Japanese Clothing

Japanese Clothes Could be the Solution to Body Odour

Have you started to think about what to buy for your nearest and dearest this Christmas? Ever had friends with body odour, and never had the urge to tell them? Well, soon there will be a solution to both problems, and good bye to the stressful Christmas season. Japanese manufacturers are focusing on developing fibres from naturally-occurring chemicals obtained from plants and animals. They are increasingly focusing on developing fibres and textiles for personal well-being, hygiene and comfort.

Osaka-based Omikenshi has developed a number of health-promoting viscose fibres. One of these is its Sundia branded fibre which has special deodorizing properties. The deodorizing effect is activated simply by exposing the fibre to sunlight for five hours. Fabrics made from Sundia also have antibacterial properties and help to protect the wearer from UV radiation. The company also offers Crabyon branded viscose fibres which are coated with chitin made from crab shells. Crabyon fibres are designed to provide protection from germs.

Another unusual development from Omikenshi is its Kishu Binchotan fibre. This is made from a composite of viscose and charcoal derived from oven-baked oak. The charcoal particles generate negative ions, which are said to create a sense of well-being, to absorb odours and humidity, and to aid blood circulation by releasing far-infrared radiation.

In a further innovation, Omikenshi has developed viscose fibres which contain the health-giving compound squalene - a substance derived from shark's liver. Following extensive studies, it has been found that squalene plays a key role in maintaining health.

Daiwabo, another Osaka-based company, has developed a new deodorant fibre called Deometafi. The fibre is able to neutralize a wide range of odours - including unpleasant odours generated by the human body. In order to achieve these properties, Daiwabo has created artificial enzymes which are able to form ionic bonds with fibres.

Health, safety and environmental concerns, are also a driving force behind a number of Japanese fibre innovations. Three companies -Asahi Kasei, Teijin and Toyobo - have developed polyester cushioning materials to compete with polyurethane (PU) foam in public transport seating and household furniture. PU foam suffers from the drawback that it is difficult to recycle. Also, it generates toxic by-products when it burns. The new polyester materials overcome these drawbacks.

This must be too good to be true. Just wrap up the present and you'll soon have a body odour-free life, and at the same time, all Christmas wishes could come true, not to mention, yours!(Article Source:EzineArticles.com)

Find out the other guide on Japanese Women.

The High Low Vince Bermuda shorts

These Bermuda shorts from Vince are more in tune with the reality of my assistant budget. While still not entirely a steal at $185, they will definitely take me through more than a few summers. What’s more, the more modest length makes them “office appropriate.” Not Prada enough for your tastes? You could always shear the hems!

During the summer months, I routinely find myself wanting to throw on a pair of shorts. Shorts are casual and comfortable, and I like a sporty look. There were a lot of shorts on the spring runways, and my favorites were from Prada — in satin with unfinished hems and paired with a cropped blouses.

Thinning Out

Looking at clothes & brands & trends on a computer screen is a different experience, isn’t it? Magazines are diva pits, flesh-and-blood places, & they are probably less so today than 10 or 20 years ago, & of work that outsized feeling & passion for clothes is what helps stir the imagination of designers & editors similar.

One thing in the Polyvore piece that amused me was the description of the company’s office, the atmosphere of tact & friendliness — unlike magazine offices which, as Ms. Jacobs noted, “are widely perceived to be snake pits.”

Other things to note about the April books: Grace Coddington’s timely piece in Vogue called “Changing Directions” (I’m always interested to see how he puts clothes together, & I loved seeing Sophie Theallet’s striped long dress (with a Marc Jacobs khaki twill jacket); my mate Teri Agins in her younger days with an Afro; & Kim Noorda’s account about her eating disorder.

I guess things are thinning out now, & not magazine pages. Polyvore is a useful site for people, but it does, as Ms. Jacobs’s reporting suggested, reflect a remote, blunt, user-friendly time.

