JUMA Inspiration | Source: JUMA

TORONTO, Canada — Following our piece on Vancouver’s Digital Olympics earlier this week, it only makes sense that the BoF Spotlight should focus on the Great White North for our monthly inspiration from emerging designers. This month I turned to long-time friends of BoF, Alia and Jamil Juma.

The designer brother-and-sister duo are based in Toronto, not Vancouver, though they have called both cities home. They are of South Asian ancestry via Africa, having grown up tied-at-the-hip all over the world, from Los Angeles to Kinshasa, and even Almaty, Kazakhstan. Indeed, the only time they have lived apart was in university, but still only 5 hours away from each other in Toronto and Montreal. That’s a mouthful of cities to have lived in for a couple of thirtysomethings.

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Priestess NYC in Beijing | Source: Priestess NYC

NEW YORK, United States — The growing importance of the Chinese market to the retail sector is well known – particularly amongst large multinational fashion companies. Few smaller labels, however, have made it their mission to penetrate the vast country. But for Cody Ross, the New York-based Texan behind five-seasons-old womenswear label Priestess NYC, establishing a local presence in China early on is a critical part of his strategy.

“If you look at the statistics in China, there are 360,000 millionaires there now and the luxury and semi-luxury market represents about $6.5 billion,” says Ross, who also happens to be a hedge fund manager. On shifting consumer behavior in China, Ross continues: “It used to be that only men spent a lot of money on fashion goods for their girlfriends. Now about 80 percent of women are spending disproportionately more in the luxury and semi-luxury brackets.” The enterprising designer, who lived in Shanghai for three years, clearly sees potential in the Chinese market.

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Hermione de Paula, Autumn/Winter 2009 | Source: HdeP

LONDON, United Kingdom — London Fashion Week has become a veritable laboratory for fashion print specialists who have made London a hotspot for new trends in print design. Many of these designers use fashion print to build an aesthetic signature and brand identity which then forms the basis for a full ready-to-wear collection. Eley Kishimoto and Jonathan Saunders were amongst the first print designers to use this approach, and since then, Erdem Moralioglu, Peter Pilotto and Mary Katrantzou have followed in their footsteps.

One of the newest London-based print hopes is Hermione de Paula, who showed off-schedule this past September at Vauxhall Fashion Scout, which provides essential early-stage support for emerging designers to stage fashion shows in order to further propel themselves onto London’s official schedule. VFS singled out Hermione as ‘One to Watch’ and we are equally excited about her promising future.

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Saloni Lodha at BoF's Inside the Studio launch, by Alistair Allan

NEW YORK, United States — If you opened up one of those celebrity magazines — like Grazia, People or US — or clicked on any fashion website around the time of the latest Harry Potter premiere in the summer, you will have seen Emma Watson’s photo beaming back at you, in a dress by the London-based Indian designer, Saloni Lodha.

Countless magazines featured Watson’s chic look in a bold red dress, and soon enough, Saloni’s phones were ringing off the hook. Boutiques and magazines around the world were interested to know more about this emerging talent. As it turns out, Lodha had no idea that Watson was going to wear her dress, which had been bought by Watson’s stylist and then magically appeared on a red carpet one day.

The rest, as they say, is history.

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MFP logo, courtesy of Maria Francesca Pepe

LONDON, United Kingdom — Fashion East, the London-based fashion incubator program, has become known by savvy fashion buyers and editors for serving up a cool crop of hot young design talent in London each season. And, beginning this year, The Business of Fashion is providing mentoring and support to these promising talents as they enter the fashion business for the first time.

Amongst the crop of designers that we met in our first Fashion East mentoring session was alumna Maria Francesca Pepe, whose jewellery and shapely designs have been garnering the attention of fashion-forward celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic, including Lady Gaga, Roisin Murphy, Agyness Deyn and Beth Ditto.

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LONDON, United Kingdom — After months of speculation and almost a year of going without a head designer, Halston announced in May that it had appointed Marios Schwab, the half-Austrian half-Greek Lond0n-based designer, as its new Creative Director.

