Portal4Fashion.com

Norma Kamali, a fashion designer known for innovative designs like her sleeping bag coat, her use of silk parachutes as fabric and fashion-sensibility take on jersey sportswear, will design a collection for Wal-Mart, in the latest mass merchant-meets-fashion designer collaboration.
 
The collection, to be produced via a licensing agreement with Cherokee Inc., Norma Kamali and Wal-Mart, will be offered in select Wal-Mart stores beginning in fall 2008.

Kamali is no stranger to partnerships with mass retailers, however ? in 2006 she joined forces with sportswear brand Everlast and Spiegel to bring her brand of multifunctional, mix-and-match style to a wider audience of women.

As with the collections she’s created for Everlast and Spiegel ? offered at lower price points than her namesake Norma Kamali Collection ? Kamali said in a phone interview on Wednesday, Feb. 27, that she will carry the Wal-Mart collection in her store on 56th Street in New York. (Currently, there are no Wal-Mart stores in Manhattan).

“It’s a great opportunity to do what I love to do,” said Kamali, which ultimately for her is to help women look and feel great through well-designed clothes.

“It’s solving the problem that women all have with self-esteem ? there are always a couple of days a month where we don’t feel so great,” she said.

In the case of her partnership with Wal-Mart, she’ll be able to offer a self-esteem boost for her biggest audience yet, specifically targeting style-conscious people on a budget ? students, for example, or women who have a family to take care of, she said.  Another nice move by the giant, Walmart.

Paris Fashion Week is known for boasting the world’s oldest fashion names but the spotlight focussed on a couple of newcomers — Phoebe and Euan, aged 7.
 
The pair, from a primary school in England, were enlisted by Vivienne Westwood, the grand dame of British fashion, along with 34 of their classmates to paint bugs, plants and snakes all over her collection.

The theme? Ecological crisis. “It was just brilliant, and she was very nice and helpful,” said Euan Bonser a working with Westwood who erupted to fame in the 1970s fomenting the punk movement and dressing the Sex Pistols.

Phoebe Ackroyd, seated beside him on the front row, also in her school uniform of green sweatshirt and grey trousers, said the experience of painting dots and dashes on dresses, jackets and a pith helmet left her wanting “to be a model.”

Fashion has always been a vehicle for politics for Westwood, who, most recently in 2005, joined forces with British civil rights group Liberty with a series of T-shirts and babywear with the slogan “I am not a terrorist” to draw attention to the preservation of civil liberties post-September 11.

Monday’s collection, titled “Chaos Point,” was no different. Her vision was a group of freedom fighters trying to avert the planet from ecological disaster and included one model on stilts “distinguish the characters and their clothes,” Westwood said.

Phoebe and Euan found their way to the front row of the world’s premier fashion event because of their teacher, Madeline Bell, 25, who had her class write to Westwood after she taught them about the designer in a lesson on “Great Artists.”