Hasta La Ideas

The beginning of the new year turned out to be a pretty great start to 2011 for a handful of British fashion designers. Among a huge batch of people from miscellaneous fields, at least five designers were handed various awards at Queen Elizabeth‘s annual New Year’s honors. Among them, Alice Temperley, Tanya Sarne of the label Handwritten (and made famous for her previous label, Ghost), and shoe designer Beatrix Ong, all of whom received Member of the Order of the British Empire nods. The founders of the retail chain Lush, Mark and Margaret Constantine, received the Officer of the Order of the British Empire award. And perhaps most interesting and surprising, is designer Katharine Hamnett taking home a Commander of the Order of the British Empire award, honored for her t-shirt designs, popularized in the early 1980s for their protest statements and encouraging of civic engagement. After receiving news of the award, she told the BBC: “I kind of tend to pooh-pooh these kind of things but at the same time it’s frightening how nice it is.”

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