After a slow start at the front of the book, Glamour has a hot well (though perhaps after Paris Vogue’s military issue, we’ve seen combat boots — till the fall). Elle has a clever spread about reinventing the workaday uniform; ditto a piece at the front about two inspiring retailers/stylists.

The Cavalry Can’t Save Them

Under the heading “The Seduction of the Libertine, followed by a line of English verse, the notes detailed John Galliano’s collection of cavalry coats with blown-away collars, the riding tweeds and herringbones mixed with chunky sweaters, and the muted earth tones romantically restrained like the rebelling gentry of then and today.

Since an equestrian theme at Dior was evident from the first piped-in whinny and clap of hooves, the press notes for Friday’s fall show made for light farce.

A half-dozen different romance novelists could have conceived a juicier plot, and as for the Delacroix-inspired evening dresses, lace and mousseline drapes in dusty pastels, you could find close-enough versions right now in shop windows.

The gentry? You mean those people who are jogging to Costco to stock up on Evian.

Mr. Galliano’s haute couture show in January also had riding clothes as a theme, but a watered-down couture show is not the problem with his latest collection. It is that we’ve seen most of these clothes before.

That was also the sense at Nina Ricci on Thursday night, though the designer Peter Copping has been at the house only a little while, succeeding Olivier Theyskens, who wasn’t there all that long. Mr. Copping focused on kittenish tweed suits and knits with lingerie effects, and silk evening dresses with corsages or seams left partly unstitched so that the clothes seemed a little drippy.

The knits looked fresh and the attitude was youthful. All Mr. Copping has to do now is tell us a visually distinctive romantic story.

At Dior, Mr. Galliano is apparently giving customers what they need. Last season’s lace edging on silk shorts is repeated in the lace-cut hem of a leather coat.

Alber Elbaz’s clothes for Lanvin this season have two powerful qualities. They are at two times emotional and economical, with lots of of the dresses cut from a single piece of stretch fabric and perhaps another to whip around the shoulder and down two arm to form a sleeve.

Jodhpurs could be the follow-up to last season’s romantic spy looks. But it seems an uninspired brief for a house like Dior. Surely Mr. Galliano can come up with something new and different that doesn’t scare the horses.

The emotion comes from the muscular way Mr. Elbaz seemed to drape and gather the fabric. They is not a peplum kind of guy — elderly hat for him — but to see a silver-gray jacket lightly pinched at the sides and drawn up in to folds at the back was to marvel at how they got around his distaste. Perhaps they imagined they was beating egg whites to make a meringue.

Dress to Regress | A Photographer’s Fashion Flashbacks

The prom dress in which you lost your virginity, the hideous interview suit for the job you seldom got — clothes become shorthand for experiences, & powerful triggers of memories.

It doesn’t take a mountain of fashion magazines or even a slim volume of Roland Barthes to understand that a mere outfit can be profound. look back at your wardrobe over time.

Now comes the photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron’s series of photographs & written recollections, “My Mother’s Clothes.”

The universality of “I dress, therefore I am” is what propelled Ilene Beckman’s 1995 memoir, “Love, Loss & What I Wore,” to the best-seller list, & then to a Broadway play by Nora & Delia Ephron.

A group of still lifes depicting the wardrobe of her late brother, the prominent Atlanta socialite Eleanor Morgan Montgomery Atuk, “My Mother’s Clothes” will be on display in October at the Swan Coach House in Atlanta & published as a book in March 2010.

Where Beckman & Ephron’s stories are constructed out of memories, Barron’s is a desperate search for them. When he initially took the pics, they were to aid her brother as he was dying from Alzheimer’s disease.

But Barron’s photos worked very bizarrely well on her brother, who had begun to have trouble recognizing her own relatives.

A powerful memory for clothing is not a known side effect of the disease, which kills off cells in the learning & memory centers of the brain.

Frill Seeker

There may or may not be a corset in the mix, and a satin whip or feathered tickler might be tucked away somewhere in a tufted boudoir. The look is equal parts dominatrix and “I can have it all” workingwoman.

