Speaking of embroidery and embellishment, how about the energetic, macro versions by Central St. Martins alumnus Jiwon Jahng? Yes please!

It’s such a personal delight to happen across an unknown designer who doesn’t fit into the banal mainstream. Finding these designers always manages to renew my faith in the future of fashion given how overexposed everything feels these days.

So we all know by now that minimalism is the current darling of the fashion world and while my personal tastes tend to skew this way and always have, I appreciate and crave embellishment. I’ve played myself with embroidery and crochet in recent years, but haven’t had the time to produce anything worth posting since I don’t seem to have much time to create these days. Anyway, I was happy to discover Francesca Crow whose work is full of beautiful, original embellishment. She shares not only her collection but her sketches, photos from recent travels, and inspirations on her blog. It’s not clear what she’s currently up to, but I look forward to hearing more about her soon

In all honesty, what really caught my eye when looking at the work of Norwegian designer Maleen Dalan was the magpie-like arrangement of fabrics and embellishment, not the obvious confrontation of gender associative clothing. Sometimes I just want to look at pretty things without thinking about if I or anyone else would wear them, and this is a good example. Her real challenge for the future will be developing clothing that isn’t so heavily dependent on art school type statements. Click to enlarge