Hasta La Ideas

Looks from Christopher Kane’s spring 2011 collection

Christopher Kane has sewn up the 2011 British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund, the across-the-pond version of Anna Wintour and co.’s wildly successful initiative to boost young design talent. Now in its second year, the BFC/Vogue award provides the winner with £200,000 (at current exchange, just a few dollars over the stateside $300,000 purse) and access to industry mentors—although Kane has already found a champion in Donatella Versace, who in 2006 snapped up the Scottish-born designer’s Central Saint Martins graduate collection and later tapped him to reimagine her house’s long-shuttered diffusion line, Versus.

Also shortlisted for the award were Charlotte Olympia, E. Tautz, Jonathan Saunders, Nicholas Kirkwood, OSMAN, Peter Pilotto, and Richard Nicoll. Kane was selected as the winner based on his business plan and a presentation to a judging panel chaired by Vogue UK editor-in-chief Alexandra Shulman. “The prize enables us to implement our strategic vision for the Christopher Kane business going forward,” said Kane in a statement issued by the BFC. He has described the next two years as a particularly exciting time for his London-based company, with plans to broaden the collections without sacrificing his love for detail and embellishment. Meanwhile, his fall 2011 collection, which will hit the runway on February 21 during London Fashion Week, is bound to surprise and entrance. For Kane, “It’s always good to move out of your comfort zone each season, to learn new things and to challenge your senses.”

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The nominations are in for the annual Costume Designers Guild Awards. In the contemporary film category, voters will have to choose among leotards and a deranged ballerina’s progression from pinky to inky togs (masterminded by Amy Westcott for Black Swan), hoodies (Jacqueline West for The Social Network), bespoke suits, sans contrast collars (Ellen Mirojnick for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), and dream-infiltrating apparel (Jeffrey Kurland for Inception), or face the meta-choice: the glitzy stage costumes and clubwear of Burlesque, as designed by Michael Kaplan. Other familiar names among this year’s nominees include Colleen Atwood (for Alice and Wonderland) and Janie Bryant (for Mad Men), but it’s a dark horse in the final category—Excellence in Commercial Costume Design—that’s got us most excited. Michelle Martini is nominated for her brilliant outfitting of Maria Bamford in the role of a demented yet steel-willed mom training for holiday shopping in Target’s Black Friday commercials. Can a cherry red track suit paired with gumball pearls and heels best the costumes featured in the chic commercials of Chanel and Dior? We’ll find out on February 22, when the Costume Designers Guild reveals the winners at a gala in Beverly Hills hosted by actress Kristin Davis.

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‘Tis the season for the shortlist for the Design Museum‘s annual Brit Insurance Designs of the Year Awards to be unveiled, as they were yesterday. Per usual, it’s a long list, filling up seven categories (architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport) with often more than ten nominees in each. No huge surprises, as the list contains lots of the items and buildings and designers everyone has been talking about over the last year. The Burj Khalifa is there, first-year award-winner Yves Behar is up in a couple of different categories (furniture and twice for product), and you’ll also find Apple‘s iPad, Dyson‘s fan, and even the game Angry Birds, which seems to have captivated the world and is confusing to people like us who haven’t ever seen the thing in action. The most interesting sections wind up being fashion, graphics, and transport, those categories that you might not immediately know the pieces, assuming, well, you don’t work in fashion, graphics, or transport. On another note, as a nice nod, we were particularly happy to see Ben de Lisi‘s Universal Gown made the cut, given that it was a commission from the UK’s Design Council, which certainly had a rough go of it in 2010. Winners will be announced in each category, as well as a single grand prize recipient, on March 15.

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The multi-talented and distinctively mustachioed Hamish Bowles, Vogue‘s European Editor at Large, is the 2011 recipient of the Pratt Institute Fashion Icon Award, the school announced today. He will receive the award at Pratt’s April 27 runway show, an annual affair that showcases the reliably remarkable work of seniors in the fashion design program. Bowles is the first non-designer recipient of the six-year-old honor, which in previous years has been bestowed on fashion greats including Ralph Rucci, Narciso Rodriguez, and Diane von Furstenberg.

“I am delighted that Pratt Institute has decided to honor me with this award, and to be joining such a distinguished pantheon of past recipients,” said Bowles in a statement issued today by Pratt. “It means a great deal to me to be celebrated in this way by a fashion faculty that is thronged by such lively and inspired talents.” And speaking of lively and inspired talent, Bowles is one busy icon. Recently, in addition to taking on a series of fish-out-water challenges (most of which involve the outdoors) that he has delightfully chronicled in the pages of Vogue, Bowles curated the Cristóbal Balenciaga exhibition on view through February 19 at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute in New York, and stay tuned for his latest book, Balenciaga and Spain, which will be published in March by Skira Rizzoli.

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David Favrod’s “Autoportrait” and “Souvenier de ma grand-mère” (both 2009)

Our friends at the Aperture Foundation have just announced the winner of the third annual Aperture Portfolio Prize competition: photographer David Favrod. Born in Japan (to a Japanese mother and a Swiss father) and raised in Switzerland, 28-year-old Favrod grapples with the culture of his birthplace in “Gaijin,” a bold, playful, and spooky search for meaning and identity amidst Japanese stereotypes that range from bathtub koi and sumo wrestlers to majestic mountains and Godzilla. “The aim of this work is to create ‘my own Japan,’ in Switzerland, from memories of my journeys when I was small, my mother’s stories, popular and traditional culture, and my grandparents’ war narratives,” wrote Favrod in a statement.

A jury led by Aperture publisher Lesley A. Martin also sifted through the more than 900 Portfolio Prize submissions to select four runners-up: Kathryn Parker Almanas, Anne Golaz, Julian Röder, and Jordan Tate. Favrod receives $5,000 and an exhibition at Aperture Foundation, while all five photographers will have their portfolios featured on the organization’s website for the next year or so. Inaugurated in 2008 to replace the foundation’s biannual portfolio reviews, the international competition was created to “identify trends in contemporary photography and specific artists whom we can help by bringing their work to a wider audience.”

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