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Top 4 Outfit Ideas for a Summer Date

Dating can be expensive. Between the fancy dinners, the weekend movies, and all that mini-golf, you may groan at the prospect of having to spend additional money on new outfits to impress your date. Not to worry. Here are four simple summer outfit ideas to take your “spree dating” to “free dating.”

  1. Thrift store style – Before you head to the biggest and most expensive stores in the mall, stop at your local thrift store. Go retro. Be original. Be the Sleek Saver, and shine on that upcoming date with elegant, time-tested style.
  2. Summer hats and sunglasses – It may not be much, but adding a fun summer hat or new pair of sunglasses to your summer wardrobe can shake up your style slightly. Even a baseball cap can be sexy if it means a day outdoors and a smile on your face.
  3. Jeans and a tee shirt – Not every date requires formal attire, especially with the plethora of outdoor activities available during the summer. Who knows. Your date may even enjoy your dress-down look more than that expensive alternative.
  4. Swimsuit and sunscreen – Nothing beats the summer heat like a trip to the local swimming hole or city pool. It may not be the first summer date outfit that comes to mind, or the most used in your wardrobe. It can, however, be a fun, flirty alternative to your everyday summer style.

Whether you meet this exciting new someone at the office, or through an online site like Parship dating, you’ll enjoy spending those warm summer nights with someone special. Saving a little money won’t be so bad either.

Filed Under: Celebrity Influence, Designers Tagged With: , ,

Seasonal Fashion Trend Tips

Models on the runway for Ed Hardy Fashion show...

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With the next season of clothing already hitting the shelves, you may be wondering what you should be wearing. If you love to be fashion forward and love to show off the style and cut of the clothing you were, take a few minutes to check out all of the latest styles. You can do that right online of course. The question is, what will you be wearing.

What Is Hot

Preparing for the next fashion season is a big deal. Companies spend millions of dollars researching what the next big thing will be. If you are able to wear it before your friends do, you will be the winner of the fashion contest. Here are some tips to help you.

  • Know what you love. Sometimes being able to look your best stems from feeling great. If you love a look or a style of clothing, go for it.
  • Color is a big thing this fashion season. There are numerous colors that will hit the pallet this year. Most will have vibrant life in them, which is a way for people to feel happy about the improvements they are seeing in their lives.
  • Fashionable clothing and products also will be all about the accessories. You will not be caught without a cute bag.

If you love to look great, being fashionable is the route to take. You can do that in numerous ways. Take a look at the latest trends. What are your favorite, must haves of the season? If you are not sure yet, you need to consider a few new options.

 

Filed Under: Current Fashion Trends, Designers Tagged With: , ,

Standing Out by Blending In?

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - AUGUST 31: Lauren Phil... 

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Certain colors look better in certain seasons, designer clothes tend to look better than generic clothing, and fashions do go in and out of style. Following fashions, colors, designers, and countless other “fashion sensors” can make some people feel adverse to trying to be stylish. Many people do not like fashion trends because they can try to make everyone look identical; however, there is a middle ground that can be rewarding without hindering one’s ability to stand out.

While fashion trends change as often as the weather, there are several guidelines that can make you look good without changing your wardrobe every few days. For example, most trends follow seasonal color patterns. These colors vary from person to person, based mostly on skin color and body shape, but there are several ways to find which colors work best for you. Also, following very general styles can help you stay fashionable without having to spend hours every day deciding how to dress.

If you also want to stand out, just throw your own twist into the clothing you wear. Jewelry is very useful in expressing yourself in your clothing. But, if you want to switch it up even more, try adapting a style to demonstrate your unique qualities. Most styles evolved from older styles, and spending half an hour on the Internet can give you a good idea of where a current trend originated and might give you ideas of how to make your style unique.

Fashion does not have to mean blending in. Fashion is about taking current trends and ideas, and combining them with yourself.

Filed Under: Designers, General Tagged With: , ,

Why we Love Plaid

Three examples of Scottish tartan.

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Plaid is a great color pattern and visual texture that’s hot right now. In truth, just like every other kind of fashion, it’s been popular in the past, too. Some people might even say that other than solids and basic stripes, plaid is the most popular kind of pattern to wear. And there is a very good reason for this.

