I Am An Individual. I Have A Voice: Kelly Shaw

Kelly Shaw is a design brand about fun, passion and being the opposite of boring. The ethos of the brand is to fight the boredom in not only the conservative nature of our fashion and style, but also of our lives.

Inspired by youth movements such as the Occupy London movement, the London Riots and George Orwell, she likes to entice, challenge and captivate her buyer. They are loud and flavoursome as people - unafraid, pro-active and ill behaved in the eyes of our capitalist nature.

Playful in essence, the S/S 13 collection unleashes the freedom of childhood with the rebellion of the youth movements creating a culture clash of fun and mischief. Each piece is loud without shouting, opinionated without being brash and says, in it's own unique way, "I am an individual, and I have a voice."

Style Queen: Lua P

Meet Lua.P 

I think she's pretty cool. I like her style, I like the grunge come girly aspect of how she dresses. She describes herself as having an eclectic style that changes frequently. Inspired by films from the 80s and 90s, she like sto mix 90s garments with bohemian accessories. For more of Lua.P her blog is here. 

Product Review: OBEY Snapback

I bought this cap the other day. I order it off of E-bay, good ol' E-bay and it came before it's first predicted date, which I'm obviously happy about. Estimated delivery was between the 4th december - 24th December, so to receive it in November still was an obvious bonus. Although I am supposed to be receiving this hat as a christmas gift but shhhhhh...

So I love it. It is sturdy, well made, has already survived a rainy night out and it still looks brand spanking new. It's for the tom boy within me, the androgynous side of me that likes to indulge in baggy jeans and sleeveless tops from time to time. The part of me that loves skating as much as I love shoes, the part that loves my Fred Perry's as much as my wedge heels - and I think my hat is super cool.

I love the contrast of the cheetah print to the black and red - I think it compliments one another well. I also like the the snap back is made of plastic which is handy for keeping the rain out of the face on rainy days I realised. This hat I feel can be worn in a girly outfit or a complete dress-ike-the-opposite-sex day. Either or, I think it has scope to work.

So I'm a happy customer. I definitely recommend buying your snapback caps on E-bay because there is a wide selection on there for 1/8th of the price of the high street - and despite coming from China, it came quickly. I'd like to thank the speedy chinese for being efficient.

Best and all, xx

Geometric Kool Kids

Maths was never cool. I liked maths, but it was never cool. It was cool instead to hate the subject, to forget your protractor and to draw without a ruler. Kool Kids with a capital K. Now though, it's trendy to be getting our Geometry on. Angles, shapes and techni-coloured patterns are now cool, in fact they're hotter than cool, they're shit hot. So get out that protractor and start doodling coloured patterns in brights and complimentary colours, and boom you've got yourself a cool new sweater. 

'Lure' by Kate Mccgwire

I went to the Kate Mccgwire's Private View of 'Lure'. As her first major solo exhibition the exhibition explored her sculpture in the face of life and death, beauty and vermin, possibility and impossibility. The exhibition feature smaller works of art mounted upon card where illusions and patterns had been created using feathers, creating uniformity with nature's own, patterns of the impossible, a regular pattern from irregular feathers. It also featured monstrous sculptors which I imagine to be bigger than the boat she lives in even, consuming your entire entity, engulfing your every essence, fleeting the notions of life and death before you - the dead bird's wings of a bird who eats death for survival.

Overall the exhibition was powerful and intriguing in the fine detail used to create the sculptures, the fine detail that aligns the feathers in beautiful succession.

Raise Your Weapon: Soundtrack to the Weekend

So I've had quite the eventful weekend you could say. Some good, some bad. Some fun, some morbid. A bit of everything, from highs to lows, from crazy rave to totally chilled. I think this song epitomises this mood. It's a bit of both, do you dance or do you just relax to it? Is it upbeat or is it morbid?

I also have been obsessed with it since I heard it last week. So this Ladies and Gentlemen is my soundtrack to my weekend, just gone.

Watercolour Me Beautiful: Stina Persson

Stina Persson is a Stockholm based fashion illustrator who uses a variety of mediums throughout her work in order to achieve the characteristic look of her work. Energetic and fast paced, her illustrations have an air of fashion lifestyle about then as well as style, they're representative of a way of life, a beauty in mind and an essence of the unattainable. 

Painting words, collages with paper and beautiful people her pieces are very expressionistic. They are evanescent in nature, and capture the essence of fashion in every aspect. They are stylish, beautiful and suggest an image of our ideals. 

Stina has worked with many big brands during her career including: Elle, Vogue Nippon and Coca-Cola. 

Marion Bolognesi: It's In The Eyes

Marion Bolognesi is a New York based artist whose work focuses on illustration and accessories design, her passion however lies within her watercolour pieces. Melancholic in mood, they speak of emotion and expression amongst the watery eyes, with the often pained look and trickling ink stain like tears.

Painted of beautiful people, the eyes are the main focus, and although the look isn't always pained it feels like a gateway into their world, with seduction, sadness and sultry looks encompassing the imagery.

