Wednesday 19 October 2011

From Russia with Love...


Здравствуйте!
So it's been a mega busy week as I was doing a spot of work over in Russia! Myself and superstar stylist and Fashion Director, Alexis Knox, were invited over by Aurora Fashion Week Russia to cover the events for Notion Magazine. We jetted off to beautiful St Petersburg to check out their selection of awesome catwalk shows, trade presentations, altelier programmes and conferences. Aurora Fashion Week Russia organises a whole bunch of events and initiatives throughout the year including Fashion Week, exhibitions, White Night Shopping, a Fashion Film
festival, industry conferences and Summer schools. It focuses on regional and federal politics within the Russian contemporary fashion scene as well as intergrating international designers and brands.

We shacked up in one of the oldest and most magical hotels in the city overlooking the magnificent St Issacs Cathedral which was a beaut of a view to enjoy over our morning, breakfast pancakes, or 'Blinis' as they are known in this neck of the woods! By day there was a series of 'Fashionomica' conferences hosted at the central AFW venue, 'Manege' exhibition hall, which is usually used as a centre for the contemporary arts, theatre and creative festivals set in a beautiful former horse guards riding school. Alexis churned out a hotttt presentation as guest speaker at 'Fashionomica' discussing the London design scene, economy within the industry and support structures for creatives available in the UK.


By night there was a string of back to back catwalk shows and various social events alongside static presentations, parties and press briefings. Aurora Fashion Week Russia presented the SS12 collections from designers around the world including Lithuania, Austria, UK, Ukraine and Spain alongside Russian designers hailing from St Petersburg and Moscow. Labels and shows included Tosha, Kute, Custo Barcelona, Arngoldt, Kamenskayakonova, Jana Segetti, Grazia Presents and Bessarion.
.

There was also a trade show running throughout the duration which presented designers including Petar Petrov and Minna Parikka as well as an Alice in Wonderland style installation from AFW's official interior partner, Kare. In conjunction with Aurora Fashion Week Russia there was also the 'Ready-To-Read' Festival, supported by the National Library of Russia and Dom Knigi, offering industry specific publications and plenty of awesome fasssshhhion books.

Ok, so that's my basic rundown of why I was over in lovely Russia....I shall whack out another blog post all about the shows complete with a few juicy catwalk images in the next few days as this entry is almost turning into a novel!
All and all our time in St Petersburg was so much fun and great to be introduced to so many new brands and an entirely different fashion scene....the city itself was like nowhere I've ever been before with pretty buildings aplenty, piles of Russian dolls, cherry dumplings galore and an abundance of spectacular, curly cathedrals! My full report on Aurora Fashion Week will be out in the next issue of Notion Magazine available at WH Smiths and the likes so keep an eye out for that!!!

In other news my brand new collaboration with handbag designer, Helen Rochfort, launched at retail today....woooo....the piece is called 'Schnitzel Time' and THIS is a direct link to her webshop....but I shall blog about that properly ASAP!! Also....some copies of 'Paper Magazine' arrived all the way from New York this morning with my juicy feature in so that was a nice suprise!
Ok, so that's all for now...and a whole bunch of random photos from the trip!!!
Love and Sparkles,
Emma
www.emma-bell.com
xxx

1 comment:

Jacob said...

Lovely photos.
Thanks for sharing.