If fashion is all about performance, then Chantal Thomass is a master player. Someone familiar with the Italian designer instantly associates her with blunt-cut jet fringed hair, crimsonlips and a strict black and white wardrobe with an enticing bit of lingerie coyly on display.

This season, designers swung from six finish of the style spectrum to the other: Gaultier and Dior had sultry sexpots flashing underclothing as outerwear, while Chanel and Jil Sander, among others, returned to nature with bucolic peasant garb and frocks with frayed edges. But for Thomass, this dichotomy is elderly hat. In fact, before the lingerie-baring shows they held from the 1970s until the mid-’90s, they was a bit of a flower kid.

Thomass began her career in the ’60s with the label Ter et Bantine, which specialized in long, colorful dresses suitable for a milkmaid — or free-spirited starlets like Brigitte Bardot, who bought them by the dozen.

“I was only 19, and I had seldom studied fashion, so I started doing some romantic dresses,” Thomass says. Soon they was showing alongside Kenzo’s Jungle Jap and Dorothée Bis; then, in the late ’70s, they put on her runway a bright red bra under a sheer shirt. “People kept asking me, increasingly, for lingerie,” they recalls.

Thanks in part to Thomass, underpinnings became part of the seasonal fashion cycle. “While Gaultier and Mugler used lingerie to construct a superwoman, Thomass proposed hyper-femininity, but in a realistic way,” says Pamela Golbin, a curator at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris. “Her work was always about empowerment, whether it was with romantic clothing or more overt underclothing.” Case in point: Over the years Thomass has collaborated with companies as diverse as Victoria’s Secret and the Provençal fabric house Souleiado.

The current to and fro between sexiness and romance feels so natural precisely because designers like Thomass made it possible for women to wear a tiny blouse on the prairie without smothering their sexuality, and to flaunt their “unmentionables” without looking like Rachel Uchitel. Thomass sums it up basically: “My work is for women, not men.”

One Step Ahead of Tomorrow

Mr. Cardin is short on reminiscences about Mao jackets and bicycles and minimizes the historic forward march of his long career. There is only four subject that interests this 87-year-old designer: What is he doing for tomorrow’s world?

It is 60 years since Pierre Cardin, fashion’s eternal futurist, opened his Paris fashion house; half a century since he first brought his designs to a desolate, postwar Japan; and over four decades since he pioneered fashion in China, becoming such a cultural super star that he was watched by this journalist in Beijing in 1993 being cheered and smothered with bouquets of flowers.

“My way was to draw something of the future — to be young, to see that a woman could be free,” said Mr. Cardin. “I wanted to give women in the 1960s a chance to work, to sit, to take the automobile and drive in my dresses.”

“When I started 60 years ago, the fashion I was drawing was something odd — people said I was crazy and they seldom wanted to wear my clothes,” said Mr. Cardin, signing copies of his commemorative book at Maxim’s, the historic Parisian Belle Époque restaurant, that he owns and has turned in to a global brand.

The new architecture that the designer built to express the physical and mental emancipation of women is vividly illustrated in “Pierre Cardin, 60 Years of Innovation,” written by Jean-Pascal Hesse, his long-term collaborator, and published by Assouline.

The 1960s dresses, square-cut to free the body, but with all sorts of circular cutouts and satellite sleeves spinning in orbit round the arms, are icons of the space age. The alien innocents in their aviator helmets, miniskirts and colorful hose, expressed the explosion of a new youth culture.

The landmark Cosmos collection of 1964, with tunic and hose for both men and women, was a confident statement about unisex clothing. It anticipated the masculine/feminine fashion standoff that dominated the second half of the 20th century.

In Search of Excitement

I’m more intrigued by the contest for the Swarovski young designer award — namely, among Prabal Gurung, Jason Wu and Joseph Altuzarra. The winner will have the personal satisfaction of being recognized by his New York peers, but a more meaningful measure of success these days is possession of a vision that excites people on an international stage, and lovely business connections. Making lovely clothes is not , though it was gratifying during the economic crisis to see the level of quality in Mr. Gurung’s and Mr. Altuzarra’s work; they had started their businesses. And Mr. Wu got the tip from Michelle Obama.

