Written in the Stars: Seren London

In just two short years, Seren London has made quite the mark on the fashion industry and, in particular, the niche corner of it devoted to jumpsuits. Founder Lucia Dailey cut her teeth on magazines and luxury PR so she combined her knowledge of that world with a life-long obsession with jumpsuits. “It is one of the easiest wardrobe items to wear,” she declares, having worn one to her own wedding, “yet can look the most polished when both dressed up or down”. Seren London launched in 2016 with a collection of just six jumpsuits and we all fell in love with its unique, striking prints. Next time you have a wedding or a party or a birthday to dress for, consider the one-piece – it makes quite the statement.

Where does the name for your brand come from?
Seren is short for Serendipity, playing on the idea of luck and fate – the coming together of multiple influences to create something positive and special.

What is luxury, for you?
Effortless sophistication and authenticity. Quality materials and an innate sense of style that has confidence but doesn't shout too loudly.

Your current favourite jumpsuit:
'The Gee'. It's one of our signature styles and all-time bestsellers. I love it in all prints! The rounded neck and 3/4 sleeves balanced with the low back detail make it chic yet sexy and perfect for all events.

Can you tell us something interesting about the history of the jumpsuit?
Elsa Schiaparelli was the first person to bring jumpsuits into high fashion in the 1930s before they really had their moment in the 1960s and 70s. Some people refer to the jumpsuit as a 'trend'; however the one piece has been a much-loved wardrobe item for years and continues to stand the test of time.

Where are you next going on your travels?
Italy, for pleasure, to our favourite hotel Il Pelicano in Porto Ercole. It was one of Slim Aaron's favourite shoot locations and is still brimming with 70s charm.

What inspires you?
Music: Easy 70s playlist on Spotify is on repeat in the studio!
Films: Talented Mr. Ripley, Alfie, Call Me By Your Name
Museums: Fondation Maeght in Saint Paul de Vence I've found hugely inspiring. In London two of my favourite smaller museums to visit are the Wallace Collection and the Sir John Soane Museum.
Books: I recently finished reading South and West by Joan Didion as well as Patti Smith's Just Kids about her life in New York City with Robert Mapplethorpe.

If you had an unexpected 24 free hours to fill in London...
I would start my day with a spin class followed by brunch in Notting Hill and a walk around Holland or Hyde Park with my husband and 19-month-old daughter Willow. Then I’d spend an afternoon pottering around Portobello and exploring the little shops on Golborne Road, ending with dinner with my husband and some friends at my favourite restaurant La Famiglia, in Chelsea.

Where do you live?
West London, Shepherds Bush.

Your three dream dinner party guests:
Frank Sinatra, Princess Diana and Steve Jobs.

Ranveer Singh Gave A Lot Of Inputs For The Ad Campaign: Vincent Lou, Club Factory

E-commerce company, Club Factory unveiled its first India-market campaign with actor Ranveer Singh and Miss World 2017, Manushi Chhillar. The company which was launched in India, one and a half years ago has made strong inroads in the e-commerce arena in India. Vincent Lou, Founder and CEO of Club Factory chatted with exchange4media on their biggest India-campaign, accelerating the brand growth and more.

Lou said that the e-commerce company in the last two years has acquired more than 70 million users globally. “40 million of these are from India and so it has to be a key market for us," he shared. On Club Factory’s proposition and plans within the overall India e-commerce ecosystem and the importance of India as a market, he said that the brand’s differentiator is that they offer unique, modern and differentiated products at factory price.

When we asked Lou the reason behind the launch of the integrated campaign he said, “Because we now have a larger presence in India, we want to have a better bond with India consumers and so we’re having celebrity endorsements.”

We have these TVCs and will leverage both online and offline mediums for this,” he let out and shared the company does have plans for offline activations too.

Speaking about the making of the campaign, he shared, "Ranveer himself gave a lot of inputs for this ad campaign." On the challenges and opportunities of doing business with India, he opined that the brand has to do a lot of localization. “We have cash on delivery available and also ensure people can shop without any concern about the shipping fee,” said the CEO.

Lou opened up that to further accelerate growth, the company is looking at providing better experiences by having more warehouses and customer care agencies. “We’re looking to do some category expansions,” he revealed.

