Fashion & Shopping
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Milan designers hit reset button during digital fashion week

Rosa S. Alexander

MILAN (AP) — Fashion is off the hamster wheel, taking a deep breath that is allowing some freshness to seep into the once relentless cycle.

“It is so weird thinking about fashion, and the kind of hamster wheel of fashion, and how we never had a break and always complained about it,’’ Marc Jacobs said during a Milan Fashion Week video chat with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons post-digital show. “And then you get a break, and you complain.”

Instead, he said, he was taking the moment to watch others, and be inspired.

Milan Fashion Week of mostly womenswear previews for next fall and winter wrapped a nearly all-digital edition on Monday. Only one designer — Daniel Del Core, marking his brand’s debut — held a live runway show for a small number of guests.

While the bustle of live shows with the parade of itinerant fashionistas decamping from New

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Fashion & Shopping
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BLM in Italian Fashion campaign shows early tangible results

Rosa S. Alexander

MILAN (AP) — A digital runway show by five Italian fashion designers of African origin opens Milan Fashion Week on Wednesday, one tangible result of a campaign launched last summer by the only Black Italian designer belonging to the Milan fashion chamber.

After some initial resistance and a slow start, designer Stella Jean credits the Italian National Fashion Chamber with “a lot of goodwill” in pushing through an enhanced collaboration with five young designers, including financing and partnerships with Italian suppliers.

“When you want to do something, you can do them immediately,’’ said Jean, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter in Italian Fashion campaign. “I have been working hard to overcome this gradualism that is part of the mentality of a certain part of the Italian fashion world.”

She launched the campaign with designer Edward Buchanan and Afro Fashion Week Milano founder Michelle Ngomo after fashion houses

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Fashion & Shopping
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6 best women’s sweaters in 2021, according to fashion experts

Rosa S. Alexander

What is the best fabric for sweaters?

Here are the seven best fabrics and blends the fashion pros say you’re most likely to come across while shopping for sweaters.

Sweaters made with natural materials

While you shop, you’ll find these four materials in both organic and recyclable variations.

  • Wool: 100-percent wool sweaters get a bad rep for being itchy, and Christian Juul Nielsen, creative director of contemporary womenswear brands AKNVAS and Herve Leger, suggested an easy fix to “make the wool a lot softer and lighter:” Opt for wool sweaters blended with at least 20 percent polyamide, a synthetic material often found in activewear in the form of nylon.
  • Cashmere: According to designer Victor Li, “good cashmere is delicate and as soft as silk.” The New York-based designer calls the luxury fabric “one of the finest types of wool” because it helps regulate body temperature, and “recycles
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Fashion & Shopping
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New York Fashion Week’s Jason Wu, Markarian, and Private Policy Try to Rouse Us From Our Sweatpants

Rosa S. Alexander

Jason Wu

Once again, New York Fashion Week—er, the newly renamed “American Collections Calendar”—is a mostly digital affair, with one exception: the opener, aka Jason Wu’s fall show. The designer turned an empty SoHo pop up into a socially-distant farmers’ market to showcase his fall lineup. There were 30 models and around 25 guests, per WWD. One of them was Pose‘s Mj Rodriguez, who showed up in a blue monochrome ensemble and bedazzled face mask. Unlike the audience, models did not wear masks, signaling an unsaid promise (or maybe jinx)—by the time these clothes hit stores in the fall, maybe we will have some semblance of normalcy as we go about our days and errands.

None of the clothes were especially “pandemic fashion”-y, and plenty would have looked fine on a runway this time last year, before everything shuttered. The tailoring was simple, there were

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