She received her BFA with a focus in illustration from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, 2003.

Punky Allsorts

Punky Allsorts is the fun of fashion, the downright inner child and playful one within us. Run by self proclaimed Mad Hatter Madame Allsorts, who not only creates quirky jewellery for the like sof ourselves, but also writes, sings and is a performer. She is the madame of all sorts, as well as taking inspiration from sweets, food and childhood memoirs of boardgames, she ran to the bright lights of New York and in her early 20s began running this jewellery business. Below are some of the best most fun and exciting pieces from the collection all available at www.punkyallsorts.com. 

Sophie Cochevelou on Costume and Fashion

"My best ideas always came to me when I'm one my bike!"

You might recognise Sophie from my latest Street Style Vlog which we did on Brick Lane. I met her at Brick Lane market where she introduced herself and I was so struck by what she was wearing, I just had to find out more. Sophie Cochevelou is in her second year of her MA in Performance Practice and Design, she recently started a blog about he creations at cyclinginheels.blogspot.com.

As a course with people with a vast set of skills, performance, costume design, lighting design and set design to name a few Sophie specialises in many areas of performance, " One day, I can be making a dress in the costume department, the next day I’m rehearsing the show of the play I’ve written and the day after that I'm shooting some footage for a pre-recorded performance. You have a lot of freedom so you have to be really organised in order not to disperse yourself too much. It's really rewarding." She began the course as a playwright and thinks that after the course she will become a costume designer instead, " I came as a dramaturge and a play writer and I think I'm going to end up more as a costume designer."

Inspired by childhood and common cultural imagery, "I think that artist see the world differently, or, more precisely as a material for art, we see the potential of creativity in the everyday life and every single object." Which she claims, makes life more exciting. "I'm convinced that reality is not fixed, it can be turned in something completely different at every moment. When you are an artist, boundaries are moving, you don't see that things are either beautiful or ugly but more as are they inspiring or not."

Delving in to her own past and childhood Sophie explores her childhood and ways of holding onto that magical time in her life through her use of Barbie dolls, as well as reconstructing the beauty ideals that Barbie portrays to young girls, and women in society. Instead of conforming to this beauty she reconstructs it, “By cutting them into pieces, I guess it's a way to claim my own freedom by damaging the perfect body of the feminine ideal embodied by Barbie. In a way within this act of destruction there is an act of creation.  But at the same time is a remaining of childhood: because I'm not interesting in playing with them anymore, the fact of turning them into jewels is a way to keep them by my side in another form.'

“No I don't really have a style icon, I don't understand pages in magazines like "copy her style".  I’d rather say that I get inspiration from what I see. I like to take what I like in everybody style and make the synthesis of it.  As a designer, I think Jean Charles de Castelbajac is my favourite, a kind of spiritual guide in the way he uses pop art and childhood references.” Instead she prefers to have fun with her clothes drawing inspiration from what surrounds her. For Sophie, dressing up is a game and is as fashion should be, fun, “Anyway, I think is really easy as a "people" to be well dress, you just have to go on shop on pick expensive stylish stuff. But it's not funny, it's not really challenging, everything is affordable. I think my creativity in outfit come from my limited budget. It's becoming a game  "be the best dress as possible with the less money as possible. By accessorising cleverly a £5 dress you can make it look like a  £200 one!”

Instead of separating fashion and costume through her life she intertwines the two fields to create a cross over, perhaps this explains her eccentric style of which she finds difficult to define, “I don't think I have a really defined style. One day I can dress really futuristic with really bright colours and geometrical shapes, one other day I dress really vintage with a dress inspired from the 20s and pastel colours. One day like a posh lady and the day after I’m nearly a Goth. I just wear what I feel like, according to my mood.” However, the creativity found within her clothes and outfits is unmistakable. Perhaps her relationship with costume design is why, “I like to intertwine the two fields of fashion and costume.  I like to make my costume really stylish inspired by what I see in magazines, and in parallel, I like to bring the craziness, the eccentricity and the extravagance of costume into fashion in my everyday dressing. For me, costume has a performance aspect, it's more about creating a character and give life to him.  The costume turns you into someone else, whereas fashion is more the expression of your own personality through clothes. But I like to blur the line between them, where disguising is revealing your true self.”

All Images from Sophies blog:cycleinheels.blogspot.co.uk

Trend Stop: Outer Space

All clothes from H&M, Topsop, Nasty Gal and ASOS

Never mind my country break from last week, this week I'm travelling to outer space and back. There'll be a day trip to the moon, complete with crackers and cheese with the machine from A Grand Day out and all. Wallace and Gromit are promised to have a guest appearance and out hotel is said to be the quietest there is with no drafty windows to deal with. ALthough it's set to be cold, there is a day trip also to the edge of the sun to catch some rays and heat in a bottle to take back to our rooms. So all in all, it should be pleasant. Crater skiing, silent discoing and cheese eating definitely sounds like a weekend break for me.

So what do you think? Who's in?