Read more at: https://www.exchange4media.com

New York City Ballet Reveals Fashion Gala Designers

New York City Ballet is to reprise its love affair with fashion this fall, hosting its seventh annual Fall Fashion Gala on Sept. 27.

The event sees rising choreographers create new works and collaborate with established fashion designers on the pieces’ costumes.

This year’s iteration will see choreographer Kyle Abraham team with Giles Deacon, Matthew Neenan collaborate with Gareth Pugh and Gianna Reisen partner with Alberta Ferretti.

New York City Ballet costume shop director Marc Happel will work closely with each designer in executing their visions for the stage.

The gala will mark Abraham and Neenan’s choreographic debuts for City Ballet. It will be Reisen’s second effort for the company, a follow-up to her piece for last year’s Fashion Gala — which received critical acclaim and saw her team with Virgil Abloh on costumes.

Sarah Jessica Parker — who conceptualized the Fashion Gala format — will again serve as the event’s cochair, this year alongside Mazdack Rassi, Zanna Roberts Rassi and Lizzie Tisch.

Previous fashion galas have featured costumes by Thom Browne, Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen, Dries Van Noten, Marques’Almeida and Valentino.

Promoting Fashion & Aesthetics

Shillong has always been a fashionista’s delight. From street fashion to haute couture, men and women here love to explore everything that’s in vogue. To take this fashion frenzy a step farther and to promote beauty and aesthetics, a group of like-minded people founded Fashion Society Shillong back in 1983.

The Society, which will celebrate its coral anniversary on October 6 this year, is all about promoting the inherent talents of local youths by providing a platform in the form of beauty pageants, fashion shows and musical gigs.

“It is not really a modelling agency. Most of the young talents venture on their own equipped with our certification to enter bigger arenas,” says Aldous Mawlong, chairman of the Society.

Mawlong says the Society does not sponsor participants in national competitions but “if sponsorship is available from the government or business houses then definitely it can tap on these resources and promote youngsters”.

Talking about the evolution of fashion world both locally and globally, the head of the Society asserts that there has been a transcendental change in the way people look at models and in the way models look at themselves.

“The focus today is not only on being fashionable but also being comfortable. There is a shift from just good looking to also be healthy, which explains why most models follow a strict regime of lifestyle, diet and exercise. They also abstain from what is called ‘loud dressing’. Personality plays a vital role in the overall category of looking good,” explains the expert.

The Society meticulously selects the contestants, who have to be between 16 and 25 years of age, for Miss Shillong beauty pageant, which is not an annual event. It conducts practice sessions on catwalk, speech, make-up and grooming. It explores ways to network with similar organisations, the central and state governments and semi-government bodies “for uplifting its activities and achieving its objectives”. The society is also making efforts to archive exhibits, texts, costumes, weaves and other art forms in the latest formals.

However, Mawlong, who joined the Society after its inception and took over as the convener in 1986, says, “We never encourage anyone to give up their studies or jobs because the rat race in the outside world is real. If they are extraordinary and have a great sense of determination coupled with the right contacts and sound financial backup, then it is a different story altogether.”

Besides the beauty pageant, the Society organises various other events like musical shows and Cherry Blossom Festival. It also comes up with a lifestyle magazine called Tattoo Magazine’.

Celebrities who have attended the various events of the Society are Moon Moon Sen, Zeenat Aman, Rahul Dev, Shikha Swaroop, Hina Ramani, Kylie Dorjie and Vijay Kim, among others.

How Lululemon and Under Armour are saving the fashion industry

Athleisure is not a fad. It is not a trend. Athleisure is here to stay. How do we know? The growth of this segment of the retail sector far outpaces apparel as a whole, and it's being led by two relative upstarts: Lululemon and Under Armour. Athleisure has replaced jeans and t-shirts as the new casual. So how did this happen?

Fitness is now fashion

For the past couple decades, fitness and nutrition awareness have been on the rise in American culture. This has made athleisure –a strange hybrid of athletic wear and business casual –the biggest growing segment of the apparel industry. In 2015, retail sales overall were flat, but sales of athletic apparel was up 12% according to Fortune. Even more impressive, a report published by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. states that the global market for athletic apparel is projected to reach $231.7 billion by 2024.

