Its over!

So, with that last post, I believe that I have showed you all that I could of the 8th Hellenic Fashion Week. It was exhausting, but oh-so-satisfying. I do feel that I kind of have to apologize because I had to bug you about it for two whole weeks, but as I mentioned before, it would feel wrong if I didn't publish here all the photos, videos and sketches I had gathered. So, I hope you enjoyed my amateur fashion journalism. And if you didn't, well, it's all over now! Back to our old habits.

Athens Fashion Week: Marios Schwab

The last show of fashion week I went to was Marios Schwab, and let me tell you, that didn't start off good. Herr Schwab had the crowd waiting outside for more than half an hour. Very un-german-like of him.

Many people with invitations took off before even the show started, saying stuff that shouldn't be repeated here.

But once the wait was over, in we went and enjoyed a great show.

What I remember most fondly isn't the actual clothes, but the way the models stopped and posed facing each other every time their paths met in the middle of the runway. Very nicely choreographed and the music was a great match too.

Athens Fashion Week: Parthenis

Orsalia Parthenis, the woman behind the brand, is the one of the most promising greek designers that showed last week. I would wear almost anything from her collection with great joy - minus the price tag of course. The color palette was the epitome of summer shic: light blue, navy, white, cream and pale yellow and all the fabrics looked so lightweight they could fly away on their own. I also wish I had shot a video from the show, so you could also see the way those hair bounced as the models strutted on the catwalk, like a summer breeze was going through it. Made me miss summer!

Athens Fashion Week: Victoria Kyriakides

Victoria Kyriakides' show was apparently inspired by the seventies: glam rock hippie chicks came down the runway dancing nonchalantly with their hands in the air, wearing headscarves, long skirts, chunky jewelery and skin-tight black and white. Not my cup of tea, but an interesting choice, compared with all the other designers that showed in the 8th Hellenic Fashion Week.

More of Athens Fashion Week: Andria

I get a feeling that all these show pictures that I am still posting almost a week after fashion week has ended, are getting boring for many of you. Even for me it feels weird that I haven't done something more personal, like an outfit or a DIY post, for such a long time. But, I still have unpublished fashion week pictures that are totally posting-worthy and I feel it would be kind of selfish not to share with you guys. I promise though, there are only a couple of AFW posts left, and then it's back to the old habits!

So, for today I selected some photos I took at Andria's show. It's not so much about the clothes, as they were quite overdone as a concept: satin dresses, romantic fairy look. Beautiful but boring, if you ask me. But the colors... See for yourselves:

Angelos Bratis at Athens Fashion Week

Angelos Bratis showed his 2009 spring/summer collection on Saturday, October 11th at Catwalk B.I don't have any decent pictures of the clothes to show you, but I managed to capture this (click on the pictures to see better)
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Jean Charles de Castelbajac in Athens

Jean Charles de Castelbajac was the guest of honour of the 8th Hellenic Fashion Week.

JCDC - a play on the rock band ACDC and "easier for young people to remember" as Castelbajac himself stated - showed his spring/summer 2009 collection in Technopolis of Athens on Saturday, October 11th, just a week after his - very successful - Paris Fashion Week show in Carousel de Louvre, which was gatecrashed by Bruno.

If I had to use just one word to describe his show in Athens, it would be fun. If I could choose three, it would be fun, fun, fun. Lame jokes aside, you get the picture. Many of you may have already seen pictures and clips the from his Paris show, so you are probably familiar with the Obama dress, the cloud-print pants and men's suit, the credit card dress, the lego sunglasses and the Minnie Mouse shoes.
What we haven't seen before and never thought we would, was a bouzouki virtuoso opening the show, playing the traditional greek music Evdokia's rempetiko solo followed by a cover of Smells like teen spirit by Nirvana, while the crowd throwed carnation flowers on the catwalk, as it is customed in greek bouzouki night clubs.

After the catwalk was covered with the red carnations, an amazing drums-and-synthesizer duo took the stage and started blasting out the most get-happy music you can imagine, while the models came out strutting to the rhythm on their multi-colored Minnie Mouse shoes.




Unfortunatelly, I wasn't able to take enough presentable pictures of the clothes and the shoes. Fortunatey, all the collection is viewable in Jean Charles de Castelbajac's official site here.

