Thinking Globally in Fashion
Our global culture and its evolving nature are on everybody's minds, including fashion designers.
At Hong Kong Fashion Week, that concept was front and center at the runway show of Hong Kong-based deisigner Ika, who has been a staple of the catwalk crowd here for years.
Her collection for Fall/Winter 2010 was divided into three groups that represented how our culture is changing. Modern Nomad had designs that were influenced by peripatetic individuals crisscrossing the global to stay connected in business and for family. The grouping had a heavy Mongolian influence with fur hats and brown tones. Geometric prints were mixed with stripes along with floar designs and animal prints.
Nordic Winter carried cooler color tones such as glacial blue with burnt siena or lilac purple. Ika continues to experiment with geometric and angular symmetry colliding with liniear patterns. Geo Swirl had linear lines, squares, triangles, trapazoids and diamond shapes in figure-hugging outfits.
Ika is intense with detail and throws a wide net when designing. For her Jan. 19 show at Hong Kong Fashion Week, she sent 84 looks down the runway that encompassed dresses, jackets and pants. And each garment, she said, used seven to 10 different fabrics. For the entire collection, she employed 150 different kinds of fabric that she played with.
