, England-based maker of Cookie Lily leather handbags,poached Bruno Guillon from Hermes to be CEO, while Louis Vuitton shuffled at least four executives, including Michael Burke from Fendi  to head up Bulgari.

Industry experience hasn’t proved necessary. Gucci, hired Jean-Marc Duplaix as Chief Financial Officer in January. Louis Vuitton raided Danone,for the future CEO of its Vuitton fashion and accessories brand: Jordi Constans tied in September and will succeed present CEO, Yves Carcelle in 2013.

“Theonly criterion that guided us was of course to find the best possible manager for the job,” Louis Vuitton Chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault said on February.

No radical step is on the prospect when it comes to designing the clothes and accessories.The world of creative directors “is often a bit of a club,” said Brambilla.

Jil Sander’s artistic director position for Christian Dior Couture was replaced by Raf Simons, by the fashion label’s namesake founder in February.

Major brands aren’t ready to take risks with unproven designers given the finances concerned and the impact collections have on a brand’s image, said Patricia Lindo,managing director of London-based recruiter Style Incorporated.

“They’re too big a beast to bring in someone fresh and young unless they’ve worked with the creative before and grown up through the ranks,” she said, citing Sarah Burton, creative director at Alexander McQueen, as an instance of in-house talent that has been advanced to the top of the fashion line. “It’s such a risk to bring in someone who hasn’t had that track record.”

references:businessweek.com,bloomberg.com

Zippers

Zippers are more than an embellishment. Their tale begins throughout the past century and up to the present becoming an ornament and a sartorial element to clothing.

Zip fasteners come out the first time in 1851 on jeans, but by the end of the century, there is the concern for a patent “separable fastener”. Only during 1913 was the zipper fashioned and used primarily for galoshes. It frequently rusted and got stuck. For a relative amount of time, before being used by immensely popular couturiers like Elsa Schiaparelli, zippers didn’t have an easy life. They were considered maladroit and too industrial.

Within 1934 Tadao Yoshida, instituted the Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha, or, YKK, engraveing them on zippers for years that have been used all around the world. It’s the brand of the bulk of zippers that are around us, from clothing to leather goods, from footwear to furniture. And since 1936, thanks to YKK’s mass production, zippers are part of our lives forever.

It’s not possible to survive without them and, above all, to think of a life devoid of that heartening up and down. There is technology but also sensuality into that swift hand motion we do whilst opening a zipper an onomatopoeic sound. From aged sleeping bags to the high-tech warfare-proof suits, from the pencil case we used to have in school, to suitcases, or boots.

Sticky Fingers Album Art 

via:29-25.com 

And then there are those unforgettable illustrations – or in other words,icons: James Bond’s wet suit, Marlon Brando’s motor bike jacket, Gilda’s “scandalous” dress, the chic jumpsuit worn by Roger Federer at Wimbledon in 2009. But also the clever introductions in the clothing designed by Fashion Houses like Dior, Givenchy, and Versace. In 1973, Esquire identifies the zipper as “A brilliant tailoring design that has among its numerous advantages the one of avoiding the possibility of the unintentional and embarrassing disarray in menswear”.

In that year an ad for children’s clothing with zippers was published: in this way they can dress by themselves. It was in 1971 when another small record was broken: the Rolling Stones placed a zipper that works on the cover of their Sticky Fingers album created by Andy Warhol. 

Monotone Defiance

Nothing will be mono-tone again: colors blend together and create prints inspired by Nature and graphic patterns that take clues from pop culture.

Fashion into Tennis?

imagevia: tennisgrandstand.com

Cross fluxes between fashion and sport: comfy materials and new colors that break the wall of conventional style and rules to fashion. But the elegance of beauty remains.

Fashion into tennis or tennis injected to fashion? The two worlds have always been very well linked, and have been equally influencing each other. You just need to imagine René Lacoste, the French tennis player of the 20s who invented the fabric called jersey petit piqué, which still at the present time feature the polo shirt with the crocodile. The fabric was lighter and more transpiring, compared to the cotton that had been used to that day, and the short sleeves and the comfortable collar aimed at making the tennis players’ movements easier. The Lacoste polo shirts were initially invented to play tennis, but later became reference pieces of clothing also for other sports, such as golf, and maybe one of most famous and worldwide recognizable clothing elements.

An element that influenced the sport and tennis wear is undoubtedly the evolution of fabrics. The new materials helped the athlete to have a superior and more body heat loss, and this goes in favor of the sport performance. On the other side, these materials allow some chromatic effects that were unimaginable with the natural fibers, and this is entirely in favor of the show. In this techno logic context, some world sport giant companies entered, such as Adidas and Nike, which hold the cartel of the best athletes’ sponsorships: Nadal and Federer, to name just a few. 

A further step to unite the connection between fashion and tennis would be the creation of clothing lines by the big designers. Something that has been started by Adidas and Stella McCartney, with the collaboration of tennis champion C. Wozniacki.

Sex: Androgynous

Antonella Arismendi

Name… Age… Height… Sex: Androgynous. Fashion, with its pioneering sense of the future and tendency towards subversion, has created a new redefinition. The imagination of fashion designers is no longer constrained by the need to design clothes strictly "for him" or "for her". They can indulge themselves and work with androgynous bodies that have the characteristics of both sexes.

Designers are now including mannish-looking girls and emaciated, decidedly girlish gentlemen in their armoury. We’ve got used by now to girls with angular chins, thin mouths and heavy eyes – but let’s start with a forerunner of this twin beauty, Kristen McMenamy.

She was born in the USA in 1964 and posed endless times for the cameras of many of the greatest photographers. Her first campaign, in 1984, was for Jil Sander and Gerard Darel and she appeared in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaarup until 2011, when she featured in i-D – she was “fixed” on the cover by Josh Olins, her face foregrounded in a play of light and shade.

But it’s only now it seems that we’ve had perfectly balanced androgyny. These slender reeds suggest what the male sex will be in the future, with facial features that are increasingly less the product of testosterone.

Andrej Pejic and Martin Cohn

This is an unconventional form of feminine beauty, one that has reached its high point with two famous young men in female-oriented outfits. These are the brown-haired (now peroxided) Martin Cohn and the blond Andrej Pejic. Cohn makes cross-dressing easy. He said that at first he was constantly annoyed by being taken for a girl, but then he learned how to laugh about it.

Between laughs, he’s appeared in V Magazine four times since 2009. He featured in Vogue Paris in 2010 and in the same year posed for Gianfranco Ferré s/s. Now he’s a party boy doing the round of the clubs, nonchalantly keeping his balance in a pair of high heels. Andrej Pejic though has been a sensation: from whatever angle you look at him, he looks like a girl.

Acclaimed by everyone as the next big thing, the only thing that seems male about the Bosnia-born Australian is his first name. With his platinum hair, small blue eyes and square jaw, the model – who’s just turned 20 – signed only last year with Storm Models, immediately attracting everyone’s attention, with endless newspapers featuring him whenever they could.