In addition to the boom of floral prints expected for Spring, we'll be seeing a lot of rose-colored frocks. Red is a classic color, and appears every season, but the most common shades this season are rose and poppy colored. So it seems, florals are back in more ways than one. Click through our gallery with rose and poppy colored garments from Carolina Herrera, Rebecca Taylor,Three As Four, Temperley, and Tracey Reese. To drive the point home, we've even included a few red floral prints.

So you've got your Easy's, your Chucks, your Toms, and now you've got your People's Shoe. It's just a little canvas and leather, an easy rationalization to have goof-around shoes for less than 50 bucks. So what's the deal with these one's? They're a common shoe for migrant workers in Shanghai and someone was smart enough to import them to hip American kids who'll spend $40 on their basic kicks. The company donates a percentage of their yearly sales to charity (this year to The Starfish Project) and their packaging is green and simple.

One of the designers in our pre-fashion week video series is New York designer Chris Han. Han's traditionally dark palate in trim silhouettes, is not without a particular lightness (manifested, in the past, with chiffon, beading, and draping) that make her designs well-balanced and, therefore, well received. This time around, Han tells us about her A/W 08 collection, inspired by angelic imagery, and her preparations for fashion week. Fashion week is just around the corner, so here's a taste of what it takes to make it happen.

More: Pre-fashion Week Studio Visit With Joanna Mastroianni
More: Pre-fashion Week Studio Visit With Sue Stemp

Last week, at a lecture in which David Wolfe, creative director of The Doneger Group, spoke about Spring 2009 trends, he began with the topic of appropriation. Nothing new can come of fashion, he warned us, and consequentially appropriation will be a great battle in the years to come. Also touched upon, was Wolfe's articulation that one of the most interesting ways for designers to find newness is to look to art and architecture for inspiration. There, he said, newness is abundant.


A parallel story, in this narrative of appropriation, are artists like Richard Prince (who recently collaborated with Marc Jacobs, a designer not free of appropriation scrutiny) who recycles cultural material to make his own (even if it simply involves enlargement). Prince is not alone, that is, hundreds of Parson's and Chelsea College graduates are investing in their pop-saturated upbringing in this way (Parson's is also notorious for lecturing it's fashion students on the impossibility of newness, and the delicacies of fashion plagiarism), by openly sampling images or media to use as the basis of their work. The trick, it seems, is appropriating content from another medium.


Today we discovered another young artist in the Prince/Warhol gamut, Shane Bradford, pointed to us by our London-based Coutorture partner, StyleBubble. Bradford gives us more evidence of the entwining concept of property in art, where if only designers appropriated art (and not other designs), they'd be off the hook.

Vogue, British edition March 2003, Nick Knight, model: Natasha Vojnovic