Swanky Modes was a British fashion brand that opened in 1972 in London's Camden Town district. [1] It consisted of four designers: Judy Dewsbury, Melanie Herberfield, Willie Walters and Esme Young, [2] [3] and was located at 106 Camden Road, London. [4] [5]
In the 1970s, they used form-fitting designs and their clients included Midge Ure, Cher and Grace Jones. [6] They created the Amorphous Dress, which is now part of the V&A collection. [2] Swanky Modes also featured clothes in magazines and newspapers including Vogue, Nova, Honey, 19, ID, The Face, Boulevard, Interview, The Sunday Times, Express, Mail, and the V&A Little Black Dress Book. [6]
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Dame Barbara Mary Quant was a British fashion designer and icon. She became an instrumental figure in the 1960s London-based Mod and youth fashion movements, and played a prominent role in London's Swinging Sixties culture. She was one of the designers who took credit for the miniskirt and hotpants. Ernestine Carter wrote: "It is given to a fortunate few to be born at the right time, in the right place, with the right talents. In recent fashion there are three: Chanel, Dior, and Mary Quant."
Sir Grayson Perry is an English contemporary artist, writer and broadcaster. He is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries, and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".
Cristóbal Balenciaga Eizaguirre was a Spanish fashion designer, and the founder of the Balenciaga clothing brand. He had a reputation as a couturier of uncompromising standards and was referred to as "the master of us all" by Christian Dior and as "the only couturier in the truest sense of the word" by Coco Chanel, who continued, "The others are simply fashion designers". On the day of his death, in 1972, Women's Wear Daily ran the headline "The King is Dead".
Young V&A, formerly the V&A Museum of Childhood, is a branch of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which is the United Kingdom's national museum of applied arts. It is in Bethnal Green in the East End of London, and specialises in objects by and for children. In 2024 it was awarded the Museum of the Year prize.
Frank Havrah "Kaffe" Fassett, MBE is an American-born, British-based artist who is best known for his colourful designs in the decorative arts—needlepoint, patchwork, knitting, painting and ceramics. While still a child, Fassett renamed himself after an Egyptian boy character from the book Boy of the Pyramid by Ruth Fosdick Jones. His name rhymes with 'safe asset'.
Glen Luchford is a British fashion photographer and film director. He lives and works in Venice, California.
Viktor & Rolf is a Dutch avant-garde luxury fashion house founded in 1993 by Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren. For more than twenty years, Viktor & Rolf have sought to challenge preconceptions of fashion and bridge the divide between fashion and art. Viktor & Rolf have designed both haute couture and ready-to-wear collections. The duo is renowned for their avant-garde designs, which rely heavily on theatrical and performative fashion runways.
Outside Western cultures, men's clothing commonly includes skirts and skirt-like garments; however, in the Americas and much of Europe, skirts are usually seen as feminine clothing and socially stigmatized for men and boys to wear, despite having done so for centuries. While there are exceptions, most notably the cassock and the kilt, these are not really considered 'skirts' in the typical sense of fashion wear; rather they are worn as cultural and vocational garments. People have variously attempted to promote the fashionable wearing of skirts by men in Western culture and to do away with this gender distinction.
Timothy Walker HonFRPS is a British fashion photographer who regularly works for Vogue, W and Love magazines. He is based in London.
Brian Duffy was an English photographer and film producer, best remembered for his fashion and portrait photography of the 1960s and 1970s.
Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on 10 February 1840. She chose to wear a white wedding dress made from heavy silk satin, making her one of the first women to wear white for their wedding. The Honiton lace used for her wedding dress proved an important boost to Devon lace-making. Queen Victoria has been credited with starting the tradition of white weddings and white bridal gowns, although she was not the first royal to be married in white.
Judith Trim was an English studio potter. From 1969 to 1975, she was married to Roger Waters of the rock band Pink Floyd, her childhood sweetheart.
The Great British Sewing Bee is a BBC reality show that began airing on BBC Two on 2 April 2013. In the show, talented amateur sewers compete to be named "Britain's best home sewer". A spin-off of the format of The Great British Bake Off, the programme was presented by Claudia Winkleman for the first four series, with judges Patrick Grant, May Martin, and Esme Young. After a three-year hiatus, the series returned in 2019, with Joe Lycett taking over as presenter. The sixth series began airing on BBC One in April 2020 and the seventh began airing in April 2021. Sara Pascoe took over as presenter from series 8, which began airing in April 2022. Kiell Smith-Bynoe took over presenting series 10 in May 2024. Since 2022 Sunny Bank Mills in Farsley, West Yorkshire has served as the new filming location for series 8 onwards of The Great British Sewing Bee.
Niall McInerney is a fashion photographer, best known for his international catwalk photography.
Gerald McCann was a British fashion designer who was considered among the leading lights of the Swinging London fashion scene, alongside names such as Mary Quant, subsequently moving to the United States to continue his career with Larry Levine.
Esme Young is an English fashion designer and television presenter. Since 2016, she has been a judge on the BBC reality series The Great British Sewing Bee.
Audrey Walker was an accomplished textile artist, embroiderer and teacher, who was active from the 1970s and 1990s in United Kingdom. Walker became known for developing an innovative style of embroidery based on fine threads applied by machine and by hand, to create striking figurative wall-hung works of art. Walker described her work as evolving from fairly fluid ideas, and the process as being akin to drawing with fabrics.
Harris Reed is a British-American fashion designer and creative director for French fashion house Nina Ricci. He is the son of the Oscar-winning, British documentary film producer Nicholas Reed and the American model and candlemaker Lynette Reed.
Janice Wainwright was a British fashion designer. She was known for creating glamorous bias-cut and tailored pieces using high quality fabrics featuring intricate embroidery and applique and ran her own successful fashion label from 1972 to 1990.
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