Gone are the days when dress codes prevailed. Today, brands like Nike, Adidas, Lululemon, and Under Armour thrive not only because of fitness trends, but because Americans have embraced dressing down and being comfortable. Athleisure is a broad category that is made of athletic apparel that can be worn outside of the gym—like yoga pants or sneakers with suits.

Shopping behavior has changed

It’s big business. Nike, Adidas, Lululemon, Athleta, Under Armour and others are all seeing healthy profits while traditional clothing retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, and J.Crew are struggling. Fewer people are shopping at malls as mall landlords look to re-invent them as lifestyle destinations (instead of simply shopping retreats). People are spending less on clothing overall. When they are shopping for clothing, they are looking for discounts. Fast fashion, discount stores, and Amazon are stealing customers from traditional retailers. In the period from 2008-2015, sales of athletic apparel boosted the entire apparel industry by 4.1% on average. Take the athleisure out of the equation and that number shrinks to 0.2%. Basically, the public’s love of yoga pants, leggings, running skirts, and other athletic wear is fantastic for sales — especially in women’s apparel—unless you’re a business selling regular clothing.

Traditional retailers are struggling to understand the disparity in sales numbers. A few years ago, J.Crew blamed its slumping sales on not having the right cardigan in its collection. Banana Republic blamed its slump on a blazer with armholes too small for the average American woman to fit into. But the truth is more basic. It’s all about the denim. Skinny jeans have been the go-to silhouette for denim for more than a decade. Why go out and buy new jeans if you already have several pairs in your closet? Retailers think that a lack of newness is what is keeping women from refreshing their wardrobes. But, once again, retailers miss the mark.

Meanwhile, shoppers are not out shopping for denim. They want something more comfortable. Something stretchier. Something they don’t want to change out of the moment they get home. This easily explains the rise of yoga pants, leggings, and the entire athleisure category.

Enter Lululemon & Under Armour

Lululemon ($NASDAQ:LULU), the Vancouver-based cult favorite, is one of the smaller players in the game with just over 700 stores worldwide. In early June, its shares surged to a record high after first-quarter results topped expectations. The company reported a 25% jump in quarterly sales with $649.7 million. Lululemon’s gross margin widened as the brand rarely has sales on their merchandise. The Lululemon faithful happily shell out $98 or more for a pair of leggings.

Lululemon’s recent growth is driven by two things.

First, Lululemon his attracting men more than ever. Last quarter, roughly 30% of its new customers were men. In fact, Lululemon is currently attracting male customers at a faster pace than women.

Second, the company has placed its focus on activities other than yoga. The brand has made big headway into running apparel and hosts an annual half marathon in Vancouver each year. This growth potential takes what has been a niche player until now and puts it in line with the industry behemoths Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour. Only Under Armour ($NYSE:UA) has fewer dedicated retail stores—168, but it has a wealth of deals to sell its merchandise in other retailers. Nike has 2.26K stores in some form, and Adidas dominates with 4.9K stores.

Frequent questions in Quora:

https://www.quora.com/Is-Club-Factory-selling-genuine-products-confused-about-its-pricing
https://www.quora.com/Has-anyone-had-any-shopping-experience-with-Club-Factory
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-safe-to-shop-from-a-club-factory

Jade Holland Cooper on building a £10 million fashion brand

When Jade Holland Cooper was seven years old, she started her first business. "It was selling eggs," she remembers. "I had 30 hens, and the other day I found my old notebook where I was listing variable costs and profit – I've always been quite commercially minded."

Today, the 31 year old has swapped eggs for clothes. But one suspects that there is still a notebook somewhere in which she scrutinises the accounts. Indeed, she reveals the best piece of advice she was given when she said she wanted to start a fashion company was from her father: "He said I had to make sure I combined creativity with knowing the numbers; so I learnt about the financials and now run the business strictly according to regular management accounts."

Holland Cooper's father is a farmer and her mother worked as a couturier in London and Paris. It is perhaps unsurprising that, with these dual influences, as a teenager she was torn between pursuing a place at fashion college and one at agricultural college. The Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester won out, but it didn’t take long for her to rethink.

