The original IT Girl
“This girl was the real thing. Someone to stir every pulse in the nation”
F Scott Fitzgerald
Clara Bow was Hollywood’s first sex symbol, predating Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe for being unashamedly fe...
Patriotic perfumes
There’s definitely something magical and unique about the British countryside and the perfume world would seem to agree – with three new fragrances whose ingredients focus on herbs, plants, fruit and flower...
Vacant expression
Still Alive. Those are the words spray-painted in English and Japanese across the side of an abandoned house in an old, somewhat forgotten, district of Onomichi, Japan. Not a house victim to graffiti, but r...
Diary of a lost girl – Glass looks at the career of the iconic film star Louise Brooks
“A well-dressed woman, even though her purse is painfully empty, can conquer the world.”
No actress epitomised the glamour, the excitement or the burgeoning sexuality of the 1920s like Louise Brook...
Drawing attention
The art of illustration has long been kindred to fashion. And if you take a closer look at the development of fashion illustration in the 20th century reveals its intimate links with the evolution of fashio...
Talking shop
Kiosk was set up in 2005 on Spring Street in Soho, New York. Half museum, half store, it has since atttracted a quiet following of customers interested in meticulously sourced artefacts from around the worl...
Yellow Frosted Willow
The actress Anna May Wong achieved global stardom against a back drop of racism, bigotry and sexism. Her considerable self belief and will power would be the only things that maintained her at a time when t...
Feeling the love
“People are throwing off the constraints of their daily lives – the rent payments, the nine-to-five, the commute – they are primed and ready to rave.” So says Steve Gallagher, co-founder of out-there and outré ...
Chaotic utopias
The beautiful and the grotesque, the everyday and the surreal – chaotic, abstract utopias. Glass last covered the work of remarkable Japanese artist, Yutaka Inagawa, in 2009 just as the first major retrosp...
Wedding belle
Me and weddings don’t mix. Firstly there’s the travel. The current fashion is for the entire party to move en mass to more sunnier climes than our rain-sodden shores can provide. This becomes a “mini break”...
Art as life
It has been 40 years since a Bauhaus exhibition has been on show in the UK and its opening at the Barbican cannot have been more timely.The year 2012 means the Olympics to Britain and the spirit of unity wh...
Are you sitting comfortably?
What does one think of when certain South American countries come to mind? Rain Forests? Tropical grassland? La Violenca? FARC? Drug Cartels? Add into the mix some ex-prisoners and you’re more likely to be ...
Gold-standard scent – men’s “sport” fragrances reviewed
The concept of men’s “sport” fragrances has always been one fraught with contradictions. After all, it’s pretty strange that a scent should be designed to go with an activity in which either the partici...
A definite shoe in
I love being a woman. The sartorial choices available to me are immense and the ideals, oh so attainable. Stark angular and Belgian during the darker winter months, ruffled, printed and exuberantly Italian ...
Kitsuné Playlist
Blending the worlds of music, fashion and design, the effortlessly cool Kitsuné label launched in 2002 as the brainchild of Daft Punk’s art director, Gildas Loaec, and Masaya Kuroki. Since then the label ha...
New spice
Undeterred by the fact that some airport authorities viewed the bottle for Flowerbomb with suspicion, Viktor & Rolf have returned to the cheeky grenade shape for their second masculine fragrance, ...
Turkish delight – Glass talks to photo-artist Jamie McLeod as he returns with a new show, Ottoman Fight Club, in London
Following his 2010 show, Jack Off Johnny, the photo-artist Jamie Mcleod returns to the Dalston Superstore, London, this month with a new exhibition, portraits of Turkish oil wrestlers, entitled Ottoman Fight Cl...
Wish upon a star
In the long, dark winter days, the sparkle of fine jewellery invokes an illuminating and celebratory experience. With this, jewellery received at Christmas becomes the ultimate indulgent and personal gift.
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A night among the stars
Showers of sequins, exuberant feathers, embroidered transparencies stretched across a lithe frame, slashes in silk jersey so high they should have been illegal and long languid looks on some of the most sen...
Cream of the crop
September in the capital is inevitably grey and a little dull. However summer was definitely here when the collections presented at London Fashion Week gave us a brief respite from our “challenging” British...