Fashion Diary: When the designer is you

Gossip, first impressions, trends in the making, celebrities and style setters. A regular feature by fashion critic Booth Moore.

 

Watching all the Twitter feeds and YouTube videos posted by the citizens of Iran this week, I can't help but think it's time the Internet started revolutionizing the fashion landscape as it has the media and political landscapes. New York designer Malcolm Harris’ new One Dress project may just be the ticket, not to mention the first true expression of democratic fashion, way beyond mass retailer H&M and luxe label Jimmy Choo trying to cash in on yet another collaboration.

A graduate of FIT in New York, Harris makes his first foray into the industry with the Madonna-fronted line Katsumi & Malcolm in 1996, followed soon after by his own label Mal Sirrah.  Then, three years ago, finding himself disenchanted by the fashion merry-go-round, the celebrity freebie mentality and the insatiable appetite for new merchandise, Harris took a break.

“Part of being a fashion designer is solving problems, but I didn’t feel like that was what I was doing. I was making esoteric things but not solving problems,” the designer told me by phone today. So, he founded the charitable organization Designers for Darfur in 2006 with Lydia Hearst, organizing a runway show to raise money for refugees and  experimenting with MySpace for the first time to publicize it.  Although he admits it sounds hokey now, while trying to chart his next move, he kept playing over a scene in his head from the film, “The Color Purple,” in which Celie makes a pair of pants that  fit everyone. “I always wanted to create something that would be a gift in that way.”

The Internet was the key.

Fashion Diary: Is Bravo TV the next big fashion brand?

Gossip, first impressions, trends in the making, celebrities and style setters. A regular feature by fashion critic Booth Moore.

I'm doing research for a series on the future of fashion and was interested to hear that Bravo is now expanding into the fashion retail space like never before, by launching co-branded handbags with Kooba that will be featured in the upcoming series "NYC Prep," debuting June 23.

It's a new step for the network, Jennifer Turner, Bravo and Oxygen Media's VP of Licensing and Strategic Partnerships, told me on the phone this morning. "It’s our first foray into the area of fashion, in creating the Fashion by Bravo brand, and Kooba was the perfect partner to gain legitimacy and offer something special." The bags, labeled "Kooba Exclusively for Fashion by Bravo," will be sold for $595 at Bravotv.com and Kooba.com. (Other partnerships will follow in the fashion and food categories, Turner said.) (Note: An earlier version of this post said the bags were labeled "Kooba for Fashion by Bravo.")

It's also a giant leap from how fashion on TV has been merchandised before, which was largely through low-budget websites that directed viewers to stores where they could find the pajamas Debra Messing wore on "Will and Grace," for example. "Sex and the City" the movie did a few fashion merchandise tie-ins (I'm remembering lingerie), but I imagine those would have been more successful on a TV show, which has more frequency.