"I was going to all these social events in the country," Holland Cooper explains. "I'm a country girl at heart – I grew up on an arable farm in Suffolk, after all. So, I'd travel around to the polo and horse trials, and everywhere I went I noticed there was a lack of stylish, fashionable clothing for women to wear at these sorts of places: clothes that had the flair of urban pieces, but with a countryside influence." She decided there was a gap she could fill and determined to have a go; she reasoned that if she ended up wanting to learn farming, she could do that at home with her father without the college time. She was 21.

"I was really young, I suppose, but I had this idea and I was convinced I could make it work," she explains. "And I am tenacious – like a dog with a bone once I make up my mind to do something. The hardest thing was persuading people to take me seriously and then having to hire and manage people who were often twice my age. But I soon showed that I knew what I was talking about and things quickly took off."

The principle behind the business is simple, she says. The town/country fashion divide is being broken down by widely available imagery on social media and online and the fact that now many people have places in both. "In Cheltenham, where I'm based now, this is so apparent," she explains. "We have great arts festivals and horseracing here, and there are good restaurants and shops. Many people live between here and London now, and they want sophisticated, elegant and stylish clothes that can work in both settings."

A look at the website (through which the label does 60% of its sales) shows how this philosophy has developed a modern take on classic country-influenced clothing for men and women. Scottish-tweed jackets stylishly cut to give a fashionable fit, waxed cotton capes that are as well suited to festivals as to the polo, skirts in houndstooth and brown Prince of Wales check that can do boardroom as well as outdoors, stylish short coats in camel and country check that are equally at home in the Cotswolds and Chelsea, as well as a wide range of accessories, including on-trend tweed baker boy caps.

Holland Cooper's hunch about the desire for this hybrid look was correct. In ten years, the firm has gone from being a 21-year-old's dream to a £10 million business, with two stores in the UK (and five new ones in development) and many others stocking its wares around the country and abroad, including Harrods, where it is the best-performing label on the 5th floor. Along the way, the founder has managed to build a successful relationship with a network of factories in the UK, and has championed British wool and tweed. This year alone she bought 800,000 metres of British tweed. The homegrown element of the business is something she is very proud of, as is the in-house apprentice scheme she has started for young people to get them into the fashion industry.

What advice, then, would this young entrepreneur give to others thinking about striking out on their own? "Do not be swayed from your vision," she says emphatically. "If you believe in yourself, be clear, understand your journey, your customer, and make sure the DNA of the brand is always there. Don't create products that your customer doesn't understand and doesn't want. Create for real people; don't just create product for the sake of it."

Artificial Intelligence Could Help Generate the Next Big Fashion Trends

A fashion designer working on a new collection has an idea, but wonders if it’s been done before. Another is looking for historical inspiration—1950s-style wasp waists or 80s-era padded shoulders.

Soon, they might turn to Cognitive Prints for help. The suite of AI tools IBM is developing for the fashion industry can take a photo of a dress or a shirt and search for similar garments. It can search for images with specific elements—Mandarin collars, for example, or gladiator laces, or fleur-de-lis prints. It can also design patterns itself, based on any image data set a user inputs—architectural images, amoebas, sunsets.

“Fashion designers arduously put in efforts and time in coming up with new designs which could potentially be trend-setters,” says Priyanka Agrawal, a research scientist at IBM Research India, who has worked on Cognitive Prints. “Additionally, they have inspirations like architecture or technology, which they aspire to translate into their work. However, it becomes difficult to do something novel and interesting every single time. We wanted to make it easier for them by augmenting the design lifecycle.”

The AI image search engine, a collaboration between IBM and the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), was trained using 100,000 print swatches from 10 years of winning Fashion Week entries. Users can filter results by year, designer or inspiration (say, “Japanese street wear”). Designers can get inspired, or can make sure their inspiration is really their own and not inadvertent plagiarism (Gucci was recently accused of ripping off designs from legendary Harlem tailor Dapper Dan; they’ve since launched a collaboration).

The Cognitive Prints team is looking at making several extensions to the tool’s abilities. They want to enable designers to make custom edits to Cognitive Prints-generated designs, like changing the background color or, say, swapping spirals for circles on a fabric. They’d also like to teach the tool to design entire garments given just a few specifications, like “red one-shoulder dresses with ruffled hem.”

