Black Sheer Dress Allessandro Dell’ Aqua Black Patent Lace Up Heels Jean-Michel Cazabat Black Feather Coat Adrienne Landau White Socks American Apparel

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theblackmark.sg

Quite possibly taking a nod from art movements of the past — conjure Fluxus or Dada — the Singapore-based design lab Black Mark established their art/fashion/lifestyle boutique Black Market to “retaliate and reject all the ideals of commercial bombardment” and to “celebrate design in all its manifestations”. Black Market, located stylishly close to Haji Lane, hits high marks for curating international brands like Nixon and Ksubi with local Singaporean designers. Every product featured within the store is carefully selected so there is plenty of rhyme and reason behind why a sweater and jeans have found their way into the shop. Black Mark blogs about each new brand the boutique picks up: take, for instance, the hipster sunglass label Mystic Vintage, which gets it’s inspiration from vintage frames and iconic figures like John Lennon and Ziggy Stardust who wore them; the deconstructionist brand Nickicio, alongside books by the Swiss Nieves collective; and French indie label L’Espace Des Createurs. Quincy Teofisto of Black Mark says the boutique is about “style rather than trends… Blackmarket is diverse, nonconformist, and unpretentious.” A look inside reflects this, with a do-it-yourself ingenuity — one will awe at the handmade Orangina bottle chandelier perched above the wares. Black Market is a celebration of artistic collaboration, reminding us as audience and consumer that playful experimentation does a wardrobe, and a heart, plenty of good.

Holey T Collar Skirt Hires bodkinbrooklyn.com Images courtesy of Bodkin

Eviana Hartman, whose switch from fashion writer to fashion designer has resulted in this year’s most promising eco-chic line, Bodkin, prefers to be the observer and not the observed. But in the months since she won the Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation’s inaugural Sustainable Design award for Bodkin, it’s hard for her not to get noticed. The former fashion features editor at Nylon and fashion writer at Vogue and TeenVogue was used to searching out talent but secretly she also hoped to be the one creating. “I always thought that I wanted to design something,” says Hartman, “but it never occurred to me that I ever would.”
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Long Dress William Tempest Chain Top Louise Gray

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Photography by Danny Bensi

Grace Jones performed last night for a lucky crowd of about 200, at a private boat party on Pier 17 in New York to celebrate the launch of Matthew Williamson’s line for H&M. At 60, Jones is as daring, magnificent, and regal as ever; it’s incredible what a commanding presence she has. During her performance, in trademark Grace Jones fashion, she pranced around half-naked singing her classics. Then models came out wearing Williamson’s clothes, writhing from side to side. But truth be told, neither the models nor the crowd could take their eyes off of Grace. She’s literally a force of nature.

Photography Courtesy of Raquel Allegra

Even your ex-boyfriend’s tattered tee, with its stains and faint smell of Old Spice, can’t tell a story like a Raquel Allegra garment. The Los Angeles-based designer makes her couture using shirts from the County Jail, weaving tales from a dark but quintessential reality of the city. “It definitely felt strange at first,” says Allegra, “but I took to recycled prison shirts out of necessity. I’m a textile shopper — when I shop I touch everything. So I was just hunting for that perfectly distressed feel.” Oddly enough, her meticulous sense of touch led her to the clink.
    As remarkable as the personal stories behind the shirts themselves, Allegra’s intricate handpicking, hand dying, and thread-by-thread deconstruction process can take weeks to complete. But for Allegra, the resulting piece — more reminiscent of cobwebs than prison garb — is worth the painstaking effort. Her labor of love seems to satisfy customers who, like herself, have a taste for clothing made with originality and thought. So it’s not surprising that tastemakers have gravitated to the brand of draped, sexy shirts, dresses, and scarves. Each item different from the next, Allegra’s creations are given new life by the wearer in a unique convergence of past, present, and future.
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wonderland-sheffield.co.uk/

Recycled clothing usually connotes trips to Goodwill or hand-me-downs, and recycled couture typically has its shining moment walking down a red carpet. But over the past three years, London scientist Tony Ryan and artist/design professor Helen Storey decided to tackle our notions of ‘recyclable wear’ and turn it completely on its head, making couture gowns from dissolvable textiles. The duo’s Wonderland exhibit ups the ante on both couture and sustainability – which, let’s be honest, have been pretty mutually exclusive as far as aesthetics go. The exhibition of their “disappearing gowns” gradually lowers dresses into large bowls of water, where they dissolve to create “vibrant underwater fireworks.” The Wonderland team hopes to introduce their “practical solutions to current ethical issues,” to the masses, interpreting their ideas into ingenious uses. Their developments (like intelligent packagings that dissolve into a gel in which seeds can be grown) have garnered numerous awards, and could revolutionize the issue of plastic waste. You really have to see it to believe it, so if you didn’t make it to the last stop in London, check out the video by Nick Knight on the Wonderland site. Super sci-fi.
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White Button Down Shirt Comme Des Garçons Feather Hair Piece Stylist’s Own

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Photography Courtesy of Olsenhaus

Growing pocketfuls of designers have taken on the challenge, but it still takes a lot to impress on the green fashion front. Eco-friendly fashion has found a worthy competitor in Olsenhaus, a new line of vegan shoes that definitely don’t sacrifice aesthetics for ethics. Designer Elizabeth Olsen’s artful metallic paint-splattered booties, pumps, and flats make reducing your carbon footprint that much more stylish while still providing shopping addicts with a little (enjoyable) guilt. Olsen draws inspiration from her own vegan upbringing to make designs concerned with “consciousness, purpose, function, and art,” she says. One hundred percent ‘cruelty-free’, and made with high standards in both animal and human rights, Olsenhaus declares “the revolution will be accessorized.” With shoes like these, we’re ready for that revolution.
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Photography Courtesy of Drone

Playful party frocks aren’t what you’d expect from a Brooklyn-based label littered with images of “a lot of vomiting and decay,” but irony helps the Death by Drone medicine go down. “Vomit is a representation of the soul,” say designers Tiff and Deb, and, metaphorically speaking, the Drone upheaval is comprised of cakes, cookies, and green-tea icing. This Drone ideology definitely teeters on emo, and that might be attributed to the duo’s love of music. After an admirable attempt to explain through various sounds, and words like ‘fuzz’, Tiff and Deb concede: “Nobody gets Drone,” (the music-term and label’s namesake) “but it helps us do the weird stuff we do.”
     Once stifled by traditional education, they took to the class-time doodling that runs heavily throughout the line. “They don’t let you draw stick figures in art school,” Tiff says, “and said our printing process would never work.” But they made it work anyway. The best thing they got from their time at Parsons? “Each other! We met in the dorms.”
     While Drone may be darkly whimsical, don’t call it morbid. Says Tiff: “It’s not morbid, it’s poetry! One day we’ll do a kid’s book for adults.” But until then, it’s pretty clear: Death by Drone is bringing daydreams back.
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