The UrbanWire

Spring and summer are often about florals and pastels. However, London-based Singaporean fashion designer, Ashley Isham, has re-defined 2008’s spring and summer for the ladies with a lot of draping and usage of unique materials, like how he has always been known for.

Ashley Isham’s latest Spring/Summer 2008 collection wowed the crowd at this year’s Singapore Fashion Festival (SFF), held at Tent@Orchard at Ngee Ann City. What kick-started the showcase was a series of dresses with prints that resemble pixels. These monochromatic dresses were tailored so brilliantly that they looked as if the models were born in them. The clever usage of belts and seamless tucking of fabrics put great and flattering emphasis on the models’ waistlines.

Long and flowing dresses are definitely a must for when the sun shines and flowers blossom, which fortunately is true of Singapore almost all-year. Likewise, Ashley has spiced up these dresses with a tinge of his personal touch. His signature stunning draping of fabrics to create a simple yet dramatic look is distinctive. The touch of skinny patent belts on the dress completed the ensemble.

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The sensational catwalk theatre of the Singapore Fashion Festival (SFF) 2008 at

the Tent@Orchard promised a fabulous display of beauty on its 60-feet-long, elevated and glistening white runway, whose narrowness left this UrbanWire editor wondering.

“Are you sure we won’t be treated, instead, to an entertaining spectacle of tumbling models?” He asked colleague and hype editor Chong Li Bing. Fortunately, there were no scenes of falling models.

The parade of absolutely entrancing apparel, draped on very beautiful people, put UrbanWire in a delightful reverie. Fascinating choreography only served to heighten his senses, sensitising his eyes to tiny details on the Ashley Isham dress and the texture of CK shorts against the background of runway music.

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“I don’t believe in people who think that clothes are not important,” Miuccia Prada, arguably the grand dame of fashion, once said.

In this fashion edition, UrbanWire talks about the perspectives, works and lives of people, who definitely think that clothes are very important, from Singapore and in the region.

It’s no secret that the fashion industry is extremely elitist, only admitting a select few as members and banishing the others with the derogatory label of “wannabe”. By strict definition, haute couture can only be applied to custom-made fashion labels that meet demanding pre-requisites. Carine Roitfeld, editor-in-chief of Paris Vogue, world’s longest-running (Vogue started in 1902) and most influential fashion magazine, also said, “Vogue is elitist. We cannot have millions of readers. We would become another title.”

Here at the UrbanWire, we hold no such notion. Instead, with this fashion edition, we attempt to bring local and regional fashion to a coherent and comprehensible level, and find sanity in the chaos of this society that regards itself as the beau monde.

While you can expect a large part of this edition to comprise opinion pieces about the recently ended Singapore Fashion Festival (SFF), there will also be interviews with renowned fashion designers and self-proclaimed fashionistas, among others, in our endeavour to reveal a rarely seen perspective in this industry.

After all, fashion is neither just the SFF nor even the Vogue magazine. The late Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel, the most prominent figure in the history of 20th-century fashion, said, “Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.”