Lika Vilkova

Lika Volkova is Co-founder and designer for SANS a fashion company that are producing eco friendly garments and are receiving rave reviews from many sustainable design communities. Despite this Lika disagrees and argues that her line is not an eco-fashion company for the simple reason she feels eco-fashion doesn’t exist.

“How can fashion possibly be good for the environment? You produce things – you make them. All garments, with the exception of secondhand clothing, produces waste, expends energy and exploits the earth – things that can hardly be called eco.”

The company offers digital patterns, which you can buy and download to make yourself - aspiring to green fashion and encouraging others to do the same. You can watch a video where Lika discusses her beliefs behind the concept at: SANS

Koji Horigome

Shoe label Koji Horigome is based in London, UK and launched in 2008.

The designer is inspired by the shape of orthopaedic shoes, 1960s artificial limbs, vintage medical equipment, military outfits, processes of traditional shoe making, the film ‘Ghost in the Shell’ and abandoned buildings. His website is currently under construction, but you can his view work at the following link: Koji Horigome

Mary Katrantzou

Mary Katrantzou is among the second wave of breakout stars of the digital print revolution that has been sweeping London's designers since Basso & Brooke began experimenting a few years ago. The shift from mechanical screen printing to computer manipulations of color and pattern has meant designers like Katrantzou can achieve impossibly complex feats of imagination. Her website is currently being build but you can follow her work on style.com at:

Mary Katrantzou

Erdem Moralioglu

Erdem, is a ready-to-wear line established in 2005 by Erdem Moralioglu.

The brand has won much praise from many followers for its gracefully modern clothing. Fusing sharp, forward tailoring and graphic custom designed silk prints in a uniquely romantic approach has been the signature of the brand’s aesthetic.

The brand also brings about a playful use of embellishment in its creations, using embroidery in a youthful manner.

Erdem Moralioglu

Kustaa saksi

Kustaa Saksi is a Finish born artist, now living and working in Paris. His Scandinavian design roots inform his work, which coupled with his unique imagination enables him to combine organic touches and viscous shapes for a variety of end uses such as shoes, wallpaper, book covers, instore installations, and catwalk sets to name a few.

The Trend Forecaster's Handbook

The Trend Forecaster’s Handbook, due to be published in October, provides a good overview of the world of trends, trend forecasting and consumer-insight techniques.
This is of particular relevance to L5 TD4Fers doing the Think Tank unit. It was written by Martin Raymond, who is the is a co-founder of The Future Laboratory.

Marithe + Francois Girbaud

Marithé François Girbaud is an international French based clothing company founded in 1964 by husband and wife, François and Marithé Girbaud.

The company specializes in casual clothing using unique styling and fabrics. Year after year, they redesign and rethink the Jean, inventing new industrial processes, technical designs in harmony with morphology and the movement of the body.

Balenciaga

Balenciaga is a fashion house founded by Cristóbal Balenciaga, a Spanish designer, born in the Basque Country, Spain. He had a reputation as a couturier of uncompromising standards and was referred to as "the master of us all" by Christian Dior.

His bubble skirts and odd, feminine, yet ultra-modern shapes were trademarks of the house. The house of Balenciaga is now owned by the Frenchmultinational company PPR - a French multinational holding company specializing in retail shops and luxury brands.

Rodarte

Sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy came from Pasadena, California, to New York in the spring of 2005 with nothing more than a few dresses and coats stuffed in their suitcase. A week after arriving, they had shown their collection, tagged Rodarte after their mother's maiden name, to almost every major fashion editor and upscale retail buyer. What got them through the door? Tenacity and talent.
Rodarte

Keep and Share

Keep and Share is a small UK knit company, dedicated to 'slow' fashion. Designing knitted garments outside trends for long-term use, which are less environmentally harmful.

Abraka

Abraka is Carine Abraham, a French designer who works for a range of different end uses including fashion and pattern design. There's a clever mix of traditional and contemporary imagery going on in her work, with some great illustration and art direction.

