Fashionista wonders whether female fashion designers face similar challenges on this side of the pond? As reported in the Guardian, women actually dominated at last year’s British Fashion Awards – Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen won the ‘Designer of the Year’ award, Stella McCartney won the ‘Red Carpet’ award, Victoria Beckham was the recipient of the ‘Designer Brand’ award and Mary Katrantzou won the ‘Emerging Talent – Womenswear’ award.

Fashionista is proud to see that her British ‘sisters’ are doing it for themselves and hopes that female fashion designers will enjoy equal recognition internationally.

The CBRE announced its annual survey results last week which maps the global footprint of top retailers around the world to identify trends in global retail.

Fashionista spotted some other interesting facts in the report. In particular, it shows that US fashion retailers are focusing with renewed effort on Europe (despite what some may think in terms of general economic forecasts). Indeed Europe continues to be the most targeted region at a city level – Asia falling into third place. But the downturn is having an impact on strategy with CBRE noting that international retailers now think more in multi-channel terms for different markets within Europe – so that may be e-commerce for Scandinavia and wholesale for German.

And where do you think the most sought over new city for retailers was last year then? No, not Shanghai or Abu Dhabi. Almaty! That’s in Kazakhstan by the way. Fashionista is planning her Kazakh mini-break already in that case!

If you, like Fashionista, find clearing out formerly-loved items from your wardrobe oddly satisfying then you will share our excitement in hearing that Marks & Spencer has just made this a little bit easier and a little bit more fun.

As reported in the Daily Telegraph, with the launch of Shwopping, M&S is aiming to divert used clothes from landfill to Oxfam where they will be re-sold, re-used or recycled. Drop-boxes are provided at all M&S clothing stores with the intention of making donating easier. This in itself should help raise collection numbers but it’s the addition of the full-force of the M&S marketing weight (and it’s gone all out) aimed at long-term engagement of customers and the cross-channel strategy that makes the campaign particularly interesting.

With Joanna Lumley fronting TV, press and online coverage, a Facebook app encouraging ‘Shwoppers’ to share their activity and earn points along with an sms campaign this isn’t just an eco-campaign it’s an experiment into the possibilities open to a retailer seeking to be truly multi-channel. Fashionista looks forward to seeing how effective this strategy is both at encouraging donations and testing cross-channel possibilities.

Fashionista will be following developments closely in the lead up to Wednesday 21 March by logging onto Olswang’s Budget Blog where Olswang’s award-winning tax team will reporting and commenting on the Chancellor’s announcements. The blog is interactive so Fashionista encourages her readers to get involved.

Fashionista has therefore been relying heavily on using her old favourites and still doing a fair amount of online shopping from UK based sites. Surprisingly, e-commerce isn’t a big market here with a lot of websites being little more than a basic marketing page for major brands and often leaving important details like pricing out! The general consensus has also been that there is little prospect of this changing in a big way as brands tend to bypass e-commerce for the opportunities presented by mobile commerce and apps.

An exception to this in the region is China and Hong Kong particularly in the luxury goods sector where the country’s e-commerce sales surpassed 10 billion yuan last year and this is only set to increase. A good sign of this trend is the news reported by Jing Daily that NET-A-PORTER has acquired Chinese e-commerce platform Shouke Limited and will be opening a distribution centre in Hong Kong.

Now if Fashionista can only up her Mandarin from “Hello” and “Chicken Rice”, she may have an exciting new shopping option closer to her new home!

Fashionista

On Saturday she saw J JS Lee‘s dreamy collection which was inspired by the view outside an aeroplane window.  The designer achieved the perfect balance between simple shapes and detailed tailoring, fluidity and structure and muted tones and flashes of yellow. Vogue said the collection was “a lesson in pared-down minimalism and chic tailoring“, summarising, “She’s definitely one to watch“. 

Holly Fulton‘s show was a complete contrast.  The show channelled Lady Chatterley, Stepford Wife and saucy French beatnik-brunette. It was a visually electric, featuring Holly’s signature graphic prints in hot fushia pink and aquamarine.  Her high-glamour designs will definitely brighten up next winter.  Vogue said of the collection, “with its smoldering prints and flirtatious cuts, [it] will have Fulton’s acolytes adequately dressed for a seductive season“.

Fashionista is always impressed with the quality of the collections delivered by these  young designers, knowing at first hand the limited resources available to them, which is why organisations such as the CFE and NEWGEN, (who also sponsor both J JS Lee and Holly Fulton) are so important. 

