Category Archives: Culture

London Fashion Week – The Designer Showrooms

London Fashion Week Designer Showrooms

If catwalk shows at London Fashion Week are displays of theatrical brilliance (big, dynamic, buzzing), then a look round the Designer Showrooms at Brewer Street offers a chance to observe fashion from the perspective of visitor in a museum exhibition: a calmer, more serene space for (deep) sartorial contemplation.

London Fashion Week Designer Showrooms

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London Fashion Week – SS16 – Day One

London Fashion Week SS16

I often think of fashion as a little bit like an excitable, blithe butterfly flitting across a meadow: so very thrilling to track and plot its unexpected turns in a distractingly beautiful milieu. And an opportunity to be one of the first to see Spring / Summer 2016 lead butterflies was not to be missed!

London Fashion Week Brewer Street car park

^ This is the world’s most fashionable car park (the new ‘concept’ meadow). From today until Tuesday, the NCP car park in Brewer Street in Soho will host London Fashion Week.

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Penshurst Place

Penshurst place

Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,
Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;
Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,
Or stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile,
And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while.
Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air,
Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair.

The first few lines of the poem ‘To Penshurst’ by Ben Jonson published in 1616 illustrate how highly the poet regarded the beautiful country house Penshurst. By virtue of disregarding what makes other houses, it is, in Jonson’s opinion, far superior.

Penshurst Place

I went to Kent for a long weekend away in the countryside and my first stop was the fascinating Penshurst Place.

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