New Fashion Segment with Derek Warburton!

Hey Everyone,

I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season. I have been so amazed with the fashion that everyone has been wearing this year for the holidays(at least the "getting ready" portion).

In this blog post, I am going to tell you about my amazing experience with modeling for Derek Warburton(Celebrity Stylist based in New York City) in Indianapolis for IndyStyle TV. Also, he happened to mention my blog on TV as well which was very exciting!

Let's get started on showing you what happened during the segment/what ideas to wear for the Holiday season....

The styles that I got to wear:

@Hipknoties Dress, @bellapierre Makeup, Clutch by Aldo, Skinworldwide knit Faux Fur jacket and @indiahicksstyle jewelry

They are such amazing pieces!

I am the one in the very Glam outfit, titled girls night out. The first pic is with me in the middle with the two other girl models.

The last pic is with me and wonderful/talented Derek Warburton.

Here is a little bio about Derek Warburton, straight off of his website www.derekwarburton.com


Derek Warburton is a celebrity stylist and international media personality known for his personal flair. He has been featured in The New York Times, Marie Claire, In Touch, Life & Style,The UK’s Evening Standard and  landed on the cover of Metro London.   Warburton is an annual presenter at the Scottish Fashion Awards for International Designer of the Year. He was featured on Vogue.tv as well as having multiple interviews on the BBC.  His client list includes Victoria's Secret Models, music superstars, and A-list Actors.

After attending New York City's Fashion Institute of Technology, Warburton's career took off when he joined Atomic Style Agency in Miami. As managing partner, he styled celebs such as Sean Paul and Beyonce. This led to opportunities as an editor, and Derek was frequently requested on talk shows for his no-holds-barred style advice.  Warburton also appeared as co host on the UK’s Fashion Avenue, with Supermodel Jodi Kidd and the STYLE network's, BIG BOUTIQUE.
As Derek ‘s career progressed, he found it was time to give back to the community. Since 2009 he has been working with Bottomless Closet, and was named ambassador of the Doe Fund. Derek helps the women at Bottomless Closet dress for the career they want and build their self esteem along with their self image.  In his honor, Miss America hosted the 2 year anniversary of “How to be DFAB” and congratulated him for helping over 300 women.


Wait! That's not all...During the segment he mentioned this amazing product called GoSmile. As of right now, you can get this product for 30% off before Christmas! Just type in the code Holiday30 when you purchase.

Go Smile has been a leading brand for teeth whitening since 2002...and trust me, it works! Derek used it while we were getting ready, and his teeth look outstanding! I'd highly recommend it, I know I am getting one :)

Here's the website for Go Smile: www.gosmile.com

Here are other links as well for the segment:
www.indystyle.tv
http://www.wishtv.com/indy-style/fabulous-holiday-look (to see the segment from Friday 12/13/13)

Thank you to Derek Warburton and his team for giving me this awesome opportunity! And to all the other models who made this segment great and glamorous :)

Until next time!

-CR

Isabel Marant/H&M

Hey Everyone,

Very exciting news: Isabel Marant has opened at H&M on Thursday(only in about 250 H&M's worldwide and online). Her designs have been seen on celebrities, such as Jessica Alba and Jessica Biel.

About Isabel Marant(from Vogue.com):

Designers

Isabel Marant

Photograph by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Published in Vanity Fair, January 2011.

