FASHION DESIGNING

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FIT Students Design Sustainable Wedding Gowns From Interlining

Chargeurs PCC and Fashion Institute of Technology are marrying technical innovation, a panel of industry veteran judges and sustainability in a wedding gown design challenge.

The interlinings company partnered with FIT for the Redefining Fashion Technologies Student Contest, where students are to design wedding gowns using at least 95 percent interlining materials, supplied by Chargeurs.

Fern Mallis, New York Fashion Week creator and FIT Foundation board member; Ken Downing, American Dream creative visionary and former Neiman Marcus fashion director; Madison Blank, Saks Fifth Avenue manager of designer ready-to-wear; Nancy Berger, Cosmopolitan publisher, and Angela Chan, managing director and president of Chargeurs PCC Fashion Technologies, will serve as judges for the competition.

“This competition is unique in that it showcases the integral role sustainable interlinings have in contributing to the shape, structure and beauty of garments. I’ve seen these students’ phenomenal works in progress, and we at Chargeurs — along with this distinguished panel of judges — couldn’t be more proud to support these designers in their educational journey,” Chan said.

The 150-year-old French company, which sells upwards of 300 million meters of interlining each year, is sponsoring the contest as part of its ongoing support for FIT’s next generation of talent but also to highlight its Sustainable 50 collection, which is a collection of 50 interlining products that launched in September.

Chargeurs is donating all of the materials for the contest, including product from its Sustainable 50 collection.

While this product line is their first complete collection of interlinings to be made with eco-responsible materials, including Better Cotton Initiative cotton, hemp and regenerated cellulosic fibers like Bemberg (the brand name of Cupro) by Asahi Kasei, the company actually introduced its Eco Interlining range in 2016. As early as 2012, development began on its sustainable interlining line alongside Kering.

Narrowing a pool of 20 competitors to a select few finalists, the judges will choose the contest winner on Wednesday.

For More Sustainability News, See:

No. 3: Sustainability Is a Given, Not a Goal, While Secondhand and Rental Boom

EXCLUSIVE: Moda Operandi Cofounder Áslaug Magnúsdóttir Returns to Fashion With Katla

FIT Students Make Strong Statements in 2019 Future of Fashion Show

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From a Beloved Fashion Designer, Fabrics for the Home

When the Nigerian-born fashion designer Duro Olowu found himself with time to spare between meetings one winter evening in London two years ago, he decided to take a walk down the Pimlico Road. Nestled between the residential districts of Chelsea and Belgravia, the charmingly old-fashioned street, lined with Victorian-era galleries and storefronts, is home to esteemed English interior design firms such as Colefax & Fowler, Rose Uniacke and Robert Kime. Along the way, Olowu, who splits his time between London and New York, was stopped in his tracks by an opulent window display at Soane Britain, the 23-year-old furniture, lighting and fabric maker that is particularly renowned for reviving disappearing artisanal techniques such as rattan.

“I was totally taken aback,” he says of the lavish living room scene, which featured matching linen curtains, wallpaper and the brand’s popular ’40s-style armless Tuileries sofa, all patterned with the lattice-like botanical swirls of Lotus Palmette, a Soane print inspired by a 16th-century Safavid silk velvet panel. “It spoke to me in the same way that a museum or a gallery display would. At the same time, everything just looked so warm and comfortable.” When Olowu shared a picture of the window on Instagram that night, his post caught the attention of Lulu Lytle, Soane’s co-founder and creative director. Lytle had been an admirer of Olowu’s own vividly colorful patterns since buying a suit from his first boutique in Notting Hill, right around the same time she helped to establish Soane in 1997. She wrote an impassioned message to Olowu in reply, and so began a creative relationship that will culminate, on March 2, with the debut of four printed and woven interior fabrics that unite Soane’s peerless craftsmanship with Olowu’s wide-ranging influences.