NEWGEN has been sponsored by Topshop since 2001.  In honour of Topshop’s 10th anniversary of sponsoring NEWGEN at London Fashion Week, it has produced a range of t-shirts designed by prestigious NEWGEN alumni, including Peter Pilotto, Richard Nichol, Jonathan Saunders, Marios Schwab, Gareth Pugh, Ashish, Louise Gray, Nasir Mazhar, Meadham Kirchhoff, Roksanda Ilincic, j.w. Anderson, Emma Cook, Peter Jensen, Holly Fulton, Craig Lawrence, House of Jazz, Michael van der Ham, Erdem, Mary Katrantzou and Christopher Kane, many of them CFE sponsored designers.  The t-shirts can be purchased at London Fashion Week or online.  Buy one to celebrate the Capital’s thriving young talent, and support Centrepoint, the charity supporting young homeless people, at the same time. How can you say no to that?!

Even though such university sponsorship may not be offered solely from the bottom of your Manolo Blahnik’s (you’ve got to find that next Alessandra Rich somewhere) so long as the primary purpose of the sponsorship is to advance someone’s training and education through a university degree, such student sponsorship contracts have been ruled not to be contracts of employment.

This means that if your student protégés try to assert they have a right to be employed at your Company once they are fully fledged graduates, you can confidently assert otherwise.

However, whilst this recent judgment is very favourable to employers, care still needs to be taken with how sponsorship arrangements are documented and run.

Fashionista has thought of four easy-care instructions you may wish to follow when ironing out the clauses in any student sponsorship agreements:

•  Avoid wording which refers to ‘employment’, including ‘continuous employment’, ‘employment rights’ and ‘terms and conditions of employment’.
•  Ensure the sponsorship agreement clearly states that its purpose is solely to provide training and education.
•  There should be no obligation for the sponsored student to undertake either paid or unpaid work with you during their university breaks and they should be free to work  elsewhere if they choose to do so (even with your competitors). 
•  Make any future offer of employment following the completion of the degree expressly discretionary, even if a condition of the sponsorship is for the student to offer you their paid services for a fixed period of time after the completion of the course.

However, if you do provide this type of service or functionality you need to be careful that you don’t make any statements which imply (directly or indirectly) that such reviews are “genuine”. Otherwise you run the risk of being deemed to be undertaking misleading advertising.

This advice comes on the back of a ruling this week by the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK against the well known travel site TripAdvisor. The ASA was unhappy with the claims they made on the site that reviews were from real travellers and could be trusted since this could not be verified. The ASA concluded that the claims were in breach of both misleading advertising and substantiation rules in the CAP Code. The site has been told that it can’t make any such statements again.

As reported in the Telegraph, TripAdvisor has defended user generated content as a valuable tool. “Of course, there are a small number who try to post false reviews. We target, catch and penalise those that do. But no site could guarantee that every single contribution is 100% accurate. Indeed, this would be true of any organisation, online or otherwise, verified or not, taking views from consumers. In reality, the impact of these attempts is negligible because they are drowned out by the vast majority of genuine voices that make up our community.

Aside from the benefit of strong projected rental and capital growth, this investment is also a long term measure to protect LMVH’s presence in a key market.  As the list of international retailers looking to establish flagship stores in central London continues to grow, the purchase of a shop in this location will also provide a safeguard against the increasing level of rent, which Cushman & Wakefield has predicted for prime Bond Street Zone A premises could reach £1,500 per square foot by 2013.

Fashionista expects the trend of retailers’ becoming property owners to continue in high profile markets where demand is outstripping supply and, in turn, an increasing number of cases of a retailer becoming the landlord of a competitor tenant - what Fashionista would give to be a fly on the wall during discussions when these leases are due for renewal!

The highlights Fashionista says you must know are:

- The new rules could, if adopted, come into force as early as 2015 and there are a lot of changes all businesses processing personal data will need to take before then to ensure compliance.

- The Regulation will mean a harmonised set of laws across Europe which may will make life easier for you if you have a presence in different countries in the EU. But there’s not much other good news in the proposals unfortunately.

- If you are currently based outside the EU but do target European customers, then you won’t escape the rules anymore and will need to appoint a data protection representative in one of the EU jurisdictions where such customers are located to fulfil the compliance obligations.

- The rules will mean a lot more admin for you including privacy impact assessments, maintainance of a paper trail of all processing operations, data security evaulation and measures, appointment of a data protection officer etc.

- All companies will have to make a notification in the event of a security breach and will need to have a team and processes in place to prevent breaches and handle the process correctly and promptly if issues arise.

- If you are working on data projects or systems at the moment then you need to take a pause to re-think how they will need to change to reflect the new proposals.

In short, with new fines available of up to 2% of global turnover for breaches possible, and at the same time more obligations to perform, data protection compliance will no longer be something to give just lip-service to and must become a key consideration.