You know her. The French girl with the just-rolled-out-of-bed, can’t-be-bothered look. She pulls on last night’s clothes—slouchy tee, gray jeans. Fingers through the hair, a touch of makeup, and she goes out. Yet she looks smashing. Perhaps it’s her ankle boots (scuffed just so), boyish jacket, and lambskin shoulder bag. Or maybe it’s the way that skinny chain-mail scarf or mass of bracelets comes off as an afterthought. Equal parts confidence and nonchalance—that’s what makes this Gallic girl so enviable, and no one captures it better than Isabel Marant.
A native Parisian, Marant blends ethnic bohemia and tomboy street chic effortlessly, and her name has long been on the lips of fashion insiders: editors, models, and sexy actresses like Sienna Miller and Rachel Weisz. Until recently, Americans had to jet across the pond to get their hands on her notoriously hard-to-find pieces—slim pants, sheer tees, and draped minis—which they carried home by the armload. (The more enterprising could turn a quick profit on eBay.) The label’s exclusivity was just part of its mystique. “It took some time to build up,” Marant acknowledged in 2008, “but I have never fallen.”^[1]
But even after fifteen years in the business, with a rock-solid fan base and booming boutiques, Marant didn’t quite know how to bring her vision to a wider audience—that is, until she reconnected with her childhood friend Emmanuelle Alt, then the fashion director of French Vogue. “My strength is not putting clothes together,” Marant said in 2010. “Emmanuelle, on the other hand, is perfect for this. . . . It’s funny because she has managed to create exactly the image I wanted.”^[2]
By 2011, that look of perfectly tousled French cool was hitting its stride, with waiting lists for Marant’s fringed and studded boots wrapping clear around the globe. Stateside fans can now get their Isabel fix in SoHo, New York, where Marant and Jerome Dreyfuss, her bag-designer husband, have set up side-by-side shops.