“We just talked and talked,” says Lytle of the pair’s meetings at both her home in Bayswater and Olowu’s store, a former gallery space in London’s St. James’s neighborhood with walls and furnishings covered in a colorful array of printed textiles, some designed by him and others — including the curtains from his sister’s childhood bedroom — collected on his frequent trips to Africa. Olowu’s clothes are similarly vibrant; his line, which he founded in 2004, consists of dresses and tailoring made from materials including vintage couture fabrics, French furniture upholstery and textiles of his own design. “We share very similar inspirations,” Lytle says of Olowu, “such as a love of Egypt, right down to a fascination with scarab beetles.”

Accordingly, the collaboration was founded on a shared obsession with antique textiles. Lytle, who as a teenager once blew her savings on a large piece of appliquéd ’20s-era Egyptian cloth she’d found at an antiques store, established Soane’s fabric division in 2011 and often finds inspiration in her extensive personal archive, which includes textiles ranging from 18th-century British shawls to Middle Eastern prayer mats, Moroccan weavings to Syrian silks. Olowu is similarly smitten. “I’ve always loved textiles,” he says. “If I ever have spare cloth from my collections, I’ll use it to cover a chair or a cushion — people go crazy over it. I’ve made pieces on commission for homes in Basel, New York and London.”

Drawing on motifs from Persian, Nigerian and Senegalese textiles, Olowu created a series of rough gouache sketches, layering them up, pattern on pattern. Lytle had given him carte blanche, and so the real challenge was whittling things down to just four designs. Eventually, they landed on Timbuktu and Koro, a pair of patterns whose geometric shapes were inspired by the jutting silhouettes of Malian mosques, as well as two finely engraved rotary prints: Regency Swirl, which evokes the curlicues of wrought-iron fencing, and Stencil Leaf, whose densely packed fronds pay homage to the sprawling topiary at the Arts and Crafts-style garden of Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire, England, close to where Lytle grew up.

“They’re strong but subtle,” says Lytle of the prints, which will be available at Soane Britain stores in 11 colors and can be custom made in even more hues. “The great litmus test for textiles is to think of how many interiors you could incorporate them into.” It’s an exercise that underlines the pair’s different creative domains: While Olowu pictures the Stencil Leaf print on a bathrobe, Lytle imagines it enveloping an entire room, from floor to ceiling. “It’s more a question,” she says, “of where I won’t use them.”

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What Does A Runway Stylist Do? Here's Why They're Fashion Week's Secret Weapon

Just backstage at Dion Lee’s Spring/Summer 2020 runway show, the designer is giving a final once-over to models as he sends them out toward the audience. By his side is a fashion stylist who specializes in runway dressing, his friend Melissa Levy, who also fiddles with the fits of his signature structural wears alongside the Australian designer. It’s the pivotal final moment following a months-long, highly collaborative process among designer, stylist, and an entire troupe of creatives intent on executing Lee’s vision including a casting agent, hair stylist, and makeup artist.

“Putting a show together is really about combining all of these separate creative collaborative relationships and bringing them together to form a harmonious message,” Lee said in a Facebook video his brand posted following the runway show. While it’s Lee who takes the bow following the show’s finale, like many other designers, he relies on the help of a stylist, whose job is pivotal in helping bring a collection to life — though it's often insulated from notoriety.

The impact a stylist has depends on a brand's size or saturation in the market. At Coach or Valentino, houses with million-dollar budgets for runway shows, it's typically not one stylist who's handling each component of a look, rather small teams who work together to execute a larger creative vision: "You have a couple people who do bags, a couple people who do shoes, a couple people who do jewelry, a couple who do knitwear, a couple people who do leather," Levy says, referring to those people whose job it is to pull and match specific accessories and determine fits. "Whereas [for a smaller brand,] we literally do everything ourselves, across the board.”

