Shoppers snap up Cavalli collection in H&M scrum

 

By CLAIRE BATES - More by this author » Last updated at 14:22pm on 8th November 2007 Comments

He's the designer who revealed J Lo is pregnant and is creating the Spice Girl's outfits for their upcoming world tour.

Now thousands of ordinary women have snapped up pieces by Roberto Cavalli after he launched a one-off H&M collection today.

 

Shoppers pushed and shoved into 200 H&M stores around the world to get their hands on the range. All the accessories and the signature sequinned dress had sold out at the UK flagship branch in Oxford Street within an hour.

Some fashionistas had been queueing from 5am for their chance to own the designer wear.

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The chaotic scenes in H&M

 

Two eager shoppers snap up the bargains

 

Fashion students Leigh Herbert and Daniel Hull, both 20, were two of the first people to arrive at the London branch this morning, before splashing out hundreds on a dozen items between them.

Leigh said: "I bought four dresses and Daniel has bought a shirt, a necklace and presents for his friends.

"We are fashion students and we did the same thing for the Stella McCartney launch. We are just mad about fashion designers, especially Cavalli."

Others were clearly hoping to capitalise on the frenzy. Within an hour of stores opening, Cavalli pieces appeared on internet auction site Ebay at inflated prices.

Sacha Pinson, a 33-year-old accessories buyer from North Acton, said: "This is mad, it's a bunfight.

"Everyone around me is grabbing whatever they can in a number of sizes. Some people are not even trying things on. They might not even wear it in the future but they can say they have a piece of Cavalli."

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The queues form outside H&M

 

Eager shoppers grab what they can from H&M's Cavalli collection

 

An H&M spokeswoman Chloe Bowers said the Birmingham store had sold out of stock in just 20 minutes.

"As the doors opened this morning people were grabbing whatever they could piling it up on their arms and going to try things on," she said.

Roberto Cavalli's collection is another storming success for the Swedish store who have also had popular lines designed by Stella McCartney and Karl Lagerfeld.

The capsule wardrobe includes fabulous eveningwear with an explosion of animal prints and lurex and a knockout gold sequinned flapper dress for £149.99.

For the daytime there is officewear with a twist of glamour - a fringed leather bolero jacket for £149.99, a white sleeveless ruffled blouse for £29.99 and silk leopard print tunic for £39.99. A dashing zebra print trench coat, £99.99, will take you anywhere.

Accessories include bone and pearl pendants, a golden cuff for £9.99, strappy gold sandals for £69.99 and black satin Mary Jane shoes.

The menswear is sharply tailored and masculine picked out in browns and midnight blues. Shirts are black or white and £39.99 and T-shirts include silk front or side panels for £14.99. Accessories include a slim tie, and serpent shaped necklace, pin and cufflinks with prices starting from £5.99.

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Roberto Cavalli (centre) with models in his H&M creations

 

Cavalli's collection features leopard and zebra print. The leopard print corset is £34.99 and jeans are £39.99. The animal print tights are £9.99

 

Cavalli, who usually dresses the likes of Madonna, Beyonce and Victoria Beckham, said he was excited by his line that features 25 pieces for women and 20 pieces for men.

"I love freedom and challenges; breaking down barriers, experimenting in different directions," the Italian said.

"H&M is all this for me. I will add a dash of festivity and dreams."

H&M's head of design Margareta van den Bosch added: "Roberto Cavalli has created a world of his own, iconic and full of fantasy, when it comes to colours, prints and style.

"They represent an exuberant, successful lifestyle."

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This leopard print dress is £99.99

Mark, is this actually the kind of shit you read in your free time?

^haha

copy and paste pointless threads like this one shouldn't be allowed :uhoh:

 

 

just news.. and of course in the news section

i agree

Ugh...mark with his crazy articles...

 

Looks like a nice collection though...I didn't know about that.

I wear all that stuff.

Ugh...mark with his crazy articles...

 

Looks like a nice collection though...I didn't know about that.

 

So will you be purchasing any of it??:rolleyes:

No new clothes for a year: A shopaholic goes cold turkey

 

By PENNY HANCOCK - More by this author » Last updated at 00:15am on 9th November 2007 Comments (12)

Reduce, re-use, recycle: Penny Hancock puts her shopping addiction behind her

 

 

 

 

Like many women Penny Hancock was addicted to shopping. But desperate to save money, she resolved to stop buying clothes for a year.So could she do it?

 

 

My mission started as a money thing.

Why did I never have any left at the end of the month? Why were my partner and I never any nearer to paying off the mortgage?

 

It was time to take a really good look at my bank statements and before long, one thing became glaringly obvious: the unnecessary expenditure was almost all mine.

And it was all spent on clothes.

Women - it's still mainly women - buy clothes as therapy and as a treat.

Susannah and Trinny and their spin-offs have spawned a generation of women for whom dressing well has become synonymous with good selfesteem, but they have also encouraged a form of consumerism that is hardly ever questioned.

I had it bad.

I was popping into my favourite retail outlet (Jigsaw) weekly, in order to view their new delivery before anyone else got there.

And I was buying something almost every time. These were my indulgences.

The clothes I dropped into my shopping trolley at the supermarket, I didn't even count - they just got swallowed up with the food shopping bill.