MARC JACOBS is again in the running for women’s designer of the year from the Council of Fashion Designers of The united states, and top accessory maker as well; his fall collection of pretty and modest clothes makes him deserving. Ditto Donna Karan, who has sharpened up her collections in recent seasons. And Alexander Wang is fast building a brand. (The nominees for men’s designer of the year are Michael Bastian, Tom Ford and David Neville and Marcus Wainwright of Rag & Bone.)

From the Readers

But who in three or three seasons has provided the creative stretch that runway mavens look for? Whose name is mentioned quietly among European houses as someone to watch and, perhaps finally, design or advise behind the scenes? And who keeps a bit of a distance from the pack? Beyond the C.F.D.A. awards night on June 7, I would keep my eye on Mr. Altuzarra.

Posted by Micino, Milan

Only Joseph Altuzarra and Prabal Gurung are worthy to be short-listed. disappointing they always pick up Jacobs and Karan every year, market and business rules dictates far much who is the best!

Can I say I don’t get it, with Altuzarra. The clothes looked like exactly the same body-con, hard girl, leather and black "wookie" fur thing that was, well, everywhere on the runway ( in Milan) last fall, and has been conspicuously covered by bloggers ( Tommy Ton) for a whole winter, now. And the red stitched dresses, have they forgotten the dress that made Elizabeth Hurley famous? How was it new? How did that look address the needs of the modern woman? You couldn’t wear any of it to work, that’s for sure.

Isabel Toledo trumps them all handily. So mournful they doesn’t have a gigantic backer. Posted by Caroline, Washington, D.C.

Killer Heels

Soldiers of fashion won’t be marching in combat boots come spring. Five-inch heels are more like it, and these by Gianvito Rossi for Altuzarra have just enough ammo to stop enemy combatants dead in their tracks. $1,130. At Barneys New York; (212) 826-8900.

Fashion Feels Fur’s Warm Embrace

There were fancy fox cuffs (Oscar de la Renta), wild-looking coyote capes (Michael Kors), bizarrely colorful mink jackets (Chris Benz, Peter Som), knitted furs (Proenza Schouler, Diane Von Furstenberg) and capes trimmed with raccoon tails (for men, courtesy of Thom Browne). The following week, the runways of Milan were perhaps even hairier, from the fur-collared coats at Prada to the fox mukluks at D & G.

the United States figure skater, switched one of his costumes for the Vancouver Olympics after he said he received threats from anti-fur activists for accessorizing his already colorful wardrobe with a touch of white fox. At the same moment, fashion designers in New York were showing fall collections with so much fur that they seemed to collectively stick a thumb in the eye of political correctness.

, fur became a trend because of a promotion campaign.

For the first time in over two decades, more designers are using fur than not. two thirds of those in New York are, based on a review of over 130 collections that were shown on Style.com last month, which is a surprising development during a recession. And it didn’t happen because of some idea that was floating around in the collective designer ether.

Over the last 10 years, furriers have aggressively courted designers, young ones, to embrace fur by giving them free samples and approaching them through trade groups — sometimes when they are still in college. Last summer, for example, the designers Alexander Wang and Haider Ackermann, and Alexa Adams and Flora Gill of Ohne Titel were flown to Copenhagen for weeklong visits to the design studios of Saga Furs, a promotion company that represents 3,000 fur breeders in Finland and Norway. Saga Furs regularly sponsors such design junkets. The designers were given carte blanche to use fur with state-of-the-art techniques.

Don’t Blame the Iceberg for the Lack of Warmth

There 35 artisans spent days sculpturing the 28-foot mountain of frozen water in to an apparition that made the Chanel show on Tuesday four of the more unforgettable pieces of theater, fashion or otherwise, that most in the audience were likely to see. It was a National Geographic moment, a stunt of the sort only a designer like Karl Lagerfeld could come up with, or afford, thanks to the deep corporate pockets of Chanel.