1. Isabel Marant born in Paris to a German mother (a model and a director of the Elite agency) and French father. After her parents’ divorce, Isabel will split her time between households. Growing up, she later tells L’Express, “I wanted to be a vet, like everyone else. I was a tomboy . . . I hated wearing a skirt or dress. How horrible!”^[3] Childhood trips to Africa, Asia, India, and the Caribbean will later influence her work.
2. Rejecting the girlish style popular in her suburban Paris neighborhood of Neuilly-sur-Seine, asks her father for a sewing machine and begins reworking old army jackets and remnants into a more bohemian wardrobe. Changes into these original creations before class. “I wanted to wear things that I liked. Fashion, I did not even know what it was!”^[4] she later recalls, noting her proclivity for wearing ballet flats, sans socks, even in cold weather.
3. Has modest success selling pieces created with friend Christophe Lemaire to a shop in Les Halles. Abandons plans to study economics to take up design at Studio Berçot fashion school. A crush on Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren inspires her to make clothes from dishcloths. “But dishcloths are really nice in France,”^[5] she later says.
4. Following her studies, apprentices with Parisian designer Michel Klein. In the next year or two will also collaborate with Bridget Yorke on two collections for Yorke & Cole, and assist art director Marc Ascoli on projects for Yohji Yamamoto, Martine Sitbon, and Chloe.
5. Launches a small collection of outsize jewelry. “I started in fashion in jewelry, putting myself behind torches and soldering irons!”^[6] she later says. (Will go on to design accessories and jewelry for Claude Montana, Michel Perry, and Yorke & Cole.)
6. Launches knitwear label Twen with her mother, with whom she works “until I felt strong enough to stand on my own,”^[7] she later recalls.
7. Establishes her own label, setting up a studio on the Passage Saint-Sébastien in the Marais. Her logo, a hand-drawn star, is taken from her school days, when she replaced the dot over the I in her name with such a star in order to stand out. “When I made my mark at 26 years old,” she later says, “I had set myself a simple goal: I wanted to create clothes that I myself wished to buy, clothes for girls, working women, who have taste and are willing to spend a little money on their looks without breaking the bank.”^[8] The first show is held in the debris-strewn courtyard of a squat, with Marant’s friends modeling.
8. Wins the year’s Award de la Mode.
9. January: Launches I*M line in Japan. Guest-designs the first of several collections for French clothing catalog La Redoute. February: Opens her first store, in a former artist’s studio in the Bastille district. Designs a collection of patchwork rabbit-fur coats and fur-lined rainwear for Parisian furrier Yves Salomon. March: The New York Times reports on her fusion of “a layered, often floor-length silhouette with Asian and African influences”; the overall look “says trekking in Tibet via the Bastille.”^[9]
10. Lower-priced Étoile line debuts at Pret-a-Porter Paris, with a focus on jeans and T-shirts.
11. Opens a second Paris shop at 1 Rue Jacob on the Left Bank. “To me, this is the authentic Paris,”^[10] she says. (She will add a third store, on the Rue de Saintonge, in 2007.) First full Étoile collection, including lingerie, is introduced.
12. Designs a line of lingerie with Beautiful People by DIM.
13. Gives birth to a son, Tal, with husband Jerome Dreyfuss, a handbag designer.
14. February: Isabel Marant pop-up boutique opens at Paris’s new Printemps de la Mode department store. September: Childrenswear line is launched.
15. Collaborates with Anthropologie on a collection.
16. French fashion chain Naf Naf is ordered to pay damages of $120,000 to Marant for copying a dress from her fall 2006 collection.
17. July: Brit actress Rachel Weisz wears Marant’s leopard minidress while promoting A Streetcar Named Desire in London. (French siren Marion Cotillard wears a similar look when she appears on Oprah in December). August: Action villain Sienna Miller wears Marant’s ruched printed cocktail dress and Otway booties to the London premiere of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
18. January: The Wall Street Journal reports on the buying frenzy sparked by Marant’s Otway studded biker bootie with isosceles-triangle heel. March: “The heels came from the little cowboy cartoon from Bugs Bunny,” she elaborates in Vogue. “If you exaggerate the shape all the way, it becomes a triangle.”^[11] April: First Stateside boutique opens in SoHo in New York, with Dreyfuss’s handbags in the adjoining space. “I’ve always had a very secure way of development, because I created my brand in ’94 with my own money and really increased, increased, increased step by step,”^[12] she says. May: Actress Jennifer Connelly wears Marant’s jewel-neck LBD, black stockings, and black Balenciaga heels at the Tribeca Ball. June: Marant is crowned Fashion Designer of the Year at British Glamour’s Women of the Year Awards. July: Model Kate Moss is the face of the fall campaign. August: “My ideal woman is Serge Gainsbourg,” the designer tells Love magazine. “Not that he was a woman.”^[13] MTV It girl Alexa Chung tells Vogue, “I buy everything Isabel Marant ever looked at.”^[14]
19. January: Actress Diane Kruger wears Marant’s cropped fur jacket over a lacy Valentino floor-sweeper to the Golden Camera Awards in Berlin. August: T magazine visits Marant and Dreyfuss’s rustic, bare-bones country cabin in Fontainebleu, outside Paris. November: She debuts a paint-splattered T-shirt for the Gap’s (Product) RED project, which benefits the Global Fund to fight disease in Africa.
20. Moves her Paris headquarters to a 21,500-square-foot space, and expands her network of boutiques to Tokyo and Seoul. Launches a wedge sneaker that instantly becomes a cult best-seller, spawning numerous imitations. April: Designs a limited-edition gold watch and bracelet. June: Model Arizona Muse stars in the fall campaign. September: Marant makes “The Vogue 120” roster of young movers and shakers in style. November: “The attitude of what I make is very difficult for me to describe,” she tells the blog Into the Gloss. “It’s really me . . . most of the time I have to try things on myself to feel if it’s right or not. I cannot see it on a model because a model, she’s just perfect.”^[15]
21. January: Opens a new boutique on Melrose Place in West Hollywood. February: Creates limited-edition skateboards with Heritage House Paris, to be sold at her L.A. outpost. June: A collaboration with H&M—for womenswear as well and men’s and children’s clothing—is announced.

Now to some of her work:

 

 

 

For more info on how much people were willing to get up at 3am and start waiting in line at 4a...then check out this article with pics all over the world at different H&M stores.

 

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2507088/Hysteria-H-M-shoppers-queue-4am-STILL-miss-Isabel-Marant--eBay-already.html#comments

Here's some photos from her recent collection with H&M:

Isabel Marant is one of my women to look up to. She is a fighter, a mother, and a success(not to mention super fabulous and talented)! I believe she is someone we can all look up to(no matter what our age/style).

Until next time,
CR

Mixing Summer with Fall

Aren't sick of putting your summer clothes away and getting out your fall clothes, feeling like you HAVE to separate the two?

Well, you don't have to worry about that anymore! There are ways to keep the two together and it not looking awkward....

Here we go, just some ideas for you(plus it's okay to mix fabrics without making it too obvious, as you'll see in some of the pics):

See? It's as simple as that! I hope you all have a wonderful fall season and I can't wait to update you all on some fun fashion events coming up for muah!

