Writer's Block ..... Well to start with

So after very few blogs i am already stuck for a topic....... i could do the predictable and comment on the death of Lee McQueen, but that would be an injustice to him and a lie to all my readers. I have never really followed his work fully, nor been a huge fan, although i am not afraid to admit he was a great designer, just not to my taste, so that is why i am not going to blog it regardless it is a sad time for many, and a tragic loss to the fashion industry.

However, having ruled that out, i feel i have nothing left to write about, i feel uninspired, thoughtless and am currently lacking the ability to focus on any one topic. There is a lot going on at the moment with two uni assignments, as well as a fair fews hours at work the last 7 days.

Nevertheless a fashion student would have something to write about if the something happening in the fashion industry, its very slow at the moment, no ground breaking news or innovation, one boring piece of news from today is that New Look have dropped their IPO and will no longer be floating on the London Stock Exchange, leaving them in a sticky situation and £1bn worth of debt. (Great news for one of my uni projects).

Probably one of the most interesting thing i have done this week is attend a lecture from Ibrahim Ibrahim from Portland. He gave a fascinating insight into the future, development sin technology, architecture, retail and the way we shop. According to him our stores may not even be stocking products, or more that they are manufactured in store, because apparently the consumer wants customisation these days? As well as this Nintendo has engineered technology that is heavily bedded in the ability to follow a person's movements, you can shop online and with use of the webcam you can see how the clothes look on you. But for me this isn't shopping, this is like dressing your avatar on xbox 360 dashboard or second life. Do consumers not want to feel the weight of clothes, quality, material etc etc To move away from our traditional methods of retail and shopping is a good move, but to the extremes that were outlined to me. The Prada store in NYC has had made several advances, a changing room is no longer a box with a mirror, its almost a computer style capsule, as you walk in the codes from the garments are registered, immediately put on to the screen, here the consumer can see it on the runway show, as well as testing it in different light. OK, so this is great for luxury brands, but is it right for retail? Do we really care what these jeans look like at night? Probably not, unles sits a special garment, perhaps a dress for a wedding or something alike.

So Ibrahim predicts a slightly scary future, for example your avatar from second life calling your real life mobile, which just crosses so many weird cyber boundaries that are not meant to crossed, as well as technology involving a projector and camera, that when you see friends etc their Facebook page is projected out? This is not social networking, it's becoming a internet stalker. However how much we can read into this i am not sure, as he claimed Westfield is the last shopping centre we will see of its kind, but yet the sister complex is currently being built in East London.

But who knows, all we can do is wait and see. And it seems apparently i did have something to write about.
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