George Chinsee/WWD/Shutterstock

When Levy works with Lee, for example, she explains that styling can be as literal as recommending a specific button in multiple looks throughout a collection in a quest for cohesion. And that those details which characterize a runway show — deciding which shoes or bags highlight the silhouettes — happen a few weeks before the show date. The most minute details, like determining the order of the collection, come much later, usually only a few days before the show after the models are cast, if not day-of. Show day itself is chaotic, and Levy says she prefers not to do any fittings, focusing instead on the other bits of the “fragile ecosystem” that make up a fashion show.

Dion Lee Spring/Summer 2020. Photo: George Chinsee/WWD/ShutterstockEmilia Wickstead Spring/Summer 2020. Photo: Estrop/WireImage

While it sounds straightforward, creating runway ensembles is about more than adding matching accessories to a few dozen looks. Stylists are tasked with understanding both the essence of a collection and a brand’s identity and translating dozens of clothing items into a cohesive vision. Runway styling today has arguably become a broader design consulting gig for many that begins long before the day of show, one which encompasses everything from offering input into the fabrics chosen for a collection to who might be cast.

“I really try not to cross-pollinate [ideas],” Levy says of the work she does not only for Lee, but for other designers and brands including Emilia Wickstead, Coach, and Valentino. “I’m there to make sure people can recognize each collection as a Dion Lee or an Emilia Wickstead collection and that one [season] relates to the previous and to the next one."

Marc Jacobs Spring/Summer 2020. Photo: Peter White/FilmMagic

Many celebrity designers — doubly meaning those who dress celebrities and who also cultivate their own celebrity — often have a stylist-as-right-hand alongside them helping define the aesthetic that makes them recognizable. For Marc Jacobs’s signature kookiness, that’s Katie Grand; Demna Gvasalia keeps Lotta Volkova close for work on Balenciaga, while Jonathan Anderson collaborates with Benjamin Bruno.

But beyond these heavy hitters, a new class of stylists are helping catapult some of the fastest ascending brands today include Eric Mcneal, for his work captivating hundreds of people in King’s Theatre in Brooklyn for Pyer Moss last season; Clare Byrne, who helps make AREA the sparkly It-brand it is; and Solange Franklin, who refined the vision at Hellessy Fall 2019. Often, it’s not easy to identify publicly who a show’s stylist is — a credit that may be included in show notes but hardly found elsewhere, leaving the mystique of how a collection comes together in the hands of how a designer communicates that to press.

Pyer Moss Spring/Summer 2020. Photo: Sean Drakes/WireImage/Getty ImagesArea Spring/Summer 2020. Photo: Rodin Banica/WWD/Shutterstock

“To be a successful stylist, one of the most important things is to distinguish when a job is about you and your aesthetic and when it is not,” Adonis Kentros, who works with Christopher Kane, told Business of Fashion in 2019. “When you do editorial, it’s completely about your vision. But with other jobs, you need to put your ego and personal taste to the side to fulfill someone else’s vision.” In essence, styling for the runway means birthing a collection based on what the designer has in mind; Interpreting that collection comes later with an editorial shoot, during which a stylist may have more artistic license to play.

While stylists have been part of the runway machine for many years, their roles in the industry have evolved. The slow debasement of traditional fashion editorial means that while magazine covers and in-book editorials may have once featured a handful of brands on a yet-unknown model, many have become brand advertisements which mirror head-to-toe runway looks modeled by a celebrity ambassador. Given the shift, a runway stylist may also be the same person coordinating an editorial shoot, helping translate a brand’s vision smoothly from runway to page.

The result of shifts like these has helped transform stylists into full-fledged design consultants, those who offer input on everything from fabric choice to conceptualization. For the 2020 pre-fall collection, Emilia Wickstead wanted what Levy describes as a “stripped down” showing, a task which fell in part on Levy. “They think [Wickstead is] a West London high society girl, which she totally is, I mean she dresses Meghan [Markle] and Kate [Middleton] and all the princesses in London," Levy explains. "My challenge was to break that perception ... not remove it entirely because that is at the core of her brand, and that’s why her dresses are so beautiful. But it was about making it a bit more accessible for people to relate to.”