Twitchett & Tonge Shoot

Earlier in July, I styled /produced a photo shoot for the Autumn Winter 2010 Shoot for Twitchett & Tonge. The designers approached me to style their shoot as they were wanting to take the label in a slightly different direction. My involvement in this shoot was to style and produce the shoot including; consulting with casting the model, co-ordinating the actual shoot agenda, sourcing accessories and directing the photographer, art director, make-up /hair artist and liaising with the designers. The results are stunning. You can read the designers testimonial about my work below and see a list of the team involved.

"Being designers and looking at your own work continuously for months on end, means that sometimes you need the eye of another creative fashion expert to help with promotion and advertising. Kate stepped in and helped with our styling for our upcoming Autumn/Winter collection 2010. Her attitude and professionalism was outstanding, which inevitably allowed the shoot to run smoothly and successfully.

Kate had excellent creative ideas that were relayed in her well thought out story boards. These boards were then effortlessly executed into some fantastic images. We were impressed with her energy into the project and we will definitely use her again in the future."

Label: Twitchett & Tonge
Photographer: Jarrod Barnes
Art Director/ Re-toucher: Myamn Creative
Hair & Make Up: Siobhan Kelly at Napoleon Perdis
Model: Shoona Stanes at Scene Model Management
Stylist: Kate Vandermeer of iSpyStyle
Gloves & Belts : Tribu
Jewellery: Kitte Accessories
Shoes: Peep Toe Shoes

Judging Fashion Exposed Debut Award

I've been a part of Fashion Exposed for some time now. When I was at stylehunter, I set up a partnership with Fashion Exposed to be a media sponsor and to help celebrate the emerging designers of tomorrow through the Debut Award.

Debut gives much needed promotion, financial support and the opportunity to showcase their collection as part of the Fashion Exposed trade fair. There are 3 Categories each year. 1. Avant Garde 2. Clothing 3. Accessories /Jewellery

I've been a judge on the panel who select the winners for Debut before and am judging again this year. It's a privilege to be involved in this and as such I've offered to give the 3 winners of each category a complimentary 1.5 hour consultation with me to help them understand what they could be doing to better market and brand their up and coming label.

I'll look forward to sharing the results with you next week.

Crowd Sourcing with AIMIA

The lovely Angelina Russo from Swinburne approached me earlier in the year after she saw me speak at Fashion Palette. She is part of research team at Swinburne currently investigating the role of Crowd Sourcing and User Generated Content in relation to designers.

We met up to discuss this movement and then I began to formulate the angle my talk would talk. I wanted to come from a trend observation point of view and use contemporary case studies. I wanted to discuss how in the current world we live in, we are so technology driven and demanding of others time, that speediness of brands responses to our feedback is imperative and we can actively make or break a brand in milliseconds through social networking. How does this impact on the consumer taking the control of an idea and promoting it Vs the old traditional method, where brands are interactive only with consumers during the selling period of the product.

The case Studies I focused on were: The Sartorialist and his style of recruiting for the Denim campaign for Saba (crowd sourcing was the unique point of difference for this shoot). I Spy Levi's using a jean hunt on twitter to create an interactive campaign allowing 2 touch points - offline and online. Threadless and Milk Shop Gang using the design community to create new designs whilst giving them a cut of the profits. Adidas Originals for their House Party interactive game where they encourage users to upload their photos to "adiatars" to create a house party online and ASOS -and locally Sportsgirl are using forums to generate market research into their own consumers.

So, the seminar was last night at Sensis in Melbourne featuring Adam Schilling from 99 Designs (a crowd sourcing business model for graphic design work) as well as Professor Lyndon Anderson (Deputy Dean of Swinburne). I felt quite out of place after meeting both Lyndon and Adam as their knowledge in this subject far surmounts mine, however it was most definately a stimulating and thought provoking night with many talented designers and interactive developers attending.