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Researchers at Southampton University have revealed their plans to develop clothing fabric that generates electricity through wearers’ movement and body heat. At it’s current level of generation, the technology is strong enough only to power individual items such as MP3 players but could soon be developed enough to support wireless health-monitoring systems such as those used in people with sleep apnea, epileptic fits or heart conditions.
One place that it might be used once is reaches a level where it can be aggregated is universities, to power campus equipment.
In the meantime, and before your university offer depends on your electricity generating status as well as your grades, if you’re one of the lucky teens who got a university place this year, what clothing should you be packing?
• Sports socks – Not smart but warm and cosy. Worn with the ubiquitous crocs they can provide full protection against the cold and the lurking nasties to be found on communal bathroom floors.
• Jog pants – The ‘tracky’ might be low-grade but it’s ultra comforting: on days when you don’t have to appear in public, like essay deadline days, they can be what you wear from waking, through faking, to breaking and calling the campus helpline in tears.
• Hoodie – Wonderful item, practical, fashionable and totally annoying to lecturers. Don’t invest in the university shop ones though: they mark you out as a fresher and a fool because they cost about twice as much as from anywhere else.
• Beanie – Great for shoving on when you haven’t washed your hair and you don’t want to give the grunge vibe. Also good for when you decided at 2 am that it was a good idea to shave/dye/straighten your hair and it didn’t work.
Beijing artist Li Xiaofeng makes ‘porcelain clothing’ by sewing together shards of pottery recovered from China’s thousands of archaeological digs and fixing them onto leather garments. The fragments date from the song, ming, yuan and qing dynasties and are stored in dustbins in the artist’s studio. Li had his first exhibition outside China in 2009 and has become one of the many Chinese artists working with major fashion designers on ‘artfusion’ or ‘artketing’ – a blend of art and marketing.
Li has been working with Lacoste, where he constructed a porcelain polo shirt with the classic Lacoste logo, and went on to design a limited edition polo shirt with a signature image of blue and white porcelain pieces scattered on the garment.
Li is not the only Chinese artist to get into the casual clothing world: Comme des Garçons invited Ai Weiwei, to design a special-edition T shirt to commemorate their new store in Hong Kong – the T-shirt couldn’t be sold in China because Ai Weiwei is so controversial there.
If you want to get into the Chinese fashion vibe, but can’t afford the small fortune required for one of the limited edition pieces, focus on the colours blue, white and terracotta for your casual clothing and combine casual polo-shirts or T-shirts with jade medallions worn on a leather thong: a very traditional Beijing look!
Apparently, according to the outdoor living magazine Grough, mountaineering and fell-walking clothing is topping the sales in the high street. Debenhams Menswear Director told the magazine, ‘Men and women have fallen in love with the rugged outdoor image the hill-climbing clothing style portrays.’
It’s called the Wainwright look, after Alfred Wainwright, whose seven-volume life work, named the Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells has become a reference book, as has his guidebook to the first ever Coast to Coast Walk, a 192-mile footpath guide that he created himself.
So how do you get the Wainwright look?
Choose layered clothing in natural and neutral colours with belts or waist detailing to get that classic post-war fell-walking impression. The look is likely to be a big hit this autumn, so spend the summer looking out for cream and beige long-sleeved T-shirts, green, grey and brown jackets and soft cotton trousers that can be worn with hiking boots.
T-shirts were not traditional Wainwright apparel, men preferring to wear a string vest under a shirt in cold weather, so the look requires a cream, pale yellow, grey or pale blue polo-shirt rather than a modern Tee.
Women should look out for canvas skirts and fitted linen shirts, worn with soft jackets or cream trousers or shorts.
The recent burst of telecommuting is damaging fashion sense, according to a number of fashion pundits. They blame the ability to work from home for the way that both men and women have been letting their clothing standards drop.
Some supermarkets have taken to banning customers in pyjamas from shopping because it can offend. They claim that it’s because customers have got used to shopping online in their pjs and now expect to be able to do the same in person.