The use of AI in fashion has exploded in recent years. Various online services use AI to peruse the internet or your own social media data to suggest new outfits it thinks might be to your taste. Indian designers Shane and Falguni Peacock used IBM’s AI platform, Watson, to search a half-century of Bollywood and high-fashion images—some 600,000 in total—to help them create a new East-meets-West collection. Tommy Hilfiger partners with IBM and FIT to use AI to help identify trends in real time, for a quicker design-to-store time. Amazon has created its own AI designer as well, capable of generating new garments.

Agrawal thinks we’ll be seeing much more of this in the near future.

“As AI progress continues to advance, fashion [will] see more transformations,” she says. “For example, with the rise of conversational agents and virtual reality/augmented reality technology, it should not be long until users can not only query fashion catalogs but also interact, iterate and [be inspired by] the technology.”

Muchaneta Kapfunde, founder and editor-in-chief of the technology and fashion site FashNerd, agrees. AI is becoming common at the retail end of fashion, she says, with stores using algorithms to predict customers’ needs. It’s also being used in attempts to create more sustainable materials, an important consideration in an industry that’s one of the world’s top polluters.

But Kapfunde thinks it will be a while before AI tools like Cognitive Prints are ready to design quality garments on their own.

“The idea of using technology to design a perfect dress, it sounds great in theory, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. It’s not so easy to implement,” she says. “We still need the human touch.”

Major Fashion Names Among Worst Offenders in Britain Gender Pay Gap

LONDON — This week, as the final hours ticked down to the deadline for British companies to report their gender pay gap data or face a fine, a flurry of last-minute filings revealed a stark and unflattering trend: Fashion and beauty brands, predominantly focused on female consumers and audiences, and often employing an overwhelmingly female staff, are among the worst offenders in the country when it comes to paying men more than women.

The explanation, according to several companies? A coterie of men in a handful of top-tier executive roles, while the majority of entry-level, retail, design and distribution center jobs are held by women, creating a gendered, pyramid employment structure reflected across sectors in the fashion industry.

Take Condé Nast Publications Limited, publisher of magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour and GQ. The company reported data on Tuesday that revealed it to have the largest mean gender pay gap favoring men among all British media publishers and broadcasters, despite having more women than men at every pay quartile.

The company reported a mean gender pay gap of 36.9 percent (in other words, when comparing mean hourly rates, women earn 63 pence, or 83 cents, for every 1 pound, or $1.40, that men earn) and a median gap of 23 percent (when comparing median hourly rates, women earn 77 pence, or $1.08, for every £1, or $1.40, that men earn).

In a statement published alongside the data, Condé Nast attributed its salary skew to its longstanding and male-dominated senior leadership team. The chairman of Condé Nast Britain, Nicholas Coleridge, for example, has held various roles across the executive team since 1991. Jonathan Newhouse has led Condé Nast International for over 30 years. The statement said that across three-quarters of its business, the company had not found evidence of an appreciable gender pay gap. Three-quarters of all Condé Nast employees are female, with the bottom two salary quartiles particularly dominated by women.

The disparity of wages that exist within most fashion businesses was further underscored by the figures produced by many brands and retailers. The middle market women’s wear brand Karen Millen pays women 49 percent less than men on a median hourly basis, meaning that, companywide, men’s median pay was double that of women. Women made up 84 percent of the company’s top positions, with a female C.E.O. and C.F.O., and the same proportion of men and women received bonuses, yet women’s median bonus pay was 96 percent lower than men’s.

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In a statement, the company said that this was because the majority of its retail assistants and distribution center staff were women, and that the small percentage of male employees worked mostly in its head office.

“Our gender gap paints a misleading picture about our commitment to gender diversity and equality,” the statement read, adding that when head office roles were excluded, the gender pay gap dropped to 6 percent. It did not, however, address why so many head office roles were filled by men instead of women.

Other high-profile names included Victoria’s Secret, with a median hourly rate gap of 19 percent, and Benefit Cosmetics, which revealed a 30.7 percent median hourly rate gap, although women made up more than 90 percent of each pay quartile at the company. At Burberry, where women make up 70 percent of the luxury fashion group’s employees, there is a 26 percent gender pay gap in favor of men, who get higher bonuses too. None of the companies in this article wished to provide further comment beyond the statements released with their data.

