Saturday night fever!

Long sleave dress and red belt by Lei.Lou (Alex Dojčinović)

"Live life fully while you’re here. 

Experience everything. 

Take care of yourself and your friends. 

Have fun, be crazy, be weird. 

Go out and screw up! 

You’re going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. 

Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. 

Don’t try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human."

~Anthony Robbins~

Cannes goes vintage

So, other than fast cars, easy women in expensive designer clothes holding hands with tanned older guys in polo shirts with bad hairdos - Cannes has an awesome vintage market on Sunday mornings.

Awesome - meaning that you can find vintage pieces of real value, well preserved but the prices are extremely high! (Guess they are going for above mentioned clientele).

Vintage purses and designer costume jewelry were my favorite finds.

Bellow you can see the photos of the most interesting pieces I found.

Uu...I also visited the perfume museum in Grasse – take a look at the Marie Antoinette cosmetic cases bellow! Can you say DIVAAA! :) 

Enjoy lovelies! 

p.s. Next time - I am taking orders and keeping the commission - hehe :)

For Japan with love

Help here if you can.

Act as if what you do makes a difference.  It does.  

~William James~

P.S. Yu, Suzuyo - I am thinking about you every day! Hang in there ladies!

Xoxo,

Za za zoom - Diva's in the room!

Rushing after work yesterday to touch up on my fab before Friday fun day party night in my brand new Lei Lou dress, and to get a hairdo at my favorite hairstylists (which never happened) I ran into numerous opticals: I ripped my pantyhose with the fabulous Lei Lou ring, hit some ladies car exiting the parking lot and now need to pay a pair of shoes worth of repair on her car, I forgot to close all of the windows in my apartment and broke a nail.

After seeing one piece from new Lei Lou collection few weeks ago at her showroom I was super excited to see the whole story on the runway. Everything was perfect: hair, makeup, girls attitudes and of course - the looks Alex put together.

Last night Lei Lou girl was a rockish lady, confident but gentle and feminine business women rushing from work to Friday fun day, sexy librarian, gentle ballerina and a classy socialite all in one. Her look demanded attention; her look was confident yet mysterious and vintage yet modern. 

Bravo Alex!
You did it again!

Zagreb's first fashion trade show: Fashion.hr Industrija

Long time no blog lovelies. I got to admit I have totally reasonable excuse. I am working on a new project - which is related to fashion and to my creative outlet - my blog. So I did fail to put it all in a blog post form. I will try to catch up fast. 

So, yesterday I skimmed through Fashion.hr Industrija as I went to pick up my gorgeous new dress from Lei Lou booth.

 Fashion.hr Industrija is a local designer trade exhibition, organized first time around this year in Zagreb with intention to give local designer the opportunity to showcase their collections to international buyers. However - there were not many buyers in attendance if any.

The venue itself looked absolutely fabulous, however there were more sponsored booths than designers, many designers were not personally at their booths and those that did showcase, mostly do have their own shops or showrooms, so I did not see much added value for them for being there as there were very little visitors the first day and I don't see how they can financially get to positive zero having to rent the booth space and merchandise it as well as to make a collection for the actual fashion show.

Another setback and potential reason for lack of visitors yesterday was that there was a charge to get in which I think is not wise to do first time around. 

On the other hand, I was quite impressed with the amount of effort and creativity the organizing team put behind the organization. The venue is quit big so I am sure it was hard to merchandise it properly, but they still succeeded in making it quit chic with right dose of technology, fashion, entertainment and designer presentation. 

Secondly, my conclusion exiting the venue on a day one was that the organization team is in terms of capability running far ahead of the local designer’s capacities and kind of educating them as they go forward. 

In ideal world, if there were enough business interest and clear business ethics with common vision among three event organizers, we would see designers from all three events showing their collections on this kind of small local trade show as this would provide more realistic, and more rich picture of local industry - with consequently showing more concrete financial results for all parties involved. Just a thought to ponder upon.

“From small beginnings come great things.”

I SPY: Cannes.

