Victoria Beckham wins Best Designer crown

The former Spice Girl Victoria Posh Beckham has added another feather to her glorious cap by winning the prestigious title of Womenswear Designer of the Year at the esteemed 2012 WGSN Global Fashion Awards in London.

The multi-faceted 36-year-old English singer-cum-fashion designer has beaten the likes of Alexander Wang, Christopher Kane and Jonathan Saunders, who were also nominated in the same award category.

 

Other than Victoria, Kim Jones at Louis Vuitton has won the best menswear designer’s title this year.

 

The WGSN Global Fashion Awards recognizes and honours the best in fashion and retail designs on a global scale. The award winner is selected through individually casted votes by a panel of industry specialists.

 

The global trend forecasting agency WGSN helps fashion and accessory brands to come up with innovative ideas for new collections.

 

Mrs Beckham, who only launched her fashion range in 2007, was included on an apparent selective roll call of the finest fashion designers that Great Britain has ever produced. Say what?

 

 

London Fashion Week: Tom Ford spring/summer 2013

Chastity and perversity are the twin themes of Tom Ford's spring/summer 2013 collection.

Tom Ford's style certainly polarises opinion these days, between those who find it backward looking and those who regard it as classic. The vote splits as soon as you're ushered through Ford HQ in Victoria and into the lifts by the same breed of chisel-jawed, side parted, uncannily smooth haired flunkies as the ones who used to line the route to the Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent shows a decade ago. All of them, it turns out, hired for the day from a model agency.

Some like the intimacy and the wink to the past (or maybe it's more of a mugging). Others, not so much. "A good journalist friend told me to quit talking at these things," Ford confessed, as he tapped away on his iPad, cueing up the models and controlling the soundtrack.

Naturally being Ford, it wasn't an entirely wordless affair, which is a good thing. The banter is what personalises these presentations. Two words in particular couldn't be dispensed with. "Chastity and perversity," he explained, were the twin themes of this collection.

Chastity came in the guise of camel cashmere sweaters, taupe skirts and long high necked black paper taffeta column dresses; perversity showed up in the form of black patent zip pencil skirts, caped backs, and the multi buckled leather strap, bondage sandal-boots.

There were plenty of what have become classic Ford tropes: backless black fitted chiffon dresses with cupped breasts (very 50 Shades of Grey ) and long, slashed, beaded skirts and skinny pants, updated this time thanks to an injection of sportiness.