Thursday 23 September 2010

Hermione De Paula - London Fashion Week

My favourite dress. It is a very flattering shape and I adore the dropped shoulders. I can see Gwyneth Paltrow in this. Hermione's fabric prints are beautiful.




This dress fabric floral pattern reminds me in essence of a Celia Birtwell print.











I was very pleased I made the effort to go and see Hermione De Paula's collection at London Fashion Week on Tuesday afternoon. The show was part of the Vauxhall Fashion Scout presentations of new' up and coming' UK based designers.
I was also invited to see Charlotte Taylor, Georgia Hardinge and Lilee in Covent Garden earlier in LFW, a review of which I will post later.

The venue in the Freemasons Hall in Covent Garden was excellent and created a perfect setting for Hermione De Paula's show. I met Manolo Blahniks niece Kristina in the queue for the show. She looked totally glam - it was very hot and she had a fur coat with her, so a conversation was struck up about how difficult it was to make a decision about what to wear. She had wonderful shoes on of course which made her very tall indeed. She told me her mother had been running the business for some time and that she would be taking over. She said that Manolo Blahnik is very much a family business and that she was looking forward to her new role.
Wish I had taken a photo of her shoes, they were beautiful.


Educated at Central Saint Martins and graduating with a first class degree Hermione De Paula's collection of hand painted and collage print designs was apparently inspired by the purity of sexual awakening, using a female character from a mythological tale as muse.
She mixed textures perfectly, combining cashmere woven and crocheted tops with hand printed silk dresses, her large looped knitted attachments looked like the muse has walked through a large spiders web and wrapped the woven blanket around her like a shawl or skirt. The clothes were constructed with movement in mind and came to life with the motion of the models down the catwalk. Wonderful !

Photographs Schelay McCarter copyright