Scarves by Mungo Gurney | Source: The Creative Archives

FLORENCE, Italy — In the shadow of luxury giants like Gucci and Louis Vuitton, a Florence-based business called The Creative Archives has been quietly offering emerging designers from the UK a rare chance to see their work produced by authentic traditional craftsmen, whose skills are increasingly under threat in a machine-made luxury world.

The idea is neatly reciprocal: emerging designers get access to highly-skilled labour-intensive services that they might not normally be able to afford; artisans get the opportunity to apply their techniques to new, buzz-worthy designs and keep their skills alive; and consumers get exclusive, limited edition products.Everybody, as they say, wins.

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Roberta Furlanetto collage by Susie Bubble | Source: Style Bubble

MILAN, Italy — The words “Made in Italy” have long been the pride of the Italian fashion system. But, in recent years, controversy has erupted as the Italian fashion industry has faced a crisis of confidence.

In late 2007, a Rai3 documentary called Slaves of Luxury “revealed a slimy world of underpaid immigrant labour, huge price mark-ups, and what was portrayed to be undue influence from American heavyweights like Anna Wintour,” as reported by BoF at the time.

Indeed, speaking to Il Giornale newspaper about the demise of his business after 50 years, longtime Italian manufacturer Giancarlo De Bortoli of Confezioni Herry’s lambasted the Italian fashion brands for their lack of ethics, slowly “strangling” businesses like his over the years. The financial crisis was the final blow, bringing the Italian fashion industry to its knees and sending companies like Confezioni Herry’s and Mariella Burani into administration.

Thankfully, the news from Italy isn’t all bad. In his interview with Il Giornale, Mr. Bertoli also singled out small companies like Roberta Furlanetto and Luisa Beccaria that are still making the best of Italian craftsmanship.

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LONDON, United Kingdom — The fashion film movement has hit the mainstream, with well-known brands like Prada and Y-3 running integrated, cross-channel campaigns around high-impact digital videos and a dedicated Digital Schedule for fashion films and catwalk streams now in place at London Fashion Week.

But there were no signs that the medium was condensing around fixed codes. Quite the opposite. What we saw was the kind of restless innovation and constant evolution that characterises the fluid nature of digital media itself, with an explosion of new films that energised, but also transcended, the seasonal presentation schedule, speaking directly to consumers across the internet as part of in-season digital campaigns.

During the Paris menswear collections, Stefano Pilati opened the Yves Saint Laurent show with “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” a 7-minute film by legendary photographer Bruce Weber, while on the first night of New York Fashion week, a mesmerising film by Nick Knight, featuring Ranya Mordanova in a fractured, postmodern ritual, beautifully complemented Korean designer Jung Kuho’s deconstructed Hexa collection. A week later in London, the British Fashion Council inaugurated a special screening zone at Somerset House for a series of film presentations by young designers like Craig Lawrence, Louise Gray and Katie Eary.

But much of the action took place outside the official fashion week schedule. We saw fashion films inhabiting online advertising units on sites like The New York Times, as well as the emergence of new editorial channels like TEST and NOWNESS, which joined SHOWstudio, Dazed Digital, brand websites, video sharing sites, and Diane Pernet’s international festival, A Shaded View on Fashion Film, as platforms for striking films by avant garde designers and established brands alike.

Last October, we brought you our first seasonal ranking of the Top 10 Fashion Films. This season, the competition was stronger than ever. So sit back, turn up the volume, and enjoy the Top 10 Fashion Films of the Season — and since most of the films are in HD, we recommend you expand the videos to fill your screens with the latest in digital fashion creativity.

(RSS and Email subscribers, click here to view the films).

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Marco Santaniello T-Skirt | Source: Marco Santaniello

MILAN, Italy — And now for a fun BoF Spotlight post to end your week. We couldn’t resist a bit of colour to spice up the Spring that is finally blossoming.

Marco Santaniello‘s pop art portraits of fashion models, editors and the ubiquitous bloggerati caught our attention when we stumbled across his Facebook page a couple of months back. Since then, he has continued to churn out images of the industry’s legends and new stars, with alarming regularity.

So where did all of his colourful inspiration come from?

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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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