Early Morning Fashion Musings

So now that I've been waking up super early, I've had a chance to read my favorite newspaper, Wall Street Journal, every morning. The reason I really love WSJ is the excellent articles on fashion, designers, style and the business of fashion. This week alone there has been a number of interesting stories, including one about Divorce Sales, where divorcees shed their old designer clothes, bags, shoes and jewelry. What a great idea, I thought. It is always good to make room for the new, and especially so if you have a lot of stuff with "baggage" i.e. stuff that reminds you of a life or a person that you once had. Getting rid of the old makes you fill in the vacuum with new, both figuratively and practically, and thus helps you move on and create a new (and maybe better!) life for yourself.

Another interesting article was about the "new" designer fabric, linen. Linen is being combined with other fibers to create fabrics that work for high end design, such as silk. The paper even had a picture of a $6000 Lanvin wedding dress that had the artful wrinkled look of linen. I loved it because linen is one of my favorite fabrics for the summer. I don't mind the wrinkles, but these new fiber combinations apparently make linen a lot less wrinkly. And - my own wedding dress was a linen blend as well...my mother's old dress from 1971; that dress was a blend of linen and something else that reduced the wrinkling, probably a synthetic fiber, but it still had that linen hand touch feel.

The third article, this week alone, worth to mention, is the new designer online shopping site for Chinese high end consumers, thecorner.com.cn, by the Italian company Yoox.  The site sells luxury items, which by itself is nothing new. The news is in the shipping service they have pioneered with Fedex. The courier will wait at the doorstep of the customer while they open the package, try on whatever they ordered and make up their minds whether to keep the item or not. If only that service would be used in the U.S. I might be ordering online too! Of course this is all designed to encourage the Chinese to embrace online luxury shopping, but what a great convenience that is...