Robert Ryan

Robert Ryan is famed for his intricate paper cuts. He creates a world of romance and magic with simple but heartfelt messages.

Jakob Schlaepfer

Swiss fabric company Jakob Schlaepfer design and manufacture fabric with extraordinary levels of sophistication, quality and originality. They create textiles for couture, pret-a-porter and interiors. If you're looking for a definition of high-end, this is it.

Lucy and Bart

LucyandBart is an experimental fashion collaboration between (Australian) Lucy McRae and (Dutch) Bart Hess. According to the site, it is "described as an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body. They share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression."
If you haven't seen this stuff before, make a cup of tea and prepare to be deeply inspired. You can also check out the individual sites of Lucy McRae and Bart Hess.

Alison Willoughby

Alison Willoughby is a textile designer who predominately works with skirts and is best known for making one-off, elaborately patterned design work. They are as much works of art as pieces of clothing - this one belongs to her upcycled range, made from gents ties.

Superbad

Superbad is a web art project by Ben Benjamin, a San Fransisco-based graphic design (not the song by James Brown or the film featuring McLovin). It was started in 1997, and is a sprawling maze of imagery you click on to move through. Sometimes it seems like you're going round and round in circles, sometimes it seems completely chaotic.

If you're interested in web design, most of pages are actually very simple. The site is essentially a huge collection of linked random images and text. It is probably the complete opposite of what Jakob Neilsen promotes on his UseIt site - a rather draconian approach to making web sites as user-friendly as possible.

Inspirational people Li Edelkoort

Li Edelkoort is one of the most sought-after trend researchers on the planet. For over 20 years she has been pointing companies towards what tomorrow’s consumers want, how they will live and what will be important to them. When she speaks, corporations listen – among others, Coca-Cola, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal, Shiseido, as well as car companies, banks and even governments consult with her at her offices in Paris and New York. In the world of fashion and design, she is considered an icon of style with a fail-proof sense of what tomorrow will bring. Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential fashion experts of our day, and the famous British design magazine i-D listed her among the world’s 40 most important designers.

Li Edelkoort

Brian Dettmer

Brian Dettmer is an American artist who uses books to create art, cutting into the pages to use the illustrations to make 3D pieces. His home page is here and his Flickr space is here. Other examples of paper art can be found on the Web Design Ledger, which has loads of other inspirational stuff for designers in general.

Jo Angell

Jo Angell likes to describe herself as as a multi-faceted designer. Her work spans patterns for wallpaper and textiles to innovative light responsive canopies and lighting. Inspiration comes directly from nature but also research below the surface. Jo won second prize from Philips Design for ‘Breathable Felt’, a collection of experimental smart textiles incorporating petals which open in response to heat. She is currently exhibiting at the Kilkenny Arts Festival

'Embracing Technology' 7 Aug - 20 October

Jo is also a member of Puff & Flock, a collective of eight female textile designers based in London.

David David

David David is the fashion label of London based designer David Saunders. It features his signature geometric prints on ready-to-wear garments for women. The image here is from his Spring Summer 2010 collection; earlier designs can be seen here.

Etro "Cooked" Shirt

Etro, the Italian fashion company, have a presentation on their site that gives a number of different recipes for applying colour to a men's white shirt with food. This includes blueberries (shown above), coffee and salt. No mention of any washing instructions, mind. You can download it as a PDF via the save button at the bottom left-ish of the webpage.

Maxalot Wallpaper

Maxalot is an Amsterdam-based gallery that regularly commissions surface pattern work for their stunning Exposif collection of Designer Wallpapers, produced in collaboration with leading names in graphic design, photography and illustration. These are available to custom-order for walls of any size or shape. The example above is by Kenzo Miniami; the site also features Timorous Beasties, Florence Manlik and Jon Burgerman.