YStyle Picks

Bench and B/Blog’s #100HappyGays

MANILA, Philippines - Local label Bench brought its A-game with a recent thrust into online expansion. The RTW brand fleshed out the full e-retail experience, in a bid to cast a wider net than its current demographic. It’s no small feat for a mass market brand to recreate the physical store experience, offering their wide lifestyle and apparel catalogue online, dominated by a retail landscape rife with brick and mortar.

What sets Bench further apart is the newly minted e-platform Bench Blog, or B/Blog for short. Much in the school of Net-A-Porter’s The Edit, MR PORTER’s The Journal, or in the same vein as editorial blogs with a retail skew from Opening Ceremony and ASOS, B/Blog features a weekly deluge of shoppable editorials, product reviews and lifestyle features from the eye of the present set. As directional as it is with its own content, we can only wish that other local brands will adopt a similar strategy to push the local retail envelope.

In a bid to welcome June LGBT Month, B/Blog set out a Pride campaign extolling the virtues of queerness, entitled #100HappyGays, a catch-all term that paints the full diversity of the LGBT rainbow. The four-part campaign features a 100-strong list of our queer cisgender and transgender brothers and sisters. “By capturing the various faces of gay, we’re showing a people loving, living, and building our nation’s tomorrow just like everyone else.” As apolitical as it is a celebration of life, love, light and fashion — B/Blog takes an uncharted (yet warranted) step in the right direction for gender equality and diversity.

Stella McCartney’s Garden of Earthly Delights

As the world shrinks smaller and smaller, waiting six months between shows for a worthy fashion escape is no longer an option. Enter the Cruise collections — or more commonly known as Resort. Much like pre-fall, mid-season designer collections have been more about the sale as opposed to the spectacle. Low-key look book presentations disseminated online are preferred, in juxtaposition, to full-blown runway shows in blue chip cities like Paris or Milan. All that is starting to change as the mid-seasons are shaping up to be more and more lucrative for designer and retailer alike.  And more and more labels are starting to pay attention. Who’s got her eye on the ball? London-based designer Stella McCartney.

No stranger to a good party, Stella McCartney knows a thing or two about putting on a fun show — be it a flash mob-style presentation for A/W 2013 in LFW, a quaint carnival block party for Resort 2013 or an English garden-themed S/S 2014 party just last year. The designer took it to New York City once again, presenting her Resort 2015 collection via the brand’s biannual garden party. The designer took a sleepy sculpture garden and transformed it into #StellasWorld.

In addition to Cara Delevingne and Jourdan Dunn leading the pack of models showcasing Stella’s Resort ‘15 collection, a food truck, a live band and human statues peppered the label’s Instagram. No shortage of star power was to be entertained as McCartney’s celebrity pals (and known Stella girls) Liv Tyler, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Hanneli Mustaparta and Helena Christensen were in full attendance. 

Featuring zany prints, sportif shapes and stripes, the clothes spoke volumes about Stella’s mood as quoted via Style.com “So often fashion constrains women and makes them feel like rubbish. For me, the Stella woman is about celebration, feeling alive and free and colorful. I want the girls to have fun, the boys to have fun — in fact, I want to have fun. Don’t you?” Who doesn’t love a good party?

I Don’t Speak Italian But I Do Speak Moschino

Making headlines with much pomp and pompadour, American gonzo designer Jeremy Scott ascended as creative director for Italian fashion house Moschino late last year. With his celebrity connections, social media savant status and his tailor-made design sensibility for the look-at-me set, Scott was the perfect successor to Franco Moschino’s irreverent legacy. The inaugural collection he sent down the runway for F/W 2014 was a ‘90s-style logo-mania reinterpretation of the Moschino house DNA. Pundits could not have imagined a more surrealist world than Scott had put out — pieces adorned with a cartoonish take on McDonald’s iconography, a subversive reimagining of Chanel’s classic shapes and a high-brow low-brow interpretation of French couture made out of oversized candy wrappers.

Love it or hate it, you can’t deny feeling the ripples from Scott’s Milan debut. His 10-piece capsule collection called “Fast Food, Fast Fashion” sold out a day after the show. Pop fixtures Rihanna, Katy Petty and Rita Ora, among others, have professed their mortal love and Instagrammed Scott’s labels to death on their personal accounts, eponymous or otherwise.

To add fuel to the fire — or insult to injury — Jeremy Scott enlisted maestro Steven Meisel to shoot his Fall 2014 ad campaign. Styled by Carlyn Cerf de Dudzeele, hair and makeup by runway staples Guido Palau and Pat McGrath, the all-star crew produced a stunning set of austere images that any magazine would be proud to call their own. The stark campaign is almost classic and indelible in its elegance, making quite the contrast to the flamboyant display that walked down the runway. Linda Evangelista, famously quoted as saying she “doesn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000,” led the Moschino campaign, looking true to form as one of the original supermodels clad in designer McDonald’s. In her wake, neo-supes Stella Tennant, Carolyn Murphy, Saskia de Brauw, Karen Elson and Racquel Zimmerman rounded up the star-studded line up, garbed in Scott’s fizzy couture confections. In an industry rife with hype and hyperbole, this is the kind of fashion moment we can definitely sink our teeth into.

World Cup 2014 #ManCandy

From a world that gave rise — from your nether regions up — to sportif names in fashion such as British Idol David Beckham and powerhouse Swede Freddie Ljungberg,  why does football command such fashion heft and celebrity quarter when no other sport can take so much as an advertorial? From designer collaborations (Belstaff and H&M by Beckham) to the annual Calvin Klein Underwear ad campaigns (starring footballers from the likes of our dear sweet Freddie, to Japan’s Hidetoshi Nakata and now, 22 year-old Brazillian Oscar Emboaba for 2014), we find an industry obsessed.

Could it be the impending frenzy brought on by the World Cup? Is it the global hysteria surrounding the sport? Or is it simply the sheer amount of regulation hotties per game, 11 per side? All of the above it seems — a mouthful and then some for any industry insider. No small coincidence that two international editions of Vogue casted footballers on the issues leading up to the Cup; Vogue Brazil had Gisele side-by-side with rising star Neymar, newly minted It boy of Brazillian football, whose name will be on everybody’s lips before this World Cup ends. Perpetual favorite and Real Madrid star Cristiano Ronaldo poses nude, sheathed only by model girlfriend Irina Shayk for the cover of Vogue Spain.

We aren’t talking about who’s going to score the most goals or who’s the next Pele; we’re scouting the best bone structure, the lithest of frames, the tightest abs, or the biggest package who is available to pitch — for an ad campaign, that is. From someone who likes a little more beef in his choice cuts of meat (read: rugby), I can see why designers and industry executives  prefer the lither yet still undeniably masculine frame of the footballer. With the required  amount of international flavor (oh-so-European), the right features, and a frame made for designer clothing, the industry is out to scoop up the next David Beckham: to ubiquity and beyond.

If you had to ask us? From making a cameo in Shakira’s latest Waka Waka-esque video to headlining that all-star Beats by Dre commercial, with a wolfish smile on his face, our money is on Neymar.