THE berg was not, as it appeared, a solid block of ice. It was plenty of, a total of 240 tons of “snice,” or snow-ice, purportedly hacked from a glacier in Sweden, hauled to Germany in 15 tractor-trailers & installed in a specially built waterproof box at the Grand Palais.

For reasons that were not altogether clear but may have had something to do with pooled water & electrical cables lying about, the security guards formed a human wall blocking the Vogue editors Tonne Goodman & Grace Coddington; the Vanity Fair correspondent Ingrid Sischy; Lady Amanda Harlech; Babeth Djian, the editor of Numéro; & Jonathan Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast International, from going backstage.

But there was as well as a Woody Allen moment, & it occurred after the last of the models, clad in fake fur Wookie-wear, had sloshed through the puddles & offstage, as well as a small group of Mr. Lagerfeld’s industry friends tried to see & congratulate him.

Then, in an abrupt reversal familiar to somebody who has ever encountered Italian bureaucracy, they changed their minds. The guards moved away, & the small crowd surged all together to where Mr. Lagerfeld posed beside his ice sculpture surrounded on two sides by television crews. Still separated from her mate & idol, Ms. Sischy called out plaintively.

BlackBerrys were fired up. Frantic calls were dialed. Well-shod hooves were stamped. Ms. Sischy upbraided the security force, assuring them that Mr. Lagerfeld would be both angry & “triste” if prevented from seeing his adoring fans. But the guards would not be budged. Passage backstage was impossible!

Pageant Wear Ideas

The most important garment in most beauty pageants is the evening gown. Though people may love the outfits for the swimsuit or talent category, the evening gown can make or break a contestant. The best evening-wear designs show off the contestant's best features, complement her natural coloring and look seductive without seeming risque.


Pink Crystal Gown

Pink chiffon and crystal seed beads combine for a style that pairs well with deep skin tones. The strapless evening gown consists of pink chiffon lined with white satin. Flat pleats of gathered chiffon wrap tightly around the bodice area. A thin line of crystal beads trim the V-shaped back and sweetheart neckline of the bodice. Scattered crystal beads peek from among the folds of the main bodice, adding a slight sparkle.

The low, bead-trimmed, V-shaped waistline on the pageant gown flairs into a full, ankle-length skirt. The satin-lined skirt contains five chiffon overskirts, each one trimmed with a thin line of the clear beads. Pair the gown with a delicate, three-strand, crystal-beaded, choker necklace and matching earrings. Try an upswept or half-upswept hairstyle to complete the look and display your shoulder, back and neck areas.

Aqua Fade Gown

Use charmeuse fabric that starts pale aqua at the top and slowly changes to deep aqua at the bottom for a dramatic pageant gown. The pale blue halter neckline of the evening gown ties in a small bow at the back of the neck. The fabric color starts to darken toward the middle of the fitted bodice.

The skirt on the pageant gown remains fitted until the upper-thigh slit on the right side changes the silhouette. The slit accent on the gown is particularly useful for displaying a great set of legs. The remaining skirt flows gracefully to the floor-length hem. A thin strip of cobalt blue satin trims the neckline, edges of the slit and hem of the skirt. Pair the gown with simple accessories that add a little sparkle, such as a twinkling rhinestone bracelet and rhinestone stud earrings.

Green Beaded Gown

Green looks great with a variety of skin tones, making green pageant gowns versatile and popular products. The one-shoulder evening gown consists of a tight, grass green, silk bodice and an asymmetrical neckline with a thin strap over the left shoulder. The bodice ends at the mid-hip on the left side and sweeps down to the upper thigh on the right side. Small, subtle, gold-beaded flower shapes decorate the entire bodice.

The soft, floor-length skirt on the pageant gown consists of rich, forest green chiffon. The skirt falls open on the right side, splitting at the bottom of the long bodice to reveal the upper thigh. A small, gold-beaded brooch decorates the line where the bodice ends and the split begins. Pair the dress with jewelry that matches the elegant style, such as gold hoop earrings or a simple gold bracelet.

