Fashion designers take runway risk in hunt for handsome rewards

LONDON (Reuters) - There can be no greater tension in the fashion world than the brief moment just before the music starts, the lights blaze and the models hit the catwalk.

The collection is ready, top editors, buyers and journalists wait by the runway with baited breath, models get last minute attention and designers pray that months of effort and expense will be rewarded with critical and commercial success.

For designers, the prospect of spending an extraordinary sum on glamorous venues, booking the best models, set production costs and marketing, is a risk many are willing to take to be exposed to the international press and the top buyers who flock to London for its groundbreaking designs and fresh new talent.

"I think the idea of doing a catwalk show at London Fashion Week is a huge investment for a designer and obviously not one that we would really encourage them to do unless they're really ready," British Fashion Council Chief Executive Caroline Rush told Reuters.

"But the images that come from that, and the marketing material and the collateral, last a good six months, so if you amortize that over the six months in terms of the coverage that you can achieve and the audience that reaches, if you can do it, it is a really great investment."

The fashion industry remains notoriously cagey about the exact figures spent on catwalk shows. Not surprising given the lavish displays on show in New York, London, Milan and Paris.

Chanel Designer Karl Lagerfeld is famous for extravagance, having once erected a huge iceberg in the middle of the glass-domed Grand Palais in Paris, just to accentuate a chilly theme.

"We know that some of our designers do their shows for 30,000 pounds ($48,700), but we also know that the brands spend an awful lot more than that in terms of the staging, the setting, the build, creating that whole brand environment," Rush added.

With such a hefty price tag, it is not surprising that coming up with the funds can be a struggle for new designers and particularly in European and North American markets wrestling with weak economies and a Euro zone crisis alongside shrinking corporate and household budgets.

"Right now, the economic crisis really makes the young, new labels hard to survive. If you don't have the mentors, industry experts, financial support, it's really hard to continue," designer Haizhen Wang told Reuters.

Haizhen, along with Vita Gottlieb and Teija Eilola are getting support from fashion business award Fashion Fringe to host their first catwalk show at London Fashion Week.

It is a big moment for the designers, who have been preparing their debut collections, and learning about how to run a fashion business successfully with the help of guest judge Christopher Bailey, chief creative officer of Burberry.

"It's an amazing opportunity to be able to have a fashion show," said Eilola. "Obviously, a fashion show is about creating more of an event of showing the collection, rather than just saying these are the sketches, these are garments."

"It does help you to give yourself and everyone else who is interested in the collection, an excitement about it," she added.

Former Fashion Fringe winner Corrie Nielsen has built her name up from her first show to become a highly successful and sought-after label. She won the prize in 2010 and recently showed her latest collection on Friday to hundreds of guests.

"It's exposure to the world," Nielsen told Reuters. "It's also your name and where you're at. The more you do it, and the better you become, the bigger name you get, it all has to do with PR and promoting it, marketing, everything."

But a catwalk show is no longer the only way fashion labels can gain themselves international exposure. Designers such as Eudon Choi, Emilia Wickstead and Dion Lee are all opting for presentations this season.

"With a presentation you often get see the clothes a lot closer. Last season, Richard Nicoll did a presentation, which actually got him a lot more attention than if he had done a runway show. It was perfectly executed and held at the ICA gallery and it became a really intelligent way to show his collection," Tilly Macalister-Smith, Acting Fashion Editor of Vogue.com, told Reuters.

Designer Emilia Wickstead, who chose to hold a salon show, said she wanted to bring back a sense of intimacy.

"Sometimes in the fashion industry, we all get carried away doing these crazy things but it's as important to me for a garment to be beautiful on the outside as well as on the inside, and I love keeping the intimacy."

Presentations don't work for every brand however, as designer Alice Temperley found.

"For us, it didn't work because the clothes needed a kind of romance, and being brought to life," Temperley told Reuters.

The need to stage a catwalk shows will never die out, said Macalister-Smith.

"The sense of pomp and circumstance, romance, fantasy and drama that is evoked from a catwalk show is absolutely crucial to the industry," she said.

"I don't think that the method of a catwalk show will ever die because it clicks inherently with something in the human condition, that we want to be invited, we want to be seen, you want to see who's there, you want to see the clothes."

(Additional reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Paul Casciato)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fashion-designers-runway-risk-hunt-handsome-rewards-195321851--finance.html

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North Mali robber describes Shariah amputation

FILE - In this Tuesday, April 24, 2012 file photo, fighters from Islamist group Ansar Dine stand guard during a hostage handover in the desert outside Timbuktu, Mali. Allied Islamist groups Ansar Dine and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, or MUJAO, are applying strict Shariah justice across the northern half of Mali, which fell to the al-Qaida-linked rebels five months ago. In the latest and most horrific incident, on Monday, Sept. 10, 2012, MUJAO carried out five double amputations, cutting the right hands and left feet off five cousins accused of highway robbery. (AP Photo/File)

FILE - In this Tuesday, April 24, 2012 file photo, fighters from Islamist group Ansar Dine stand guard during a hostage handover in the desert outside Timbuktu, Mali. Allied Islamist groups Ansar Dine and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, or MUJAO, are applying strict Shariah justice across the northern half of Mali, which fell to the al-Qaida-linked rebels five months ago. In the latest and most horrific incident, on Monday, Sept. 10, 2012, MUJAO carried out five double amputations, cutting the right hands and left feet off five cousins accused of highway robbery. (AP Photo/File)

BAMAKO, Mali (AP) ? Speaking from his hospital bed, a young man whose hand and foot were amputated this week by the radical Islamic group controlling northern Mali described an agony unlike any other ? "a pain that made me forget everything."

