06 | Style
KIT &
THE CLOSET KEN THOMPSON
CABOODLE
All about Audrey Your scribe jets off to London next week for a fashion shoot, and at the top of my downtime to-see list is the exhibition Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an Icon at the National Portrait Gallery. Icon is one of the most overused words in the fashion dictionary but the great Hepburn could not warrant a lesser description. She was a true hybrid of humanitarian, esteemed actress and fashion luminary, one who still captures the world’s imagination. It will be wonderful to see the imagery captured by some of the greatest photographers of that generation, such as Norman Parkinson, and the amazing outfits and couture Hepburn wore, largely designed by her lifelong friend Hubert de Givenchy. I was lucky to meet Hepburn one evening in Sydney while she was in Australia for UNICEF, and was bowled over by her charm. I will never forget my chum Alastair remarking to her how beautiful she looked, to which she replied: “Oh, you should see me on a Sunday in Geneva!” That is the essence of the style icon: sheer effortlessness. And she had it in bucketloads. kthompsonstylist @bigpond.com
The Canadian brains behind luxury streetwear label Kit and Ace want to change the world, one ‘perfect’ hi-tech T-shirt at a time CARLI PHILIPS
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s a child, JJ Wilson, the son of billionaire Lululemon founder Dennis “Chip” Wilson, lived and breathed the family business. “I would finish school and wouldn’t go home. I would go to a Lululemon store. I would spend my weekends in a Lululemon store and you’d better believe that on family vacations we were visiting factories to look at fabrics. My whole life has been that.” So if JJ is anything like his entrepreneurial father, whose ubiquitous stretchy yoga pants catapulted the activewear industry into the stratosphere, it’s worth listening up. “Luxury streetwear” is the next big thing, according to the 26-year-old co-founder and “young visionary”, who has launched the Canada-based apparel brand Kit and Ace with his stepmother and exLululemon designer, Shannon. The demographic? Those living a “full contact” lifestyle. It’s luxury clothing with all the technical and functional benefits of athletic clothing: durability, stretch, versatility and washability. As Chip told The New York Times in February, this is an entirely new apparel category of “technical athleta-leisure or business athleticism ... JJ and Shannon have caught the next wave”. Based on a proprietary fabric conceived by the Wilsons, Qemir™ (the phonetic “come here”) or Technical Cashmere™, is a blend of cotton, elastane, nylon and wool fibres that mimics the softness of cashmere but without the maintenance. It’s not directional, but more fabric-focused, with casual women’s and men’s basics in safe greys, white, black and navy that can be worn from morning to night. Prices range from $68 for a tank top to $168 for a dress. It’s contemporary, affordable luxury. “Italian cashmere makers thought we were crazy,” says JJ, whose resume includes positions at Canadian department store Holt Renfrew, private equity company Advent International and menswear label Wings + Horns. “They thought we were trying to modify something that was already seemingly perfect. But the traditional familial generation of crafting cashmere fabrics and what we wanted to
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do was quite different. We wanted to re-create cashmere into something that had technical properties and some sort of functionality that meant it could be put in the washer and dryer.” Their Asian factory contacts were much more amenable, creating the desired shrinkage, stretch and combination of interlaces that is now Technical Cashmere. The process took two years and was conceived while the family was living in Sydney. “We have a very big love for Down Under, let’s just say that,” says JJ, who believes the “product really lends itself to the Australian market”. Their store in Greville Street, Melbourne, which opened last month and marks the brand’s foray into the Asia Pacific, adds to the roster of stores in North America and London. In the past 12 months Kit and
Ace has grown to include 21 shops and six pop-ups internationally, and this aggressive expansion has seen staff numbers swell from six to 600 in just nine months. Next up for Australia is Brisbane and two locations in Sydney — all by the end of this month. The plan is to open 30 to 50 shops by the end of this year. Kit and Ace projects that by 2020 it will be a billion-dollar company. “We want to be global, we want to be in international markets, we want to be omni-channel, we want to have a world-class ecommerce site, we want to save people time and we want to figure it out all right now so that it’s almost easier in the long run,” says JJ of going global so quickly. “It’s what the world expects now and it’s actually been fun trying to figure it all out.”
Pining for Pyrex: the latest collectable Feather your nest with this
LIZ LOGAN
Forget Twitter for a moment and focus instead on the more delightful TweetieBird. Moschino has embraced the cartoon canary in its latest collection, even better when slightly abstracted in this shoulder bag. Bonus points if you are a cat owner. “I tawt I taw a puddy-tat!” Moschino bag $784.30 net-a-porter.com
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On any other day, I would have walked right past those pastel-coloured bowls. One was pink, charmingly decorated with striped berries, leaves and buds; the other, turquoise, bore a bucolic pattern that depicted a giant rooster and an Amish farming couple standing near stalks of wheat. Before this, I’d never purchased a piece of vintage kitchenware — it always seemed a little dirty to me — but on that Saturday in May at an outdoor flea market, I recognised these bowls immediately as opal Pyrex. I’d just spent hours looking at images of an
LIFE
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AUGUST 8-9, 2015
exhibit at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York State that celebrates the 100th anniversary of Pyrex. I was particularly entranced by the more than 150 designs of opal Pyrex — an unusually colourful version of the glass cookware manufactured from the 1940s through the 80s. The first Pyrex products were mundanely (if practically) clear, allowing home cooks to monitor how their food was doing on all sides. As kitchens became vibrant, informal communal spaces after World War II, Corning introduced opal Pyrex, which fused the technology behind their durable glass with applied colours and endearing patterns. As I learned more about my new acquisitions, I started to really fall for them. Even their name was romantic: they were Cinderella bowls, a style
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