“While we continue to take steps to ensure employees at all levels are able to fulfill their potential and further their careers at Burberry, and are recognized for their contribution, we know we can do more,” said the Burberry chief executive, Marco Gobbetti, when the company released its data last month. “This report shows that we have a gender pay gap in the U.K. The gap is influenced by the fact that we have fewer women in senior positions, however we are committed to narrowing this gap as we work to develop more women leaders to drive the growth and success of our business.”

More than 2,500 companies, equivalent to one in four, submitted their gender pay gap figures in the 48 hours before midnight on Wednesday. Last year, the government ordered all British companies with more than 250 employees to publish their gender pay gap reports by midnight on April 4.

The hope, it said, was to shame companies into doing more to close the divide. On the final day of results, findings indicated that 78 percent of companies showed a pay gap in favor of men, 14 percent had a gap favoring women and 8 percent had no gender pay gap. The government calculated that Britain’s overall pay gap is 18.1 percent.

Prime Minister Theresa May called the gender pay gap a “burning injustice,” and added that the whole of society would remain “poorer” if outdated employment practices went unchallenged.

The effort in Britain is one of a growing number of initiatives among countries to promote equal pay. Australia recently mandated gender pay gap reporting for most companies, while in Germany a new law will require businesses with more than 500 employees to reveal their pay gaps. The fashion industry, riding high on selling female empowerment via T-shirt slogans and social media hashtags, is starting to look like the employer equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes.

Spring Fashion Captured by a Photographer Who Hides Faces

The 23-year-old photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis rarely shows a model’s face. “I want their egos to be taken away,” she says. Her fashion photographs are kinetic, snapped as models twist and manipulate the bright color-block clothing that contains them. Without a face, she says, every element in a photograph’s composition has equal play: the clothes, the setting, and the model tell a single story.

For this fashion shoot, Bobb-Willis went to New Orleans, where her mother is from, with a box of our fashion editors’ favorite looks from the spring 2018 runways. She photographed women who live in the city wearing colorful dresses, accordion pants, and plastic knee-high boots, all while contorting on sidewalks and in abandoned fields. “The colors and the composition of the city have always inspired me,” she says. “There’s just this heaviness to it. It’s so vibrant, but there’s a spooky undertone that runs through.”

Bobb-Willis developed an abstract, dissociative style while struggling with anxiety and depression, using photography as a form of therapy. “I felt like my body was something I was renting more so than something that was given to me,” she says. “When I’m shooting, I’m focusing on what’s in front of me and nothing else.”

Exploring Femininity With Fashion at the New Orleans Museum of Art

When fashion curator Sofia Hedman first assembled “A Queen Within: Adorned Archetypes” in St. Louis in 2013, she did so with a psychological approach typical to her exhibitions. But now, as a revamped version of the largely avant-garde presentation opens this week at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Hedman’s vision has shifted, along with the collective zeitgeist.

“One thing I’ve learned in the past five years is how politically aware people are today,” explains Hedman, who holds a BA in psychology from Stockholm University. “We wanted now to do something that is quite contemporary and touches on pressing issues such as sustainability, race and inclusivity.”

Comprised of over 100 gowns, shoes, headpieces and jewelry from more than 50 renowned and up-and-coming designers, the museum’s first fashion exhibition explores how pieces of “bold couture” can illustrate various forms of femininity. Iconic pieces from Alexander McQueen, Comme des Garçons and Gucci stand alongside works of photography, sculpture and art including experimental video from South African designer Rich Mnisi.

Calling the exhibition a “celebration of femininity,” Hedman focused her scope of “QA Queen Within” to include only designs of the past decade, building on mythological personality archetypes to illustrate how wearable art can tell a woman’s story in real life.

“We look at the [archetype] of the ‘Thespian,’ who is blessed with imagination,” continues the Swedish-born curator. “We also look at ‘Mother Earth,’ which [investigates] how to make the world more sustainable for the future. Then we have the ‘Explorer,’ who is an independent-minded pioneer, the ‘Enchantress’ or femme fatale, the ‘Heroine’ with a very strong personal morality and, lastly, the ‘Magician’ who is the visionary artist and inventor. She is reimagining a new future.”

Masterfully presenting these lofty concepts has become the norm for Hedman, who in 2010 acted as London-based archivist for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibit “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.”

