It’s fashion competition time and whilst we await the results of Swiss Textile Awards with Gareth Pugh, Marios Schwab, Ann Sofie Back, Ute Ploier, Bless and Felipe Oliveira Baptista battling it out tonight for 100,000 Euros, the biggest fashion competition launched by Mango has its first winner. The finalists were Txell Miras (Spain), Clara Leskovar & Doreen Schultz (Germany), Sadaharu Hoshino (France), Felipe Oliveira Baptista (France), Cathy Pill (Belgium), Christian Wijnants (Belgium) ,Sandrina Fasoli (Belgium), Sarah Swash & Toshio Yamanaka (UK), Sachiko Okada & Aaron Sharif (UK) and Mikio Sakabe (Japan). Some of them you may remember me blah-ing ong about on the blog. Some of them are waiting for me to wax lyrical about. One in particular though won a stonking 300,000 euros and the prize went to Sandrina Fasoli and Michael Marson who both graduated from the La Cambre school in Brussels (ok, so my preference for the school is a little biased towards the fact that I have met so many talented grads from there….).
However, the collection has the final word. Where are the attention grabbing bells and whistles? The va-va-voom shapes? The ‘difficult of wear’? Nope there is none of that. Instead, it’s a superbly-executed, delicate and covetable collection that Fasoli and Michael have very tentatively referenced classic workwear shapes and flapper styles but only very slightly. Awash in nude shades, black and midnight blue in fabrics that nod towards ‘bedwear’, it’s all exactly the sort of thing you would want to hang carefully on pale pink padded hangers. If Fasoli and Marson wanted to achieve pretty-pretty that isn’t sickeningly girly, then they got it spot on with this winning collection. With 300,000 euros now in their hands, I look forward to seeing what they do in terms of the possibility of presenting their collection in Paris and of course subsequent collections.
i kept my fingers crossed for this one. sandrina is my favourite brussels designer, but unfortunately with one retail point only.pff, that’s belgium – everyone loves it, but noone buys it. hopefully this prize (and your attention to miss Fasoli) will turn things around. one down point – my opening-soon guerilla store might count one designer less, well well.
cheers
L
she deserves it!
she and mickael are really kind, and the collections are really constructed on their style, not on the fashion season effect, that eventually pays!
congrats!
hope they will have a great show with a cool new collection,
happy for them!
This comment is not directed at this post, but rather at this blog as a whole. I read with interest your brief write-up in Papermag, and that, along with other factors, inspired this post on my blog:
“The chances that I will say something today that will change the way a stranger thinks is very slim. But the chances that the way I dress will change the way someone thinks is probably far greater. Like it or not, clothes speak for us. And every so often I like to see what I can get them to say.”
Thank you for wearing what you do, and for having the courage to post it here for everyone to see. Even when people don’t agree with what you’re wearing (and it amazes me some of the vitriol directed at you), they are at least engaging their thoughts about why they don’t like it. And the more people thinking about style the better I say.
hip hip hip hourra for Sandrina and Mick!
Delicacy is right. I love the ’20s references that while obvious are also restrained (am I alone in being reminded of Christian Schad’s Weimar-era paintings by all that transparency?), the interplay between prim pleats and sheer, the delicacy of the palette…I want to see these up close.
And as I haven’t yet read the latest Paper mag, very glad to see your comment, quoted above – very nicely put.