It’s just one sign that business-casual is devolving into ‘anything goes’ but for those who hope to travel up the career ladder it’s a dangerous path. Companies have taken complex dress codes and turned them into ‘use your best judgement’ but for savvy employees, owning a good pair of trousers or a skirt, a smart shirt and a decent pair of shoes is still the minimum requirement. If your CEO suddenly turns up in your home town and the company want you to drop off some papers or take him or her a memory stick, then you need to look right. And for those who work in ‘back offices’ it may be tempting to wear shorts, flip-flops and casual teeshirts but if you tend to look sloppy and unprofessional, you may fail to win promotion.
Find a middle path by wearing polo-shirts instead of T-shirts, lightweight casual trousers instead of shorts and simple pumps or even this year’s fashion winner, high-top trainers, instead of flip-flops.
Oddly enough, women tend to spend a lot more on clothes than men, but paradoxically, they actually have more ways to change the appearance of their clothing than men do, so strictly speaking, they should need to buy less items!
For summer clothing, women can change the appearance of a T-shirt or polo-shirt by using a scarf, either round the neck as a contrasting colour, or twisted to make a casual belt around the waist, or tied in the hair as a floaty pony tail accessory that harmonises with the colour of your top. Women can can also wear waistcoats over T-shirts, especially long sleeve T-shirts, to ring the changes on their wardrobes.
Both men and women can wear a summer vest T-shirt over a long sleeve T-shirt, or use a contrasting vest under a hoodie to make a colour contrast that can make a familiar piece of clothing look totally different.
Men may like to try wearing more formal clothing with shorts, and less formal with trousers: often they tend to stick to vests with shorts, lightweight polo-shirts with trousers but swapping those over you can develop a whole new look with the same clothes.
Apparently, men are more body conscious than they were a decade ago. The evidence is in the mannequin: Homme Nouveau have a shop window dummy that’s just 33 inches round the chest, and Burberry’s new window man is similarly spindly. All this in a time when the average Brit man has a 39 inch waist – yes, waist, not chest!
So how do you manage to look like the slender chaps whom fashion is designed for? It’s the same problem that has beset women for decades: clothes are not designed for average sizes and are modelled by genetic rarities who are taller and slimmer than 90% of the population.
1. Skinny jeans work for almost all men, even the extremely chunky, but you need to make sure that if you are less than slim, you cover up the waist, which can look porky, with a loose fitting V necked T-shirt which slims the body even further
2. Hoodies with a zip rather than a front pocket are slimming and elongating – pick navy blue, grey or black if you’re not the slimmest chap, but go for red, white or beige if you are skinny and proud of it.
But if you are proud of being a big chap, don’t despair. It seems that a ‘robust’ body shape is more popular in times political uncertainty or economic stress – because culturally we are more likely to value men who look as if they can take care of themselves and of others too. Play up your beefy status with bright polo shirts and round necked T-shirts with stripes or ringer details to show off your bulky beauty.
A large part of the global economic recovery may depend on a small group of dedicated shoppers according to the latest Acxiom Retail Consumer Dynamics survey.
These fashion-savvy clothes-buyers are called fashion-forward shoppers in the retail clothing world and they tend to be top spenders on clothes and fashion. Understanding what drives them to buy might help the garment trade which is digesting the fact that retail clothing sales in the USA dropped in May for the first time in eight months.
Fashion forwards are people who say they focus on fashion and style, rather than comfort or cost, and over two-thirds of them have indicated that they plan to spend the same, or more than usual, on summer clothing in the next three months. This is a contrast to the value-driven clothing buyer, who spends only around a third as much as the fashion forward, and who intends to try and spend less than usual on clothing between now and the autumn.
To be a fashion forward, you need to have a good eye for fashion, even in casual clothing – this winter’s top tip, for example is shades of cream and ivory, and savvy fashion forwards will already be overhauling their autumn wardrobes to include white or cream winter jackets and light coloured trousers and boots.