“There’s been a huge shift politically in just the last five years,” she observes. “I’m very intrigued with looking at fashion from a sociological perspective, but also trying to understand why we dress as we do and what it means.”

Susan Taylor, the director of NOMA, offers a more straightforward assessment, describing the museum’s latest installation as “definitively [demonstrating] that fashion is art.”

Hedman, who describes New Orleans as “bubbling with creativity and culture,” understands the many layers of symbolism may not reach each visitor of the collection, which is open through May. Instead, her hope is that people “see it as a celebration of femininity, but also makes people think about their own lives and how they dress every morning.”

Integral to each of Hedman’s projects is to create a provocative experience that inspires self-reflection for the visitor, which she argues is often easiest with fashion (over other visual arts) given its daily role in our lives. “Today, you can see a lot of people want to create more communities and it becomes very political. You buy clothes to belong to a community or show you have certain values.”

“Some people say they don’t care about clothes, but then they use fashion to tell a story,” she adds. “There are a lot of possibilities with fashion as an art form and you make a statement when you dress every morning. It’s good to be aware of it.”

These Are Hip-Hop's Realest Fashion Styles

From bucket hats to full-body tattoos, hip-hop fashion changes like the wind. Here's our guide to some of the most pivotal and influential trends.

Hip-hop fashion has evolved at a rate of knots since the sound first emerged from New York City's Bronx neighbourhood in the middle of the 1970s and styles have ranged from city to city, coast to coast and scene to scene. Our handy cut-out-and-keep guide to hip-hop trends focuses on those that have stood out most, those that have never gone away and those that continue, from time to time, to make comebacks. Will Chance The Rapper's dungaree overalls stand the test of time like these have?

The b-boy years

The first hip-hop uniform was worn by rappers, DJs, breakdancers and graffiti artists alike. The early '80s b-boy look, which emerged on the east coast, comprised of Kangol bucket hats, chunky street-tuff gold chains and name-plate necklaces, shell-toe trainers with 'phat' laces, and black (sometimes leather) tracksuit tops.

Sportswear companies such as Le Coq Sportif, Adidas and a couple of other now-defunct brands ruled the streets. Run-D.M.C. probably wore it best, but The Fat Boys, Ultramagnetic MCs, Schoolly D, LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane and many, many more also rocked the look.

Black pride

After a few twists and turns that took in an early gangster rap style inspired by Latin American gang culture and the preppy flower-power look of De La Soul, hip-hop fashion became entwined with a growing interest in black pride and socially conscious hip-hop.

Towards the end of the '80s hip-hop acts such as Public Enemy, Eric B And Rakim, Brand Nubian, Main Source, Queen Latifah, KRS-One, Salt-N-Pepa and more began celebrating their African heritage, as well as revisiting black nationalist movements such as the Black Panthers. Paramilitary fatigues mixed with the black nationalist colours of yellow, red, black and green, and even the jewellery took on meaning, with Salt-N-Pepa's gold door-knocker earrings connected to Africanism.

Ghetto fabulous

Next came hip-hop's most ostentatious trend, which outstrips even the Courvoisier-guzzling bling period of the early '00s for flashiness. In a style that suggested extreme wealth, in the mid-'90s hip-hop's biggest stars started wearing increasingly extravagant attire.

Sean Combs (aka Puff Daddy, aka Puffy, aka P Diddy, aka Diddy, aka Love) turned the trend into something straight-up slick and called it ghetto fabulous, but he, Snoop Dogg, Notorious B.I.G. and 2-Pac began by mimicking the old-school gangster look of Al Capone and the prohibition era's most notorious. That means fedoras and bowler hats, double-breasted suits and alligator-skin shoes. Snappy.

The baggy years

After the concepts and show-off years, hip-hop fashion simplified in the mid-to-late '90s. Out went suits and uniforms and in came low-slung baggy jeans, snapbacks, work boots, puffer jackets, Tommy Hilfiger threads and – a hip-hop perennial – sportswear.

The Wu-Tang Clan rocked this look, as did Gang Starr, Missy Elliot and others. Later on, Dirty South rappers such as Nelly and Ludacris would add do-rags and basketball tops, while female rappers Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown eschewed the baggy style altogether.