Plaid is an extremely popular pattern for a very good reason. To start with, plaid suggests movement visually, even when you are standing still. In this day and age, it is very important for most people to seem energetic, because energy is power. When you wear just the right amount of plaid, you have a sort of movement to your look, even when you aren’t moving at all. This visual pattern, especially in pants and socks, invites a person’s eyes to travel upward along your body. Everybody loves to be checked out, in moderation of course. As well, a plaid pattern allows you to integrate a lot of different colors into one outfit without seeming garish.

In many ways, wearing a basic plaid pattern can set you off as more than just a monotonous plain color wearer, but not as wild and crazy as a someone who has on a more intricate design. In this way, you could basically say that plaid is the happy medium between dullness and outright madness in one’s wardrobe. So if you don’t want to come across like an old fuddy duddy and you don’t want to come off like you just escaped from the asylum, wearing plaid is the perfect way to strike a balance.

Filed Under: Current Colors, Designers Tagged With: , , ,

How Fashion Designers Can Showcase their Work Directly to Audience

Until the 1990s the fashion designers had to either start their own magazine, publishing company or tie up with a magazine which could showcase their work in front of the public and let the people decide whether the fashion designer was going to be successful with his or her talent and artistic impulses.

However this was a very tedious and whimsical process since the designer had to build a good relationship with the magazine’s publishers and if the publishers and designers did not have great personal chemistry, there would not be a successful launch of fashion related careers, or the careers would depend upon the blessings of the publisher.

The fashion designer could always go to hundreds of other publishers and depending upon what contract they could come up with, how their personal relationships were developing, the designer could always find some outlet to showcase their work.

With consolidation of media and fashion industry it became increasingly difficult for designers to display their talent to the masses and the fashion world saw increasing levels of conformity and uniformity.

This led to a brief but invisible decline in the rise of talented designers who were entirely dependent upon influential publishing houses for their career prospects. 1990s was a welcome change for thousands of fashion designers who could now go directly to people online to express themselves and their creativity and no longer had to depend upon exclusively on media conglomerates to showcase their work.

Fashion designers are often graphic designers themselves and with a team of as few as two to three people they can easily build their website and display all their work by using latest flash or upcoming HTML 5.0 standards. This has led to tremendous explosion in creativity and new fashion trends have emerged on regional and international level.

Filed Under: Current Fashion Trends, Designers Tagged With: , ,

The Trends in Consolidation of Fashion Related Media

Up to the early 20th Century, there used to be hundreds of magazines each with its unique owner, staff, philosophy and message in terms of what fashion trends, statement and prospective futures they wanted to publish.

These magazines were very creative in their approach, and even their advertisement sections were covered with highly distinctive colors, textures, patterns and materials used in innovative ways to depict families including kids wearing attractive and sublime clothing.

However as the century progressed the trend towards media consolidation picked up pace and hundreds of magazines were either bought through mergers, acquisitions or went bankrupt. This removed the broad presence of small town, mid sized city level magazines in local hands under local ownership and the consolidation led to increasing ownership by a few media conglomerates in large cities like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Miami.

This trend in print magazines consolidation of ownership seems to be universal and irreversible at least in the western world. Established publishing houses with enormous fortune have been rapidly able to buy out or muscle in new markets, shoving aside smaller players to dominate the trends in the fashion industry.

Today less than a dozen media conglomerates manage and own hundreds of magazines with annual circulations in tens of millions. For example, Conde Nast publications now owns popular magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Allure, Teen Vogue, GQ, Outdoor Life and many others. Same is the case with other media outlets where fashion and management decisions are no longer decentralized and closer to towns and cities.

However this consolidation trend has been mitigated to certain extent by the internet revolution and the proliferation of online portals, magazines with creative designers showcasing their work directly to the people without depending upon print magazines.

Filed Under: Celebrity Influence, Designers Tagged With: , ,

Do African Fashion Developments Have a Bright Future on Global Landscape?

Africa is a very diverse continent and there are hundreds of ethnic tribes, cultures and dozens of languages in that continent. Northern Africa, particularly Mediterranean Africa is much similar to Middle-East with elements of European culture and history woven into the regional and tribal fabrics.

