14 Dec, 2009

Designer collaborations are everywhere. In Oz, the madness began a few years back when Stella McCartney did a range for Target and girls completely lost their minds queuingup for her floaty, bird-printed tops and classic trenches.

More recently, there’s been Camilla and Marc for Portmans, sass & bide for Lovable, and Bec & Bridge for Sportsgirl. It’s damn exciting when your favourite designers create something that’s within your budget and at a store you can access without planning a complicated reconnaissance mission, which will most likely include either paying $30 for parking or spending an inordinate amount of time on public transport.

For a while, I’ve been thinking that a designer collaboration really should happen on a magazine; that it would be amazing to take the creative genius of some of our best fashion designers and let them loose on the design, styling and creation of an issue. So, that’s exactly what we did.

This month, we’re launching the fi rst in a series of three very special editions of CLEO that have been co-created by high-profile Australian fashion designers.

January belongs to Alice McCall. We’ve invited Alice to create her own cover for CLEO (she chose to shoot rising star Emma Booth – read more about Emma on page 23).

Alice picked a specific range of colours, fonts and patterns that you’ll see throughout the issue and the website. She also styled her own fashion story on p46 of the magazine and contributed to fashion, beauty and entertainment pages throughout the mag. Alice’s background as a celebrity stylist (she’s dressed Natalie Imbruglia and Blondie) and her endless amounts of creative energy have made this collaboration a breeze.

I hope you’ll enjoy this beautiful issue and magazine first. As a result of Alice’s influence and the excitement around our fi rst designer collaboration series, this issue is, naturally, very fashion-focused. Our fashion director, Aileen Marr, took time out during a family trip to New York to file two amazing fashion stories – one from the streets of Brooklyn, the other from up-state New York.

Meanwhile, the features team delivered stories on vintage dresses with intriguing histories, fashion blogging, and the clothes that men find sexy (interestingly, there’s not a miniskirt in sight).

Next month, we’ll reveal our next designer collaboration. Until then, I hope you enjoy the issue and that you have a fantasic start to the New Year.

Sarah
xx