Thanks to the Guardian and the Observer you can make your own designer clothes and accessoires. In their DIY Eco fashion section, you can make your own Celia Birtwell bag, Vivienne Westwood dress, Jade Jagger bracelet …

In collaboration with famous designers, they created step-by-step “how to” guides illustrated with  photographs offering the user a helping hand in the creation process of  designer stuff.

Source: The Guardian, The Oberser, Considerate Clothing

QR (quick response) codes are two-dimensional bar codes which link online and physical graphics to websites and multi-media. Most of the time, the codes look more or less the same: abstract look and black.

But that’s about to change!

SET, a Tokyo based creative agency restyled the standard code. Takashi Murakami, a well known Japanes artist, and Louis Vuitton worked together and created a distinctive code featuring one of the artist’s characters and the classic Louis Vuitton pattern.

In this way, the agency hopes to add  some style and character to the bland world of machine readable codes.

Source: PSFK

I absolutely adore cashmere! It’s so soft ! So I was pretty exited when I found out about Trendy Workshop.

Trendy Workshop is a french fashion platform that allows users to design and buy their own clothing, but also share their designs with other users within the Trendy Workshop community.

Right now, it’s all about cashmere. So the clothes one creates are solely made out of cashmere. But according to co-founder, Tristan de Montebello, the offer will be broadened with cotton this spring. Besides the limitation of  the fabric, the clothes one can design are nowadays only restricted to those of the upper body (tops, sweaters, dresses). However it’s a very nice idea, that works around three major goals: create, buy and share! For the moment 100% French, so deliveries only in France.

Below are two videos in which co-founder Tristan de Montebello explains the concept of Trendy Workshop. Although the first one is in French,  you’d better listen carefully as he also gives some nice washing and ironing tips for cashmere clothing.

Source: Trendy Workshop X En Mode Fashion.com from enmodefashion on Vimeo.

In this second video, a nice quote from Tristan de Montebello, which stresses the need for user input and user research: “Listening to the community will get us to be the best!”

Source: Create your own clothes - Tristan de Montebello @ LeWeb from Tiburon Tv on YouTube

I’ve you are planning a visit to Antwerp in the coming months, don’t forget to visit the Paper Fasion exhibition at the Fashion Museum.

The exhibition focuses - as the title already indicates - on the use of paper in modern and contemporary fashion. More information can be found here.

Yesterday I was looking more in detail at a mass customization site, more in particular Propercloth. They sell custom shirts for men and what I found really interesting is how people can choose their size.

So after creating your own custom shirt, you’ll need to indicate your size. And sometimes this is a problem! But in this case you have three options for choosing your size.

The first one is just choosing the standard size (small, medium, large, …), the type of fit and two shirt dimensions (collar around and sleeve lenght).

Another possibility is giving in your body measurements and the system will give you the most approriate size.

The last way is choosing the sizing of a particular brand. This is very interesting since people often refer to a brand as their standard or reference. For example a lot of people don’t fit the clothes in the H&M since they known from former experience that a H&M-medium is the right one for them.