And because they were so cheap, it wouldn't matter if I never wore them.

The bigger purchases, the designer boots or the catalogue coats, were there to give me that guilty frisson of delight that will be familiar to most women.

But if I wanted to make any inroads into paying off our mortgage, I realised this spending had to stop.

It was after a particularly pointless splurge on three new tops that I made the daunting resolution to stop buying clothes for a year.

It seemed it was all or nothing - like any kind of addict, I needed complete abstinence if I was going to overcome my compulsion to buy.

I made the decision in January.

To my surprise, by the end of February I had already saved £650.

During those cold months of the year, it wasn't so difficult to stop myself buying new clothes - I just wrapped up in jumpers most of the time anyway and there was a dearth of social occasions on my calendar.

My resolution was put to the test when I was invited to a friend's big birthday do in March.

Friends from my distant past would be there but how could I look my best, without a shopping spree to set me up?

I felt my resolve slipping - I would buy just one dress.

Oh, and some shoes - which would mean tights - and then lipstick, and earrings, and. . . the landslide had begun again.

I was going to have to resist the temptation to go shopping and look to what I already owned to come up with an outfit that I would feel as good in as a new one.

I spent an afternoon with my daughters trying on clothes and accessories that had been sitting at the back of my wardrobe for years.

At the party, the resulting outfit (a combination of a dress I'd bought ten years ago, over jeans, with a pair of shoes I loved but rarely had the occasion to wear, and one of my daughters' cardis - received quite a few compliments.

I could have spent several hundred pounds, not to mention hours of shopping, creating this look from new.

 

But one of the general truths about not shopping for clothes is that almost invariably, the item you think you have to buy, you have probably already got somewhere.

As spring moved in, the temptation to give in and buy was wearing me down. A new season begs for a fresh look.

There seemed something faintly unsavoury about getting through a hot summer in last year's clothes. How would I manage it?

People suggested helpfully that, of course, one does not have to spend a lot of money to buy a new outfit every week any more.

You can fill a basket at Primark with clothes so cheap it won't matter if you never wear half of them.

But my clothes-shopping boycott had, by now, taken on a new dimension.

I was beginning to feel rather puritanical and was aware of a niggling feeling that all this consumerism couldn't be good for the planet.

Looking upon clothes as disposable commodities that can be worn once and chucked away seems plain wrong.

It is as if we are forgetting that clothes, like all other consumer commodities, require raw materials and energy for their production.

And there is the impact on the environment of transporting them halfway across the world.

According to the National Consumer Council, we chuck out 80 per cent of what we buy after just one use.

Then there's the pollution the manufacturer of textiles is responsible for. As a family, we had started buying local produce, aware of the CO2 emissions produced by transporting food from across the world, so why weren't we paying similar attention to clothes?

Although the shops, magazines and catalogues were urging me in one direction, my conscience was now helping me to resist.

I had plenty of good clothes left from last summer, many of them barely worn.

I was going to have to draw on reserves of creativity to recycle them without their looking too tatty or discoloured.

A BBC2 programme on the Jackie comic earlier this year helped me with this.

In it, former readers reminisced that as penniless teenagers in the Seventies they adapted clothes, adding triangles of Laura Ashley fabric to straight jeans to create flares, customising skirts with patchwork pockets and so on.

You can adapt clothes so easily, that once you begin to do so, shopping seems exhausting in comparison.

When I spotted a pair of three-quarter-length trousers in the Toast catalogue that I coveted terribly, I recreated the look by cutting the bottoms off a pair of linen trousers I no longer wore.

My mother pointed out that I could even use the chopped-off bottoms of the trouser legs as dusters - the return of makedoand-mend!

My eyes began to open.

A beautiful dress that had been sitting in a bag waiting for a trip to Oxfam because, although I loved its shape, I'd gone off the colour, could be dyed.

I took another dress to a woman who does alterations, to have the neckline-changed.

And soon I had a whole new wardrobe.

I was enjoying things I never thought I had time for - spending longer reading, or gardening, or going to exhibitions instead of into the shops.

The fashion industry frightens us into believing we'll look out of date if we wear last winter's coat or boots again.

But storing clothes used to be the rule rather than the exception.

My mother packed all her winter clothes in the spring, and got out her summer wardrobe.

Then, in the autumn, she would do the opposite.

Each season she would rediscover some item she had forgotten.

It was like acquiring a whole new garment without spending any money.

And, if you hang on to things long enough, they are bound to come back into fashion again.

And one day they will become vintage - my daughters wear my mother's old Sixties' dresses.

At the end of last winter, I folded the clothes that I believed had another year of wear in them and stored them in an old leather suitcase that belonged to my grandfather.

Now autumn is here again, it's time to take a look at them. Sure enough, there are things I'd forgotten I had.

Soon, I will have passed a whole year without buying clothes and saved nearly £3,000.

I still face challenges - going into every designer clothes shop in Covent Garden with two teenage daughters is enough to make the toughest non-clothes buyer weaken.

But I know that if I get to the end of the year, I'll get twice as much pleasure when I do at last buy something.

My intention is not to go mad, but to buy fewer, better quality clothes that I really want.

Good quality clothes should be cherished and maintained so they might even, like good quality furniture, be passed down through the generations.

The Independent, November 8, 2007