Coggles press day

It's rare you come across a fashion business ploughing it's own successful furrow without lofty pretensions, so it was a total treat to attend Coggles' first official press day and witness just that.

The event (and the open house party afterwards) exhibited a cool confidence alongside beautiful product and copious amounts of Hendrick's gin.

The press day was hosted in the retailer's new London HQ. Coggles originally hails from Yorkshire and the flagship Coggles store is in the heart of the city. The story of how and why Victoria Bage started the buisness in 1974 is one of fabulous revenge, and was printed on the wall at press day:






As well has having the York store, Coggles.com is a highly succesful website catering for a fashionable folk in the UK and overseas, selling a strong selection of fashion, books and stuff for the home. On the fashion front, new womenswear labels for SS12 include Draw in Light and footwear label Atalanta Weller, while Japanese label Bedwin & the Heartbreakers is on board for menswear.




The team; Mark, Jake and Adam

One of the most innovative things about Coggles is the way it has harnessed the marketing potential of street style. It has the largest street style archive in the UK, and has built an AW11 campaign around its stock of images.
Watch the campaign on www.creativereview.co.uk or www.selectism.com

TiVo fright night

Definitely the most random event of 2011. On Wednesday Henry, Peanut and myself skipped off to Marylebone One for the evening (So Henry could get free Tivo for a year). TiVo - the channel that records everything that's been on tele for a week - invited him (and by proxy us) to a Halloween themed quiz night hosted by Paul Daniels and the lovely Debbie McGee. It was a sham in that we didn't win, but Henry got a foam finger (and Peanut NEARLY pulled Debbie McGee).



Peanut, Henry and Brix (and a mouse).



As part of the quiz we had to mummify Laura Jean in toilet roll for God's sake.


We did the same to Donna Air, who is hot even in loo roll.



Kate Walsh from the Apprentice is so nice.



Peanut chirpsed Debbie McGee.


That girl was so bored she died.

Cocosa Magazine

I've been a blogging hermit and haven't posted much since LFW because of this baby; The Cocosa Trend Edit SS12. It's the first time the site has produced a magazine and I've edited the first edition and worked with super talented team and art director Chris Williams (Freelance designer for Elle, Attitude and others) to come up with the concept.

Chris came up with cute little branding flourishes, like the little brackets which are the minipulated 'a' of Cocosa and most of the aesthetic takes a spherical form. The font is in keeping with the Cocosa house font and is Nutra, and we opted to insert two lighter weight end-papers to give the magazine a quality bookish feel. The atmospheric image on the papers is a digitised still from the video played at Gareth Pugh's SS12 show, and kicks the thing off nicely.

Content wise this piece isnt customer facing but is an industry trend edit, being sent to 250 editors and bloggers within weeks of the SS12 catwalks drawing to a close. It's 40 pages of trends, interviews with designers and backstage stylists, a hair trend edit by Percy & Reed's Adam Reed, and an anonymous account of working the front row by a London pr. Chic Geek blogger Marcus Jaye has done a menswear edit and there's a nice piece by WGSN on trend prediction. Cocosa has invested in a digital version.








cover draft and end papers





























After eight days working on this straight, we began to go insane.







We hit lows






and highs.

House of Holland

Lovely end to the week a friends and family (and anyone else that wants to buy something) purchasing session at shoreditch House for HoH. I plumped for the tea dress in blue, but should I have gone for the pink? Too late now.



The HoH team


My dress