Until next time!
-CR

Insta-Fashion and Pin-Fashion

Hey Everybody!

Have you ever wondered what life was like before Instagram and Pinterest? yeah, me neither....

I am writing this post to tell you where these programs began and how they inspire people today.

From the actual Instagram page:

The Team

Kevin Systrom (CEO, co-founder)

Kevin (@kevin) graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management Science & Engineering. He got his first taste of the startup world when he was an intern at Odeo that later became Twitter. He spent two years at Google - the first of which was working on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products and the latter where he worked on the Corporate Development team. Kevin has always had a passion for social products that enable people to communicate more easily, and combined with his passion for photography Instagram is a natural fit.

Mike Krieger (co-founder)

Mike (@mikeyk) also graduated from Stanford University where he studied Symbolic Systems with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction. During his undergrad, he interned at Microsoft's PowerPoint team as a PM and at Foxmarks (now Xmarks) as a software developer. He wrote his Master's thesis on how user interfaces can better support collaboration on a large scale. After graduating, he worked at Meebo for a year and a half as a user experience designer and as a front-end engineer before joining the Instagram team doing design & development.

From Forbes.com 's Article "Inspiring Insights by Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, The Man Who Built A $1 Billion Startup"

What is the history of Instagram?

First off, we have to say that we never expected the overwhelming response that we’ve seen. We went from literally a handful of users to the #1 free photography app in a matter of hours. But as my cofounder Mike Krieger likes to say, Instagram is an app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship, but was a product of over a year of work.

The story starts when I worked at Nextstop. While I was there working in marketing, I started doing more and more engineering at night on simple ideas that helped me learn how to program (I don’t have any formal CS degree or training). One of these ideas was combining elements of foursquare (check-ins) with elements of Mafia Wars (hence the name Burbn). I figured I could build a prototype of the idea in HTML5 and get it to some friends. Those friends ended up using the prototype without any branding elements or design at all. I spent weekends working on improving the prototype for my friends. At a party for the Hunch folks I ran into a bunch of people who would basically make starting Burbn a reality. At that party were two people from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. I showed the prototype, and we decided we’d meet up for coffee to talk about it. After the first meeting, I decided to take the dive and leave my job to go solo and see if Burbn could be a company. Within two weeks of leaving, I raised $500k from both Baseline and Andreessen Horowitz, and started work on finding a team.

Mike Krieger and I started talking and he decided he liked the idea of helping start the company. Once he joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood. By this time, we had built Burbn into a (private) really neat HTML5 mobile web app that let you: Check in to locations, Make plans (future check-ins), Earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much more.

We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing. We saw mobile photos as an awesome opportunity to try out some new ideas. We spent 1 week prototyping a version that focused solely on photos. It was pretty awful. So we went back to creating a native version of Burbn. We actually got an entire version of Burbn done as an iPhone app, but it felt cluttered, and overrun with features. It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram. (We renamed because we felt it better captured what you were doing — an instant telegram of sorts. It also sounded camera-y)

So 8 weeks later, we gave it to our friends, beta tested, bug fixed, etc. and this Monday we decided it was ready to ship. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, but we’re encouraged by the adoption and usage that has far exceeded our bets pre-launch.

It’s a long story, but that’s what you asked for :) October 8, 2010

How did Instagram get its name?

A long week of searching for something that combined the ‘right here right now’ aspect of what we were trying to accomplish with the idea of recording something in your life (hence the suffix -gram).

We also wanted something relatively unique. We had a bunch of other names that were in the running, but there were lots of other apps with names that were too similar. Another characteristic was whether or not you could tell someone the name and they could spell it easily. November 22, 2010

How long was Instagram in development for before launch?

It’s hard to answer this question, because there’s the client and then there’s the server. Most of the server code was taken from Burbn. (For those who never used Burbn, Instagram looks/feels/acts a lot like burbn, only it’s focused on posting a photo). That code took many months to develop, refine, and turn into libraries that we can use internally on just about any project. We built them knowing we’d likely reuse them in other experiments down the road. We learned *a lot* along the way that made Instagram act the way it does currently.

