Week in Review | Fashion Graduates, Great Gatsby, Miami Design District, Scott Malkin, Nigeria, Emotionally-Aware Computing, Tim Blanks

LONDON, United Kingdom — For me, the highlight of another week of rich BoF reporting and analysis from around the fashion world came from right here in London, where we spoke to six of the top graduates of Central Saint Martin's BA fashion programme, who, last week, presented their collections in the lobby of the famous fashion school's sprawling new campus in King's Cross. And seeing the smiling faces of a diverse group of future fashion design stars on the BoF homepage seems to have brought a smile to the faces of many of you, our readers, as well. Fellow CSM student and BoF editorial apprentice Lisa Wang met with each of them to learn a bit about their personal stories, collections and plans for the future. The beautiful portraits were taken by another junior member of our team, Shahriyar Ahmed. Thank you Lisa and Shahriyar for your great contributions this week.

But CSM is not the only British arts college to present the work of their top fashion graduates. Earlier in the week, I met up with BoF columnist Colin McDowell at Graduate Fashion Week in London, engaging in a question-and-answer session with designers and other fashion industry participants. Later, over dinner, Colin and I discussed his views on Baz Lurhmann's The Great Gatsby, which he elucidated in great detail in a typically fiery column which argues that the film reflects everything that is wrong with the fashion world today. The slew of comments and opinions that Colin's column provoked are definitely worth a read as well.

There was also plenty of retail intelligence from around the world this week. We explored Miami's burgeoning Design District, which has attracted many fashion and luxury brands away from Bal Harbor Shops, which according to the International Council of Shopping Centres (ICSC) is the most productive shopping mall in the world, with more than $2,500 in sales per square foot.

But across the pond in the United Kingdom, Scott Malkin, chairman of Value Retail, the parent of company of Bicester Village and eight other 'villages' dotted throughout Europe, had some impressive sales density metrics of his own to share when I met with him for my latest CEO Talk. Had Bicester Village been included in the ICSC rankings, it would have outpaced Bal Harbor by about thirty percent. So, what's the secret to the success of the shopping centre with the highest sales density anywhere in the world? You'll have to read the interview with Mr Malkin to find out.

Onto Lagos, Nigeria, for the first instalment of Market GPS, our newest series on BoF, exploring the emerging fashion and luxury markets beyond the BRICs we all know. We spoke to local experts to learn about the idiosyncrasies of the market and highlight the opportunities for fashion brands looking to enter this fast-growing country, home to more than 174 million people.

And just yesterday, we spoke to Rana el Kaliouby to learn what her groundbreaking work on emotionally-aware computing at MIT-spinoff Affectiva could mean for the fashion industry. Facial-expression and gesture recognition are amongst an array of fast-emerging technologies that are more direct, and therefore more accurate, than traditional, self-reported methods of measuring emotional response, like surveys and focus groups, Ms el Kaliouby says, with important implications for fashion companies, from product development to marketing, sales and service.

Finally, on the occasion of the Eugenia Sheppard honour awarded to him by the CFDA on Monday night, I wrote a long overdue open fan letter to Tim Blanks, who has inspired me with his work for Fashion File and Style.com for more than two decades. Gauging from the tweets and comments that flooded in, in response to the letter, I am not the only one who feels this way. We received messages of agreement from a far afield as Australia, Chile and Brazil. Congrats again Tim. Very well deserved!