In Mansfield Ohio, a new detailed dress code has been drafted for court staff – it’s meant to ‘inspire confidence and respect from the public, create a professional image and install a sense of pride in city government’.
So municipal employees will be denied lip piercings and excessive tattoos. Jeans and T-shirts will be limited to Friday only in office areas.
In the USA any rules about dress codes must be careful not to infringe on First Amendment rights and religious freedoms and Casual Friday has become a contentious issue, because it’s a test of what is acceptable or not – can you wear a shirt, tie and smart jacket on Dress Down Friday if you’re Mormon or is that seen as a non-team choice? Can you turn up in a T-shirt with an overtly religious or controversial sporting message or is that somehow also against the spirit of teamwork?
This is why many companies prefer to impose casual uniforms which are usually a soft-collared top such as a polo-shirt, worn with the employee’s choice of skirt, trousers or jeans. This allows issues of gender, age and cultural equality to be balanced with health and safety issues.
Even the most gormless person can manage to fold a T-shirt, although the fashion-conscious have leaned the triple fold rather than the half fold, to make a T-shirt look better when you take it out and wear it. But packing a polo-shirt can present a little more difficult because of the collar. Here’s a simple guide to the triple fold and the polo pack too.
Triple fold
• Lay your T-shirt with the front down, on a flat surface
• Fold one shoulder in until it reaches one third across the shirt, turn the sleeve back so it lays across the fold – your shirt should now be two thirds as wide as it was before and the sleeve should have its open end facing out, not facing into the body of the T-shirt. This is especially important for long-sleeved T-shirts
• Fold the other shoulder and sleeve the same way. Your shirt should now be one third as wide as when laid out flat
• Lift the bottom of the T-shirt until it reaches the neck, persevering the two folds you’ve already made.
• Pick up and turn over. Perfect triple fold achieved!
Polo fold
• Button the collar of your polo and pull the collar so it’s folded down neatly before putting the polo-shirt face down on a flat surface
• Grip the shoulder seam in one hand and with the other take the corresponding sleeve and fold it into the middle of the shirt so that the fold makes a perpendicular line from the shoulder seam to the bottom of the shirt. Fold the shirt sleeve in half
• Repeat with the other side of the polo shirt. Smooth out wrinkles as you fold
• Take hold of the bottom right and left sides of the folded shirt. Bring the bottom edge of the shirt up to the bottom of the sleeves. This divides the shirt into thirds.
• Bring the folded edge to the top edge of the collar. Turn the shirt over and put in your suitcase
• To preserve polo-shirt collar shape, you can tuck other items such as clean socks, underwear or swimming togs into the neckline to hold the neck it its rounded shape.
Summer’s favourite colours are usually white and ice-cream shades of pink and blue, and this year is no exception. There may be more ‘rainbow shades’ in the uniforms at the World Cup but at Wimbledon it’s white all the way, and white can be a difficult colour to wear successfully.
For women, white can cause difficulties against a tan, or the lack of one because it can also make a fake tan look well … fake. The answer here is to take a leaf out of Audrey Hepburn’s book and separate the white from your skin with a border of black and white. Either black with white polka dots for the cute type or zebra stripes for the more dramatic look will break down the visual barrier between flesh tones and white, and create a ‘disturbed impression’ ie stop it looking like you’re a plastic Barbie in a tennis outfit.
Men’s problems are different to women’s – white expands the waist and neck and can make you look like you swallowed the ball! Things to avoid:
• white under white unless you are Andy Murray thin – a navy vest or a black T-shirt under a white hoodie will slim you down
• round-necked tops white if you are still winter-pale – a V neck or polo shirt will stop your skin and the white clothing blending together into a ‘lump’
• white against black – unless you’re slim, a white top with black trousers can make you look very top-heavy. Instead try grey or camel coloured trousers or shirts, or faded jeans which will balance the lightness of a white summer shirt.
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