Open Thread: This Week in Style News

Each week, the Open Thread newsletter will offer a look from across The New York Times at the forces that shape the dress codes we share, with Vanessa Friedman as your personal shopper. The latest newsletter appears here. To receive it in your inbox, register here.

Hello and happy Friday. It’s been quite a week.

First there was the red carpet revolution at the Golden Globes. You might have noticed a difference in our coverage and slide shows (no name-checking of brands) and I’d be really curious to hear what you thought.

Then there was the furor over Michael Wolff’s book on the Trump administration, “Fire and Fury,” with its many juicy, controversial revelations, including the astonishing tidbit about how, exactly, the president achieves his hairstyle.

I’ll let you discover that for yourself, but suffice it to say in involves scalp reduction surgery, and then an elaborate comb-up-and-over.

Amid it all, understandably, a genuine piece of fashion news got a little lost: the first designer appointment of the new year. Diane von Furstenberg named Nathan Jenden her new chief design officer (I know: C.D.O.; brings up strange, recessionary nightmares). He starts with a bang — and not a lot of time to settle in — at New York Fashion Week next month.

Jenden, who is British and went to Central St. Martin’s and the Royal College of Art, has a history with DVF. He was creative director of the brand from 2001 to 2010 — he and Von Furstenberg used to take their runway bow together — when he left to concentrate on his own line, which launched in 2005. That didn’t go so well, and most recently he was creative director of Bebe.

Meanwhile, DVF also couldn’t settle down without him, going through three designers in the last seven years.

Now both sides are older, wiser and have presumably realized what they missed without the other — which is probably a good thing in these days of crazy designer churn. A lot of fashion success is dependent on relationships (designer with founder, designer with C.E.O., designer with design studio, brand with consumers) and it takes time to build that kind of trust and understanding.

Anyway, enough with the lectures! Let’s see how it all plays out next month.

For now, I offer the following reads: Amber Tamblyn’s searingly honest Op-Ed about getting dressed for an awards ceremony; an inside look on how the experts pack for the men’s wear season; and the latest, weirdest slogan clothes. Have a good weekend!

Your Style Questions, Answered

Every week on Open Thread, Vanessa will answer a reader’s fashion-related question, which you can send to her anytime via email or Twitter. Questions are edited and condensed.

Q: My son is in college in Maine, and the temperature is frequently below zero. It seems like every woman is swathed in an ankle-length black puffer coat from November to March, so why do men have so few choices in outerwear that is knee length or longer? Have you come across any knee-length down coats for men? — Amy, Pelham, N.Y.

A: It’s true: Though dress coats hit at the knee and great coats (especially those that are military-inspired in heavy wool) can be even longer, in general men got the short end of the stick in the coat-length sweepstakes. It’s pretty clear this is one of those sexist fashion things — a long coat is somehow seen as not manly, unless maybe you live in Russia and it is fur. Because real men…have weatherproof legs? Or something.

Given that all sorts of gender rules are loosening up when it comes to clothing these days, however, a warmer time may be on the horizon. In the meantime, however, I asked Matthew Schneier, our deputy fashion critic (currently in Milan at the shows) for his advice. Here’s what he said:

“Where men’s outerwear is concerned, even the hardiest coats seem to come only to somewhere above the knee. To test the theory, I looked around at a range of brands known for their tough winter-wear (the North Face, Canada Goose, Moncler, Duvetica, Stone Island) and struck out at every one. Even L.L. Bean (which knows something about Maine winters, being headquartered there!) didn’t offer much that dropped below the waist. I suspect it’s that floor-length outerwear is pretty unwieldy, especially where there’s snow and slush on the ground, and many men (at the expense of their body temperatures) chafe at the idea of something long enough to be mistaken for women’s wear.

My solution, for what it’s worth, is to pile on the underlayers. Thermal-wear has come a long way since the days of heavy waffle weaves in one color (though I love those, too). I swear by Uniqlo’s Heattech line, which I wear, tops and bottoms, basically all winter. They’re thinner, softer and warmer than their predecessors, cheaper by far than a new coat, and they disappear under clothes. Friends report that there was a run on them at the New York Uniqlo stores last week when the weather was wretched here. I wouldn’t know; I order mine, as can you, online.” — VANESSA FRIEDMAN