Shades of green

Over the past few days I've been adding some stunning green clutch bags to my store. They are all made from Chinese silk fabrics that I bought in New York in the summer. Each one is a slightly different shade of green and vary from luxurious emeralds to rich olives. I've also added a suitably bright lining to each bag so that there is a flash of colour when the bag is opened.

You can find all these beauties in my Etsy store.

The fabrics remind me of some of the fabrics seen at the recent Dries Van Noten show in Paris.

I love the bamboo design of the clutch above and matched the yellow lining

to the yellow of the leaves in the design.

The clutch below has a stunning magenta pink lining, one of my favourite colours.

The clutch below is a stunning shade of emerald green and has a stylised peacock feather motif.

Dries Van Noten

I'm a few days late in mentioning this, but I had to post some images of the latest Dries Van Noten collection shown at Paris Fashion Week a few days ago, and seen on Vogue.com.

As a textile designer, I always gravitate towards pattern and colour and the Dries Van Noten collection had all of that, and more! Dries wanted a brutalist approach to this collection, chopping up garments and throwing flower prints onto them to create heavy contrast.

Some garments were asymmetrically designed. I love the extra long sleeve of the dress above. 

Vibrant colours sat against deep black or soft white grounds. The coat above is stunning and reminds me of many of the vibrant obi fabrics I came across in Tokyo.

Several outfits incorporated heavily beaded Victorian-Inspired neck pieces.

The blue one below picks out the blue from the print on other outfits and acts as a dramatic contrast to the beige and black dress.

The coat below reminds me of the Chinese silk fabrics I picked up on a recent trip to New York and am looking forward to making some more clutch bags out of it. Watch this space for the next instalment.

I love the combination of the acid yellow and brown of the outfit below, with stunning florals.

It's a bit difficult to see from these photos, but the runway was flagged by stunning floral arrangements that emulated rich botanical oil paintings. Each arrangement had been frozen in a massive block of ice to create a temporary ice display case for each piece.