Posts tagged 'fashion'

Towards the end of his recent Skype appearance at the Wheeler Centre, UK fashion designer Gareth Pugh was asked to sign off with some advice to aspiring fashion designers in the audience. Here’s what he said:

“People get very confused, I think, when thinking about fashion and design. Especially with fashion because obviously you see it everyday …. I think if you want to be a designer and do it for a long time, you have to not think at all about how you’re going to sell those. You shouldn’t think in terms of commerciality. It should be more about the ideas, because without the ideas you don’t have anything. You just have a collection that you could get anywhere or you could see anywhere. It needs to speak to people on a level for people to actually believe it and to want it ultimately.”

Pugh’s appearance was presented in partnership with the State of Design as part of a series of ‘9 to 5’ talks, in which Melbourne’s leading designers posed nine critical questions to five of the world’s most important design thinkers. Other videos/podcasts in the series: interior designer Ilse Crawford, design group Troika, Korean urban designer Kyung-won Chung and US designer-illustrator Milton Glaser.

(Click to watch video.)

Image of mid-1960s perfume set from the Soviet Union via WikiCommons

Fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld is reportedly working on a new fragrance based on the smell of old books. The German designer is a famous bibliophile – it’s thought that he owns 300,000 books in his collection (it’s the photo in the top left-hand corner).

The fragrance won’t be a first – there are already several fragrances on the market based on the smell of paper. They include Demeter’s Paperback (“sweet and just a touch musty, a lot like [British writer Barbara] Pym’s world”), Zadig & Voltaire’s Tome 1 (“wraps the soul and the heart in a delightful and innocent whirl”), and Penhaligons' Hammam Bouquet (“warm and mature, redolent of old books, powdered resins and ancient rooms”).

English novelist George Gissing loved the smell of books. He wrote, “I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.” Research into the smell of old books has found that it’s caused by the release into the air of hundreds of volatile organic compounds ‘off-gassing’ from the paper. Matija Strlic, a chemist at University College London, has described the scent as a “combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness”. The smell is, in fact, the smell of the paper slowly decomposing, and can be quite useful to antiquarians seeking to preserve a rare book.

The Sartorialist has been snapping locals in Sydney and Melbourne over the past week... we like Melbourne Man, even if he does seem to have forgotten his socks.

Scott Schuman: The Sartorialist

Scott Schuman's (aka The Sartorialist) book of collected sartorial highlights from around the world is published by Particular Books.