News flash: NYFW turns into a catfight, er, catwalk fight!

We've all heard plenty of gossip about rivalries between designers (Yves vs. Karl, anyone?), editors (Anna vs. Carine!), models, and even retailers, but this is something else – dueling New York Fashion Week venues! For September, Milk Studios and M.A.C. beauty products have teamed up to offer an alternative to the Bryant Park tents, and have snagged a bevy of hot young designers, including Alexa

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Berlin trade shows go green: an MBF exclusive report

Photos, from left to right: Hedda William S/S09; a bag from Royal Blush; Blue Notch S/S09.MBF brings you an overview of the Berlin womenswear trade shows for Spring/Summer 2010, where we talked with quite a few companies about sustainability and shifts in the marketplace. We were most impressed with the two eco tradeshows: Green Showroom, featuring 16 sustainable collections from the high fashion

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Presenting the new green giant: Wal-mart!

Pilloried in the media, and notably in Barbara Ehrenreich's must-read Nickel and Dimed, for its low, low pay and appalling lack of benefits, Wal-mart has cleaned up its act. Okay, conditions for workers may not have improved so much, but perhaps they will: surprisingly for a company whose employees often have to supplement their incomes with welfare, the mega-retailer recently announced it's officially supporting an employer mandate on health care. Which would be great in and of itself, but another announcement has knocked that one out of the water: Wal-mart is creating a (self-reported) scor

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Saving the world through social media

Nonprofit organizations can be many things: caring, diligent, altruistic, painfully earnest. One thing they rarely are, though, is chic. Enter charity: water, started by Scott Harrison, an ex-party promoter who leveraged his natural flair for marketing into a group that, in only 5 years, has helped provide clean water to almost 1 million people in third-world countries. With only 11 employees, charity: water has raised money (over $10 million so far!) in ways so catchy, for-profits can only dream of catching up: asking people with September birthdays to request donations in lieu of presents;

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News flash: Less is more, again

Looks like minimalism is back – both as æsthetic and business strategy. This summer, Camilla Stærk's sudden, unannounced closing of her Soho boutique set off alarms, but it turns out she was conserving her resources to regroup for the recession in a clever way: by creating Stærk Signature, a tiny line consisting of the 8 essential pieces that her customers demand from season to season. Like designer, like retailer: stores, too, have begun paring down their inventory, as WWD reported yesterday. The still-suffering (and possibly for sale to Uniqlo?) Gap learned years ago that too much merchandi

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News flash: What recession? SS10 fashion weeks defy expectations.

With all the design houses going out of business lately, one might have imagined September's upcoming fashion weeks would be tragically quiet, underattended affairs. One would, in that case, have been utterly mistaken: IMG is reporting that the number of designers wanting to show at New York Fashion Week is up this season, while the British Fashion Council is staging a concerted – and so far quite successful – effort to lure back local designers to London's much-ignored fashion week. Prodigal sons and daughters returning to the British Isles for SS10 include Burberry, Matthew Williamson, Prin

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