You can also take a good look of the clothes in this backstage video I discovered in YouTube. As for the end, I saved a small clip I managed to shoot with my poor old camera, showing all the models dancing to "Girls just wanna have fun" and JCDC himself escorting the bride for the show finale.

FUN, FUN, FUN!

FOODWEAR: the Athens Fashion Week Workshop

First, let me apologize for the delay. I returned in Volos last night only to discover that all the craziness of last week and the 4-hour road trip took their toll on my health: I have caught a cold, nothing serious of course, but enough to keep me off my laptop for one more day. So, now that I made my excuses, back to our topic of the day. To briefly recap, the 8th Hellenic Fashion Week Workshops started last Monday and ended with a very impressive show on Sunday evening. I've already posted pictures and details from our first, second and third day in the FOODWEAR workshop. To explain it in the shortest way possible, the goal was to produce fashion inspired by food, using the architectural way of thinking. We worked in groups of four all week.This is us! From left to right: Katerina, me, Penelopy and Sapfo. I already knew Sapfo from Volos architecture school and had witnessed the amazing things she can craft, but Penelopy and Katerina I met there. Penelopy - who shares the same name as me, Lopi is just a nickname - is studying architecture too, but in Thessaloniki. She was a real sweetheart and so valuable to our work. And Katerina, I've already mentioned her before, but I would like to say it once more: It was a real pleasure meeting her. She truly is an amazing person, so wise and mature for her age, but also very fun to be around. I just hope she will soon get over her non-technological phase and set up an email account, so we can keep contact the digital way.
But, lets get back to our project: Inspired by the food we ate on the first day, and specifically the stuffed tomatoes (yum) we decided to work on the "food you stuff with other food/food you use to wrap other food with" concept. We made the observation that in tha case of stuffed tomatoes, the stuffing gets molded into the tomato shape, like the corset molds the body into its own shape. The exact opposite is the way dough gets its shape by wraping it around a sausage when making small sausage pies or loukanikopitaki, if you prefer the greek word. So we decided to work on that and produce a garment that will "reflect" the shape of the body by describing its curves. We decided to use stripes made from non-stretchable material that would stay the same while they followed the vertical curves, so the eye would read the shape behind by seeing the gap between the stripes. We used cardboard that we cut into bands and connected with elastic to make the first dress. You can see it modelled on Sapfo's curves:
But we wanted to try different materials and techniques as well, to see what other results could be produced. So, we sewed a white foam sheet on a very elastic black fabric using lots of parellel stitches and then we cut between them to make stripes. When worn, the black fabric stretches around the body, but the stripes remain unstretched, thus producing the same effect as the previous dress: describing the curves optically using the gaps between the stripes.

And of course, we had to present the results of our hard work on Sunday's show. We had our hair and make-up done by the MAC make-up artists that also did all the models for the shows and we had to walk the stage like a catwalk. Talk about scary! But the audience and our professors were ecstatic about our performance, so we must have been good.
For more pictures from all the projects and the show visit the official blog of the FOODWEAR workshop here. Thank you for your patience all this last week. More pictures from the Fashion Week shows will be up tomorrow!

End of Athens Fashion Week

I have so many things to share and so little energy to do so. The 8th Hellenic Fashion Week ended tonight with the workshops' presentation, in which I myself participated. On stage. OMG. Of course I have pictures from our show, as well as from the fashion shows I watched these past two days, but right now it's impossible for me to edit anything. So please visit back for pictures from the shows of Angelos Bratis, Kathy Heyndels, Jean Charles de Castelbaljac, Parthenis, Andria, Victoria Kyriakides and Marios Schwab. Oh, and this also happens to be my 100th post. It was a great day.

AFW Workshop, Day 5

Lots of creativity in the workshops today. We are almost there, but there are still lots of things that must get done. All wearables that were created in the workshops during these days will be presented on a show that will close the 8th Hellenic Fashion Week. It kinda feels like a big thing for us. All of you in Athens on Sunday, please come and support us! You won't even need an invitation (I'm inviting you). But even under all this stress, we couldn't ignore the runways. I have to admit though that today it was impossible for me to watch all the scheduled shows. I missed the Collage Social Installation and Dimitris Dassios, who I was told makes the most amazing costume jewllery. However, I did manage to watch Demna Gvasalia, Maria Mastori/Filep Motwary and menswear designer Juun.J, so check the pictures!