Key trends for spring/summer

Leather jacket, playsuit and ruffles
Leather jacket: £10, Snooper's Paradise
Topshop ruffle playsuit: £10, Oxfam

Underwear as outerwear
Body-con nightdress: £3, H&M

Candy pastels
See by Chloe yellow dress: £5, TK Maxx

Floral print
C&A dress: £9, Oxfam

Nautical
Scarf: £1.99, Oxfam

Biker boots
Studded boots: £35, Dorothy Perkins

Metallics
Trainers: £5, Topshop

Ahead of the curve

Following Mark Fast's bold decision to use size 12-14 models at September's London Fashion Week, and the overwhelming positive response Glamour magazine received when it pictured a woman looking comfortable with her belly roll last year, this month's V magazine champions the fuller figure.


The Size Issue features fashion's top plus-size models in various states of undress - love-handles, back fat and all. But while the focus on healthy-looking women is encouraging, and the models glowingly gorgeous, I can't help but feel that they could have been more flatteringly styled.

The problem lies in the fact that, while the fashion industry may gradually be welcoming curvier models into its midst, the top fashion houses still aren't designing for them. Clothes that are made for skinny girls don't look great on anyone over a size 10.


As a girl with curves myself, I wouldn't wear a cut-out swimsuit, body-con cut-out dress or crop-top. Not because I think I'm fat, but because these styles just don't suit my shape.

So as much as I love these photos - I'm clamouring to get my hands on the print issue - for showing the beauty in healthy, curvy women, I'd love them more if the models were dressed in clothes that compliment their figures - you only need to look at 1950s style for a guide on how to get it right.

Let's hope that, in the future, we see women like this in our magazines on a regular basis, and that's it's not under a gimmicky heading telling us that "it's okay to be curvy" - we know that, thanks, now just let us get on with it in style.

Image credit: Models.com and V Magazine.

What's new copy-cat?

British fashion designer Luella Bartley’s eponymous label may have lost financial backing at the end of last year, but it seems that its spring/summer designs will see the light of day after all, be it via fast-fashion dresses.

Boohoo.com’s recently launched spring/summer collection features a number of pieces boasting a heart cut-out similar to Luella’s distinctive design and an almost identical Eighties-inspired polka-dot bandeau dress.



Of course this isn’t the first time that fast-fashion retailers have blurred the line between taking inspiration from and copying the work of top fashion houses, and it won’t be the last.

Just weeks ago Lindsay Lohan was accused of copying a Jen Kao Fall ’09 dress for her 6126 fashion line after sketches of her designs seemed to show striking similarities between the two. In 2007 French fashion house Chloe forced Topshop to destroy over 1,000 yellow dungarees, claiming that it was a copy, and in the same year the Diane von Furstenburg (DVF) Studio filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against U.S. retailer Forever 21 for allegedly plagiarising two of its spring/summer dress designs.

While Luella may not be producing the dress designs it showcased at London Fashion Week for the upcoming season, Bartley may still be able to sue for breach of copyright, giving that, we are assuming, she hasn’t licensed or assigned copyright to others. In which case, could the online retailer be seen to be gaining financially at the expense of copyright holder Luella?

And where would Bartley stand if she re-launched her brand, with the help of a new financial backer, and wanted to roll out the designs? Would there be damage by association? Would her original designs lose desirability due to the fact that thousands already owned similar pieces?

Of course, the two labels are catering for very different markets, one offers top-end designer and the other high street fast-fashion, and it remains to be seen if such imitation will much bother former fashion journalist Bartley, who is due to publish a book with the working title ‘Luella’s Guide to English Style’ in September.


Imitation - the highest form of flattery?

They do say that imitation if the highest form of flattery, but it isn’t always seen as such in the fashion industry. Indeed, fashion houses used to physically hide their designs from competition. A Business of Fashion article on the subject quotes a 1950s’ press officer for Christian Dior as saying that “all precautions must have been taken to ensure that no member of the profession would be attending” their fashion shows.

But, as the article rightly highlights, thanks to the rise of fast fashion and the volume of fashion bloggers, the industry has never been as transparent as it is today.

According to the author, Competition and Intellectual Property lawyer Hanne Melin, the law dictates that Intellectual Property Rights mustn’t “unreasonably restrict the ability of others to develop new ideas and produce new works”.

But as ‘implied license’ can be used as a defense against copyright, with a defendant stating that the copyright owner knew what they were doing and for a significant period of time did not act to prevent it, the impetus must lie with the fashion houses to actively defend their copyright.