Many in the industry breathed a sigh of relief. Amongst the various names that had been bandied around in the rumour mill, including Olivier Theyskens (apparently the strong choice of Anna Wintour), Schwab’s name was the one that seemed to create the most excitement amongst fashion insiders for his potential to develop commercially viable collections in the spirit of the brand’s DNA.

Making the final cut was no easy task. Amongst others, Schwab had to pass the muster of board members including Bonnie Takhar, Halston’s CEO, Harvey Weinstein, the notoriously demanding Hollywood heavyweight and investor in the Halston brand, and Tamara Mellon, Founder and President of Jimmy Choo. With a vested stake in the Halston brand, each of these big guns also knew that their decision would directly impact the bottom line at a critical time for the newly-relaunched label.

I caught up recently with Marios on a sunny day at London’s Shoreditch House to learn more about his decision to join Halston, his plans for balancing two labels, and his advice for young designers just starting out in the business of fashion.

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Behnaz Kanani

LONDON, United Kingdom — Behnaz Kanani is the name to know for buyers in search of a shoe designer with an age-old emphasis on craftsmanship paired with a modern eye. This month, our BoF logo showcases her aesthetic which mixes contrasting colours, exotic skins, and luxe leathers in immaculately-constructed shoes that are designed to catch a bit of attention.

After graduating from Cordwainers College in London in 1997, Kanani set her sights on Italy’s traditional shoe industry at Bruno Magli in Bologna to get the kind of old-world training that money can’t buy. With that technical foundation in place, she flexed her design muscle working with Sandra Choi, Creative Director at Jimmy Choo, just as the brand was starting to take off and reach uber-hot status. Then, in 2006, with brother and business partner Reza by her side, she launched her own label and has experienced promising success in the first few years of her business.

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Sophie Theallet

NEW YORK, United States — New York fashion is said to strike a balance between commerce and creativity. With few exceptions, New York designers tend to prioritise practical concerns like wearability over more frivolous concerns like the so-called wow factor. On the surface, this seems like a sound business strategy. But when designers focus too much on the practical and are obsessed with being on-trend or with what their peers are doing, everything ends up looking, well, kind of the same.

Sophie Theallet, the French-born American designer based in New York, does not have this problem. Theallet creates clothes with a distinctive mix of sophisticated wearability and refreshingly untrendy luxury. Unlike other designers who look for aesthetic inspiration from visual archetypes or vintage clothes, Theallet, who claims to not have a specific muse, designs with a more soulful, introspective process.

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Justin Giunta

NEW YORK, United States — For the month of June 2009, The Spotlight is on Justin Giunta, of Subversive Jewelry.

I first met Justin in the throes of a chaotic New York Fashion Week in February, after he was introduced to me by Mary Gehlhar, author of one of the must-read fashion books for any emerging designer, The Fashion Designer’s Survival Guide. Mary raved about Justin’s creativity and drive, and my late afternoon tea at the Mercer Hotel with Justin only confirmed this.

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The ever-morphing Barcelona dress, courtesy of Karolina Zmarlak

NEW YORK, United States — As global economic woes continue to wear on consumer spending, some fashion and luxury companies are teetering on the brink. Blue chip brands are halting expansion plans in order to focus on survival tactics, while smaller labels with limited resources are faced with the reality of sudden annihilation. It may not seem to be the ideal time to start a new label, but New York-based womenswear designer Karolina Zmarlak remains unfazed.

“All ventures in the business of fashion are daunting because it is an industry that is constantly moving, contradictory, and revenue-challenged,” she argues. “But it would be tragic to not face the demons and complexities by attempting to ‘wait it out.’” Rather than sitting on the sidelines, Zmarlak has jumped into the fashion game with an eponymous Autumn/Winter 2009 collection of directional and versatile clothes that bravely tackles womens’ shifting perception of real fashion value.

Faced with tight personal credit, consumers want more bang for their hard-to-part-with bucks. “We have taken this deeply to heart by enabling each piece to be worn in various, truly distinct ways,” notes Zmarlak’s business partner, Jesse Keyes, adding: “Just as the Parisian woman is famously able to style the same garment in a myriad of ways with accessories, our pieces can be accessorized within their own structure.”

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