For example Tunisia has a rich history as it was the seat of the Phoenician Empire which was a great rival to Roman Empire until the demise and destruction of its capital Carthage. The old ruins of Carthage are still evident in Tunisia and the people of Tunisia are very European in their clothing and design preferences. Men and Women like to follow European and Western fashion trends and statements, including what colors, shapes, textures are used in clothing, footwear, head wear, and personal items such as wallets, handbags and Ladies purses.

In contrast to Mediterranean Africa which is separated from rest of Africa by the great Saharan desert, Southern Africa is much more insular and native clothing and footwear is much more distinctive and natural compared to Western fashion and design.

Africans often tend to use much more natural materials compared to synthetic materials used in Eurasia and Americas. This emphasis on cotton, silk and other materials also influences the intensity and type of coloring pigments they might use for their clothes. Due to Equatorial and extremely hot and sunny weather prevalent during most of the year, climactic factors have deeply influenced African penchant for design. African clothing can be very color intensive and cheerful with extensive use of dark maroon, black and white colors signifying animals, natural phenomena, celestial objects and nature in general.

The head scarfs, caps and boots are appropriate for the kind of equatorial, tropical climate Africa is known for and there are striking regional variations in dressing style. South Africa and Zimbabwe have seen European contact for many centuries and this has made there clothing much more of a fusion between African and European fashion sense.

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The Pending Design Piracy Prohibition Act: Copyright Protection for Fashion?

For the last several sessions, Congress has considered the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (“DPPA”), which would extend a form of sui generis limited copyright protection to the “overall appearance” of new and original fashion designs for a period of three years.

Elements of the DPPA:

If enacted, the DPPA would provide a very modest scope and term of protection.  It is carefully calibrated to protect only innovative, high style fashion elements (i.e., designs of ‘haute couture’), leaving everything else in the public domain and available to copy.  In effect, it would capture only truly unique original designs.  This limit is consistent with the copyright law principle that basic creative elements remain unprotected; per the DPPA, those staple, commonplace, ordinary, and/or prevalent clothing design parts—such as sleeves, collars or even bell-bottom pants—are explicitly excluded.  As notable, the copyrights it would afford would extend solely for a three-year period: the concentrated time window in which such design elements are most likely to be infringed and designers most likely harmed by the sale of infringing lower-priced articles.

Effect of the DPPA in Practice:

Ultimately, the DPPA protection would be a very thin copyright, but adequate to defend against very similar knock-offs and possibly the item types often appearing in “splurge and steal” magazine columns (comparing new high-end fashion items to available cheap rip-offs to save readers’ money).  Perhaps most importantly, it would provide a fundamental safety net for small-scale or up-and-coming designers, as a general rule less able to rely on customer loyalty or luxury name attraction to effectively compete with cheaper copies of their original innovative designs.  Note that the bill would not affect out-and-out counterfeiting. Such “street-corner” piracy (i.e., selling fake Gucci bags on sidewalks) is already illegal under current laws; it continues due to enforcement problems.

Filed Under: Current Fashion Trends, Designers Tagged With: , , ,

Use Various Accessories To Get Attractive Look

A necklace pendant shown next to a loop of its...

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Now we are living in an advance society. Nowadays dresses take a major part in the life of both men and women. Everyone wants to catch the attention of others by wearing beautiful dresses. But a presentable, smarter and dashing look cannot be achieved only with dresses. For men there are many accessories which can make your dress complete. Some of the common accessories for men are sunglass, watch, belt, shoes, socks, pendant, bracelet, necklace, armband, bag, wallet etc. Some of these are really needed when you go outside.

Some accessories like bracelet, pendant necklace are most appropriate when you are going to a friend’s party or club. You can achieve a rocking and dashing look with a leather or metal bracelet. A beautiful pendant will be best suited with your party dress. If you wear a necklace then it will be a complete dress for your destination. It is not a bad idea to wear an armband if you have attractive and bold arms. There are many caps available in the shops which are best to wear while you want to achieve a dashing look. In winter season wear attractive caps and gloves so that you look attractive.

Shoes are considered as one of the most essential accessories for men. Varieties type of shoes can be purchased. Black and brown polished leather shoes are best when you are going to office. On the other hand many other designs are there which are best when you are going to a party or any normal place. Socks should be matched with your shoes. On the other hand your look can be changed totally with these things. Remember that all these accessories should not be used in any place. You have to know that which accessories are perfect for the place you are going. Otherwise you will look funny.

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