Last week was quit hectic for me - just how I like it! :) My journey started in Budapest working and finished 6 days later in Cannes, France. Lead by my life strategy: Work is fun and fun is fun, I met some amazing and very inspiring people from all over the Europe like Marie Claire editor in chief and Glamour magazine beauty editor from Hungary and collected wonderful experiences I can share with you in next couple of post. Ouu, yea, and I got sick, but by now you know my hyper nature so you know that a fever can't hold me down. :)

We stayed at amazing historic Carlton hotel, located on the famous Croisette Avenue, close to the Cannes Palais des Festivals. This hotel is visited by numerous celebs during the film festival, some of which have their own Suites. Many have left thank you notes to thank the Carlton on hospitality. :)

I've noticed some cool rides...(none noticed in pink so not to impressive).

As you already know, Cannes is a home of a famous film festival; so naturally, many fabulous fashion brands have their stores there. I loved Hermes and Chanel accessories window merchandising for upcoming season.

What really gives me a feel of the city is the street art, being spoiled with what I was seeing in the City daily, I was not hoping for much, but in Cannes - the city which lives and breads film art - street artists displayed nothing else but the pulse od the Cannes glamorous heart. :)

Lastly....I visited a perfume museum nearby surrounded with wonderful orange tree garden story of which I will tell you in my next post...

"Security is mostly a superstition. 

It does not exist in nature.

 Life is either a grand adventure or nothing ...." 

Helen Keller

A birth of an industry.

As you already know from my previous blog posts, I have moved back to Croatia about two years ago. Ever since, I have been curiously following how local fashion industry and designers function. All that I have seen was three separate fashion weeks – each pushing their own agenda, waking up couple of months before their event and falling asleep day after.  Basically, they functioned as an entertainment event organizing agency – without clear goal for the participating designer’s promotion or the clear plans for projects future, which consequently disabled them from attracting sponsors.

For the remaining of the year – designers “belonging” to each of the respective events attempt to earn some money by selling mostly not wearable and rather impractical pieces, which are often overpriced and not of a  particularly good quality. While others, who are the true and proven talents (based on their customer base and yearly earnings), have good quality, wearable pieces, and competitive prices and are actual media & customer magnets – act as drivers of the mentioned events, but do not get much out of the whole ordeal – as real industry buyers are not in attendance and showing their collections on these events gives them temporary PR exposure but rarely new customers.

However if the international buyers were in attendance, even the talented few designers, who have potential to have their collections ordered – do not have a production capacity to support an order of an even a small to medium clothing chains.

What have changed with existence of this new project – Fashion.hr Industry?

This year Fashion.hr group consisting out of: fashion portal, PR-marketing agency, organization team for three fashion events per year and trade show – Fashion.hr Industrija following each of the events (SS, FW & resort) have announced that they are attacking the root of the problem of local fashion industry with the industry motivating project objective of which is to connect all the dots – manufacturing & production – design – presentation (via shows) – PR/marketing and most importantly – sales & international exposure via bringing international buyers to local trade show. Project was named – Fashion.hr Industrija.

The idea and theory behind it is just what local industry needed which is why I am really proud and supportive of this young team. So big thumbs up!  However, when I have seen the start of the project execution, I had some doubts.

Partnering with local chamber of commerce, selected local clothing company production factories and selecting a decent pool of talented young designers to sign a yearlong contracts and produce capsule collections for mentioned clothing companies, were all good moves.

On the other side, many things stayed undefined and unclear.

For example, I think that it was not a good idea to have both fashion.hr fashion shows and trade show fashion.hr Industrija to run in parallel due to limited capacity of production team as well as designers who will be present for both, this way quality of the events might suffer.

In addition, it hasn’t been defined which and if any real fashion buyers will actually attend, will this trade show showcase the upcoming  Fall/Winter 11’. collections or a combination of the SS and FW 11’? Will regular consumers be able to attend and purchase the pieces they see on the spot?  What will happen if the buyers make orders from designers who did not sign contracts with local production factories as part of Fashion.hr Industrija project?

All in all, this move is definitely a good move and a move forward for Croatian fashion industry. It will motivate a natural selection among the designers collection, it will give designers insight into what market demand is and it will most definitely make them be more realistic in pricing. In spite of the fact that not all details are clear and polished, I really hope that from the first time around this project will be a success and that strong foundation will be built for upcoming fashion talents, local textile industry will be awaken and more jobs will be open for industry professionals in the future.