After 2012, a year in which digital media continued to radically change our lifestyle, New York consulting firm, MBF predicts the top consumer trends for 2013 will include the importance of story-telling in retail, buying locally and the continued integration of sustainability into our everyday lives…

Founded in 2001 by Berlin-born Manuela Fassbender, MBF Inc. is a New York City-based consulting firm that provides clients with trend and design direction customized to their client’s unique markets.

In recent seasons, a cyclone of dizzying digital prints has blown across the fashion landscape, quickening the pulse of fashion editors and making cash registers ring. Perhaps nowhere did the whirlwind seem stronger than outside the shows, where ‘it-girls’ in graphic, printed pieces by young designers like Mary Katrantzou, Jonathan Saunders and Peter Pilotto made coquettish plays for the attention of street style bloggers. But the Spring/Summer 2013 collections ushered in a new mood, with many designers sidelining head-turning prints in favour of calmer, cleaner clothes.

Tilly Macalister-Smith is a London-based writer and acting fashion editor at Vogue.co.uk
The Business of Fashion

Hall Five partnered with Sophicolor to create an exclusive color palette for Holiday 2013.
Connect the past and the present through color. Unexpected shades of teal, pink, purple and green replace more predictable seasonal jewel tones; while antique gold and gunmetal offer a baroque opulence with an historical feel.

Whether its Oriental Splendor at Harvey Nichols, Disney Princesses at Harrods or “Not Your Usual Christmas” at Selfridges, London’s Holiday windows for 2012 are all about fantasy, luxury and the traditions we associate with the festive season.

For Dante Gabriel Rossetti of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, art and poetry were entwined with his personal life and relationships to such a degree it was all one. His devotion to female beauty in his poetry and painting mirrored his obsession to a vision of ideal feminine beauty in his personal life. That ideal meant long lustrous hair, an elongated sculptural looking neck, heavy eyelids, sensuous pouty lips and skin with a luminous fair complexion.

Despite loving most of the Olympic coverage, the London fashion catwalk cameo segment in the closing ceremony made me cringe. I really wasn’t sure why until I read an article by Lisa Armstrong in The Telegraph . Labeling the catwalk strut by Kate, Naomi et al, “pompous” and “bombastic”, she succinctly expressed my own feelings. Fashion and ouvert sexiness so often go hand-in-hand, but for the most part, London’s style-mongers exist in a sort of parallel universe, where what you wear in public can mean not taking yourself too seriously. Paraphrasing Mulberry’s creative director Emma Hill, Armstrong goes on to say, “If we have a USP, it is (having) a sense of humour. You don’t need to tamper with things too much. Our natural style is very cool.”

“London Bridge is Falling Down” goes the nursery rhyme but in fact the opposite is true as this area of the city’s South Bank has undergone a radical transformation evolving into “London Bridge Quarter” at the heart of which is The Shard. At 1,016 ft tall, The Shard has already transformed the London skyline and when it opens to the public in 2013, with a hotel, apartments, offices and viewing galleries, The Shard will offer the services and entertainments of a veritable vertical city.

The shape of the tower is generous at the bottom and narrow at the top, disappearing in the air like a 16th century pinnacle or the mast top of a very tall ship. The architecture of The Shard is firmly based in the historic form of London’s masts and spires

Renzo Piano

From Sarah Sands of The London Evening Standard , a review of London 2012, what’s to come in 2013 and why she thinks it’s the greatest city in the world.

For S13, many designers in New York and Europe showed a variety of looks in shades of chemical and natural green, mixing and matching them in unexpected combinations, often pieced-in to the same garment. Inspired by this, Hall Five created an exclusive color palette using swatches from our partner, Sophicolor Collections.
L-R: Genny, Pringle of Scotland

Geometric patterns, blocks of color, stripes and diamond shapes created strong and graphic looks on many runways. They alluded once more to the post-modern period of art and design in the fifties and sixties.

“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, it’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world” sang The Kinks back in 1970 and according to this season’s R-T-W Collections, that is still the case as many designers sent trouser suits and tuxedo/Smoking looks down the runways of New York and Europe. it’s nothing new of course, women in menswear, tailored to the female form, just look at movie stars Katherine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich who both strode around wearing trousers in the 1930s and 40s. Bianca Jagger, a major icon of the 1970s was well-known for wearing menswear, in particular a bright white suit by Yves Saint Laurent. But why was the menswear look so prevalent this season?

Was it an early homage to one of their own? Hedi Slimane, known for ground-breaking designs in menswear, now at the helm of Saint Laurent, creator of the ultimate in sexy menswear on women, Le Smoking? Although trousers were mostly slender or even caught at the ankle. On the other hand, jackets were varied; boxy and broad shouldered, fitted with a peplum, cropped, longer length, short over long and sleeveless, were all present.

Arguably the loudest conversation swirling around the S13 collections was an analysis of how successfully modern brands interpret the work of designers created forty, fifty or more years ago. It was a discussion that became the most heated in referencing the R-T-W debuts of Raf Simons at Christian Dior and Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent. Not to mention the stalwarts, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, Balmain, Chloe, Celine ... established names with talented designers at the helm challenged with producing fresh ideas every season that will appeal to the modern and let’s face it, wealthy client. For the most part, all of the above are consistently, hugely successful in interpreting their particular brand. So much so that store buyers are starting to claim that there are “no trends anymore”  perhaps not realizing that THIS is the trend. Nowhere has this modernity been more apparent than in the area of fabrics. This season, as was the case in the past several few, there was a tendency to use a mix of transparent and opaque materials in order to create a sensual “reveal and conceal” style. The standout feature for Spring 13 is that several designers took classic organzas and coated them.