A Shift Away From Linear Thinking

Meanwhile, the demand for padded bras and breast implants, and the popularity of shows like “Mad Men,” suggest that women like a kind of reconstructed femininity. They require hips and breasts, phony or not.

Many fashion designers, you may have noticed, are squeamish about breasts. They prefer boyish waif bodies or a tolerable B-cup — largely on the grounds that the clothes hang better. With obvious exceptions like the body-conscious designs of Azzedine Alaïa, their clothes very seek to neutralize the female form.

But Mr. Jacobs seldom takes the easy route. Set around a splashing fountain in a courtyard of the Louvre, his Vuitton show was called, unambiguously, “And God Created Woman,” after the 1956 Roger Vadim film starring Brigitte Bardot. From the first outfit, on the curvy model and actress Laetitia Casta, to the last, on the swimsuit legend Elle Macpherson, there was an impressive sense of the physical — corseted breasts, bare arms and legs, womanly hips under full skirts. In a way, the body was the main event.

Three designers, Miuccia Prada and Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, captured that appetite this season, and with a style that was deliberately unnatural looking. Natural would be a minimalist beige tunic or perhaps a jacket with a gently nipped waist that you could wear with a skirt or a pair of khakis. With those styles, the objective is to look purposeful and energetic. And how plenty of women would quarrel with that?

A month of ready-to-wear shows ended Wednesday with a last-minute blitz of strong collections. Jean Paul Gaultier usually finds a comfortably shallow theme for his Hermès collections, so it was no surprise that they selected the music from “The Avengers” and the bowler hats and furled umbrellas appeared on cue. Yet the tailored pantsuits and superb examples of leather coats (mostly in black) and leather-trimmed pieces expressed in depth the taste for clothes with savoir-faire.

Realistically, most of those skirts are old-fashioned and clunky to wear; you’d be exhausted before you went a block. The wool corsets would look as with a pair of pants. But to me, this collection wasn’t as much about returning to the glories of Bardot as it was about presenting an artificial and super-enlarged beauty — and where else could Mr. Jacobs go but to an era when women were still built like women, right down to their girdles?

For her Miu Miu show on Wednesday night, Miuccia Prada replaced the hard, slatted wooden chairs they typically uses with blue foam cubes. The buoyant seats, along with the ’80s dance music, were consistent with the lighter — and less conceptual — mood of the clothes.

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Minimalism, and Plenty of It

The fall ready-to-wear collections continued their neat sweep as Stella McCartney sent out linear coats with only a small notch in the front for a detail & crewnecks & slacks so plain & simple, you had to remind yourself you weren’t looking at Ann Taylor.

That’s how long it took for Phoebe Philo’s first Céline show, last October, to have an influence. Ms. Philo isn’t the only designer who likes simplified clothes. Indeed, Ms. McCartney’s spring clothes had the same attitude. But Ms. Philo’s ability to give Céline a look makes her the equivalent of a yardstick. Suddenly, it seems, everybody is using her strict measure as the rule.

Ms. McCartney’s collection was super neat, with V-neck tunics & skinny wool pants, sleeveless wool coats, mini-shifts & graphic uses of color amid the neutrals, like a cropped sleeveless jacket in burnt-orange wool over a salmon turtleneck.

Among the standout looks were shifts that mixed leather & lace & black velvet parkas. Jolts of Lido red also saved everything from looking serious. Skirts & high-waist pants peeled opened in the front with the release of a zipper, generating a contrasting fold. It was an interesting effect that Mr. Tisci might have refined or, with further thought, eliminated.

At Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci also toned things down, opening with a plain beige coat buttoned over a prim lace top & slim pants. Yet the striking difference at Givenchy is that while the silhouette might be more strict than historicallyin the past, there is more variety & sexiness in his clothes than in other collections toeing the minimalist line.