A NEW LONDON FASHION WEEK
A new Pop Idol-style fashion competition that will run alongside the biannual London Fashion Week festivities is causing contention within the industry. The Red Bull-sponsored fringe event, which will result in a new designer winning £100,000 in prize money to launch his or her own design business, is seen by some as an innovative way to breathe new life into the London Fashion scene, while others claim the money would be better spent helping out designers who are already struggling to establish themselves. "I do not want the people from London Fashion Week to think we are in some way trying to destroy their little world," fashion commentator Colin McDowell, who has been hatching the new scheme over the last two years, told The Sunday Times. "But I feel the most dangerous thing you can do is to praise something just because it happens to be British. What we need to do is to reactivate young participation. We had one of our greatest moments for emerging designers when students were so politically opposed to Thatcherism. There was a fashion of protest that made things edgy. Nowadays they don't fight so much. We have 40,000 fashion students. But it is not just them we want to attract. The winner could be a solicitor from Scunthorpe." Katie Grand, stylist supremo and editor of Pop magazine, will chair a panel of judges to pick four finalists who will receive £10,000 to spend on a catwalk show next September. "We don't want to end up as a TV fashion academy," she said. "But we do want to find somebody quite wild rather than someone who can make a good pair of trousers." John Wilson, chief executive of the British Fashion Council counters that there is plenty of already-tapped talent in the industry, however. "Colin McDowell might make a better Simon Cowell of the fashion industry than me," he said. "But is the solicitor from Scunthorpe going to be what we are looking for? The money for this competition should be redirected into business which have already started." (January 6 2004, AM)
although i dont like this idea of a 'manufactured designer' i've always wanted to make it on my own.........