This is exactly what Diane von Furstenburg did by establishing a three-year strategy to address counterfeiting and intellectual property issues, during which Forever 21 was just one of the companies hit with a lawsuit.

Such cases will surely have acted as a warning to others not to even think about ‘sampling’ the DVF’s designs, and if other labels want to be seen as similarly untouchable, they must fiercely defend what is theirs.

Letter love

Top of my 'things to buy on payday' list, these beauties from Rock 'n Rose are just £7 a pop and there's a purple letter J with my name on it...
The larger letter necklaces are even more of a bargain at £4 in the sale! Sadly there are no Js left but an F would make a nice (very-)early wedding present to celebrate my new surname. Happy days :-)

The Guardian Fashion Store - discuss...

The Guardian launched an online fashion store in October 2009, here I write about the possible benefits of such a venture for publishers, advertisers and web users.

Oh hand me down...a 1960s shift dress

The wardrobes of older generations of the family can be veritable treasure troves for vintage-lovers. I have a very pretty dropped-waist butterfly print dress, bought from Topshop by my mum in the late Seventies, and her leg-warmer collection was fully raided a few years ago when Eighties style first started to come back around. But as my mother shops frequently, she has had regular clear-outs throughout the years - many of which before I was turned on to the joys of vintage fashion. So that well is now pretty much dry when it comes to original gems.

My fiance's older relatives seem to have hung on to special items, however, and as a Christmas gift his mother passed down a gorgeous sixties' croquet-work, diamante-detail shift dress. It needed a touch of TLC, but miraculously all the diamantes are still in place, and after I took the hem up and gave it a good wash, and my friend did something clever with croquet-repairing tools, it was ready to wear. With the sort of timeless and sophisticated style which makes it perfect for any event, it's my new favourite LBD.

Thank you for not smoking

New Year’s Day marked the one year anniversary of my giving up smoking. In the early days I didn’t think I’d make it this far – I’d smoked since I was a teenager, and I was good at it. I also enjoyed it – especially when the act was partnered with a few drinks. My aunt’s therapist recently told her that cigarettes and alcohol were essentially married – and in my experience the divorce has not been altogether amicable.

Of course the smoking ban has been a god-send when it comes to beating temptation – when the small minority of my friends who do still smoke pop out of the pub or bar for a sly cig, I don’t envy them the shivering or the social outcast status. But the summer proved to be tough – beer gardens, sun and smoking go together well. And house parties have nearly seen my downfall. Unfortunately for me, the group of friends who hold the most in-house gatherings are also the crowd in which a hefty number still puff away gleefully – whether they prefer to stay in so they can smoke freely, I don’t know, but I sure as hell have envied them those delicious alcohol-infused inhalations.

Annoyingly, the better half plays the mature ‘you’ll only disappoint yourself’ card. I’d much prefer it if he’d respond to my ‘would one really hurt’ drunken witterings by telling me that I simply am not allowed to smoke – that he forbids it. How well this direct form of control would go down in my drunken reality, I can only hazard a guess. But he’s right, of course. If I did allow myself ‘just one’, I’d only wake up the next morning feeling terribly let down – that all those months of abstaining had been for nothing. And once you pop that social-smoking cherry, it becomes instantly harder to resist the next temptation. There’s nothing worse than the person at the party or in the pub who ‘doesn’t smoke but would actually really enjoy one with this drink, even though they know it’s naughty’. In other words, they have given up buying their own fags, but would love to smoke yours.

But out of a drinking environment, I’m absolutely fine without the fags. Don’t miss them one bit. The first obvious benefits of stopping smoking were instantly rewarding – my fingernails grew rapidly, my hair and skin began to look brighter, and I no longer smelt. And the long-term benefits are just as sweet. Not only have I dramatically reduced my risk of heart and lung disease, I’ve also managed to save around £500 in the past year – money that would usually have been puffed away that is now going to help pay for my honeymoon. One of the main pieces of advice I’d offer to those trying to keep their new year’s resolution is to set up a standing order for the amount you’d usually spend on cigs in a month to go into a savings account, so you can actually see the worth of your continued determination.

Oh, and don’t fanny about with nicotine-replacement inhalers - they’ll just keep the stuff in your system for longer. In my past experience it was a steep slippery slope back to the real things. You might have had your fill of it over the last few weeks, but I found that cold turkey really was the best approach.

IMAGE by Flickr user psyberartist