Escada stock prices over the last 5 days, courtesy of Google Finance

Escada Board to Meet on Insolvency After Bondholders Snub Offer (Bloomberg)
“Escada AG, the luxury clothing company whose dresses are worn by Demi Moore, is holding a board meeting today to discuss a plan to file for insolvency after bondholders rejected its financial rescue proposal.”

Micro trends making major fashion statements this autumn (Telegraph)
“Brace yourselves as ’slow-burning trends’, such as thigh-high boots and shoulder pads, hit the big time this season.”

Claudia Schiffer to address IHT’s Berlin luxury conference (MNI)
“The International Herald Tribune (IHT) has announced that Claudia Schiffer will join the lineup of high-profile speakers at its annual luxury conference where she will talk about the challenges of maintaining and protecting your global image in a digital world where fashion and celebrity media platforms have proliferated.”

Playing to the Middle (New York Times)
“Why would this perennially square department store bother to reanimate itself in Manhattan – in the sleekest, scariest fashion city in America – during a hair-raising economic downturn, without taking the opportunity to vigorously rebrand itself?”

VAT increase to cost retailers £90m (Drapers)
“The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has forecast that the return of VAT to 17.5% on January 1 will cost retailers £90m, as the Conservative party refused to rule out raising VAT further if they come to power.”

No Editions, courtesy of No Editions

NEW YORK, United States —Back in March 2008, when Fast Company published a report on “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” not one fashion or luxury brand (or their parent companies) made the list. This is unfortunate, not least because many of the world’s most successful fashion and luxury brands have a strong heritage of experimentation and innovation. (Louis Vuitton, for example, began by creating a lightweight, airtight trunk of a kind the world had never seen). Only a few months ago, this lack of innovation may have looked like a missed opportunity. But in 2009, it seems positively suicidal.

In today’s tough economy, many fashion brands face an existential choice: innovate radically and re-energise consumers with new thinking, new ideas and new products — or risk failure. Radical innovation means reinventing what fashion can be.  And nowhere is radical innovation needed more than in fashion’s approach to new digital technologies.

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Yesterday I met with James Killough, an innovative London-based film maker, who happens to have a film in pre-production that may end up being one of the first real films about the fashion industry — or so everybody tells me.

More to the point, James also talked to me about the potentially powerful combination of the Internet, video and the luxury industry and cited an innovative video project directed by Olivier Dahan, the renowned French film-maker, who collaborated with Cartier on a series of 12 videos for its Love collection.

I took a gander at the videos today, and was impressed — not only with Cartier’s forward-thinking use of video to create a narrative behind one of its most important iconic lines, but also with the stories themselves, which were engaging and, sometimes even moving.

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NEW YORK, United States – I’m sure you’ve all had one of those moments when a friend or colleague picked up your phone by accident, because it looked the exactly the same as theirs. I know it’s happened to me on more than one occasion. Today, Paul Taylor of the FT cleverly compared the uniform style and design of most mobile phones to the Ford Model T, when Henry Ford declared that “the customer can have any colour he wants, so long as it’s black”.

Just the other day, we dove into the marriage of fashion and technology for the first time, looking at the emergence of the fashion phone. But, the ideas, questions and suggestions have kept coming since then, begging the question: is now the right time not only for bringing a little fashion to technology, but also for bringing a little technology to fashion?

New York-based Angel Chang thinks so. She is one designer who is integrating new technologies into her designs.

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