The app itself took about 8 weeks from start to where we are today. October 14, 2010

 Does Kevin Systrom code at Instagram?

Yes. I’ve been doing mostly backend work lately – python/django stuff. December 10, 2010

Why didn’t Instagram buy the .COM version of its name?

Not sure it really matters – the domain name’s shorter this way, though slightly more difficult to spell. In the end, we decided most folks would learn about us through links on other services, and therefore the .com wasn’t a must-have.November 22, 2010

Why did Andreesen Horowitz invest in Burbn when it had already invested in Foursquare?

Actually, Marc and Ben did our seed round well before they invested in Foursquare. To be fair, the feedback when we raised our round was not “Looks like a foursquare competitor, go compete”. It was “You’ve got a lot of good ideas in the product so far, go figure out what company you want to build”. — it took us a while, but we took the best elements of what we were building (social mobile photos) and built Instagram. Our development of Instagram was never influenced by their investment in Foursquare — it was about needfinding and developing ‘product market fit’ — something all very tiny startups need to do.

We’ve had a great experience with Andreessen Horowitz, and have become good friends with the folks at Foursquare — in fact, their API has been an essential way for people to tag their photos. October 8, 2010

That's the majority of the article, if you wanna read more go to: http://www.forbes.com/sites/limyunghui/2012/04/09/inspiring-insights-by-instagram-ceo-kevin-systrom-the-man-who-built-a-1-billion-startup/2/

Now moving onto Pinterest....

This is from the article "Ben Silbermann On How Pinterest Slowly Grew to Massive Scale" on Forbes.com:

In June 2010, more than two years after Ben Silbermann left his job to start what became Pinterest, and three months after launching, the site had 3,000 registered accounts.

Now Pinterest, which Silbermann describes as a tool to find inspiration, is the third-largest source of referral traffic on the Web. Silbermann described how it went from languishing to its current massive size, in a talk at Y Combinator’s Startup School this weekend.

The 3,000 users weren’t impressive after three months in today’s social media world. But Pinterest focused on its small group of fanatical users and built around them. Pinterest was in many ways the opposite of what was hot at the time in Silicon Valley. Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed were hot because they focused on real-time streams, mostly comprised of text. Pinterest instead focused all on images and was not real-time. He got rejected by many Silicon Valley venture capitalists because of that–and because the company had two non-technical cofounders.

After leaving his job, Silbermann first built an iPhone app called Tote for shopping on the phone. But the app included too many features and was too hard to ship. Investors were not interested, because Silbermann and his cofounder were not technical founders. The company focused on these fans of the website by having meetups with them–not the typical approach for a web company. The users gave feedback and helped get the word out about the site. Pinterest also set up a campaign called “Pin It Forward,” where people would create a pinboard and get more invites by getting friends to create pinboards. He realized that the company didn’t need to just build a better product it needed to work on building its user base and connecting with its users. “We didn’t have an engineering problem. We had a design and community problem,” Silbermann said.By June 2010, the site had launched, but the response was not what Silbermann and his two cofounders hoped for. “But the few people who used it, myself among them, actually really loved it,” he said. “Instead of changing it, we’d find more people like me.”

Silbermann has always been interested in tech startups. While an undergrad he worked on a site that helped people virtually try eyeglasses on. Later Silbermann went to work at Google and worked on a quiz website. Silbermann had always done these projects on the side. He believes that he never could’ve started Pinterest if he hadn’t quit his job and focused exclusively on his startup.

While some people can start a company while still working a full-time job, Silbermann says that was a crutch for him. “It always stalled,” he said. “It wasn’t the right market. It wasn’t the right timing. But actually the only dependent variable was just me. I never actually committed and put myself in the position where I had to commit. For me at least, the act of committing and going out and doing it turned out to be a really important thing.”

For More info on this article, go to: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/10/22/ben-silbermann-on-how-pinterest-slowly-grew-to-massive-scale/

Here are some inspiration fashion pics from those sites:

Instagram:

Pinterest:

It really goes to show you how much the future is changing! I hope you found some inspirations like these in stores(believe me, good deals to find these are out there!) I will have a post soon about that...

Until next time!

-CR