Youssoufa Hamidou borrowed the phone of a hospital attendant and braved the guards posted outside his door to call a journalist hundreds of miles (kilometers) away in Mali's capital and tell the world what he went through.

He is one of five cousins, all in their 20s, and all but one from the village of Fafa, who were convicted of carrying out highway robberies.

It's a crime punishable by double amputation, according to the strict form of Islamic law known as Shariah that is being applied with increasing frequency in the northern half of Mali, which fell to al-Qaida-linked rebels five months ago. Since then, an adulterous couple was stoned to death, a thief's hand was cut off and numerous people, including women, have been publicly whipped.

Monday's amputations of the five cousins in the northern city of Gao shows how much Mali, once praised for its democracy and whose undulating deserts and camel caravans were a magnet for Western tourists, has changed in just a few short months.

"When it was my turn, they took me blindfolded, and tied my right arm and my left leg just above the ankle with plastic ties to stop the circulation," Hamidou said. "Suddenly I felt a pain in my right hand that was out of this world. My hand had just been chopped off. They put a compress on it. Very quickly they cut off my left foot, and they also put a compress on it to stop the bleeding."

"At first I was afraid ? but the pain I felt made me forget everything, even my fear. Then the Islamists put us in a car and drove us to the hospital."

The 25-year-old spoke to The Associated Press on a phone handed to him by a hospital worker. He spoke in his native Sonrai language in a voice so weak that, at times, the attendant had to take the phone back to relay his words. The interview, conducted over several hours Tuesday evening, was interrupted more than once when the guards posted by the militants checked on the amputees.

Before the north fell to the rebels in April, Hamidou and his cousins belonged to the Gandakoy, a self-defense militia made up of people from the Sonrai ethnic group.

"When our militia was chased out we held on to our weapons, and we used them to hold up buses on the road between Gao and Niger. That was until someone denounced us" to the Islamists, said Hamidou.

North Mali's Islamist rulers make public spectacles of the brutal Shariah punishments.

Ibrahim Toure said he was talking with friends near the public square in Gao, some 750 miles (1,000 kilometers) northeast of Bamako, when the Islamists drove up and ordered people to gather around.

"We understood that they were going to carry out a Shariah punishment, but we could not have imagined what was about to happen," Toure said.

The crowd tried to enter the square, but the fighters stopped them. "The Islamists told us to go outside the square, and to stay behind the iron bars that encircle it. ... It was then that we started to really worry, because normally when they whip people, they let us inside. ... So we realized that something even more horrible was about to happen."

Toure and his friends watched as the fighters brought out a chair and tied its legs and back with a rope to a pillar on a stage inside Independence Square. Then the long-bearded "cadi," or Islamic judge, arrived and gave a sermon, saying that within the territory the Islamic militants control Shariah law would be applied.

"He said that for highway robbers, Shariah calls for the right hand and left foot to be cut off. And that four people had already had their limbs cut off. And immediately a small child came running out of one of the cars with a bag. We saw that it was dripping with blood," said Toure.

The judge said the chopped off hands and feet of four of the accused were inside the bag. The fifth man's limbs would be amputated in public in order to serve as a lesson.

The militants then brought the young accused robber out of the car, and pushed him toward the chair.

"It was unbelievable. The young man, he just followed calmly," said Toure. "He had his eyes closed with a bandage. ... He put out his hand to be cut, then he put out his foot to be cut. ... He didn't cry out, he didn't even move. It's my impression that they must have drugged him ? if not how can you accept to let someone cut off your limbs?"

One of the doctors who helped treat the amputees, said the Islamists initially came to the hospital and asked the medics to carry out the amputations.

"We categorically refused," said the doctor, whose name is being withheld by AP out of concern for his safety.

The fighters left, and returned sometime later, carrying in the five young men who were trailing blood, he said.

"We could see that their feet had been badly amputated. They were in indescribable pain. You could read that on their faces," the doctor said. "To treat them, we were forced to break the bones in their feet, so that the skin could cover the bone, which was poking out."

Last week, the government in Bamako, which still controls the southern half of Mali, asked the 15 nations in western Africa for military help to take back the north. Radical militants in northern Mali were drawing disaffected youth from other countries, warned the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, in an opinion piece published in The New York Times titled "Why Mali Matters?" The situation in Mali threatens to create an arc of instability across the neck of Africa, he said.

On Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross called the situation in northern Mali "more and more alarming." Western powers and Mali's government in the south have spoken out over the abuses in the north.

Aliou Mahamar Toure, the Islamic police commissioner in Gao, said Shariah law distinguishes between unarmed thieves and those who rob at gunpoint, a crime that requires a greater punishment. He said the Islamists were only carrying out the word of God, and that they had done everything they could to make the amputees as comfortable as possible.

"We took them to the hospital. ... Today we gave them new clothes," he said. "And we have put them in an air-conditioned room. When this is over, we will give them money ? like a gift. ... They are now Muslims like us. They are our brothers."

____

Callimachi contributed from Dakar, Senegal

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-09-13-Mali-Amputations/id-2b3488140df14da3bbe63ebe00611e36

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