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Sports goods maker Puma appointed fashion designer Hussein Chalayan as its creative director in a bid to vault its style status to the next level marking itself out from rivals like Adidas.  Puma, the world’s third largest sportswear maker, made the announcement during Paris Fashion Week where Chalayan presented a critically acclaimed womenswear collection for fall 2008.

“We want to be different, that’s the idea behind this. We don’t want to be mass market and selling to discount stores, we just want to keep a premium,” Puma Chief Executive Jochen Zeitz, told Reuters in an interview at the presentation.

Chalayan is famous for his thought-provoking designs, would bring his use of new technology and provocative point of view to Puma, Zeitz told a news conference.  Zeitz is credited with turning Puma into a lifestyle brand and making it one of Germany’s best-known exports.

Collaborations with designers are a regular feature in the cut-throat retail industry as the world’s biggest brands seek to differentiate themselves and lure in ever-pickier consumers. Puma, has already worked with edgy, top rated designers Alexander McQueen and Jil Sander.

Meanwhile German rival Adidas has seen its business boosted by its long-term collaboration with Stella McCartney, whose top end fashion house is owned by Puma parent company PPR.

Bernstein Research analyst Marco Giovanelli said the deal was a signal Puma was aiming to move upscale in fashion terms.  If anyone doubts the logic of marrying high fashion with sports gear look no further than the price tag on some of the new basketball runners.

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.”

The financial meltdown pains hitting the United States has also hit home on the fashion runway, when New York Fashion Week takes off, but its impact may be surprising.  Certainly, less business will be done than usual, and some designs will be muted, industry experts say. But at the same time, some designers will interpret the financial downturn as an excuse to turn up the fashion excess.

“The wonderful thing about fashion is it will always do the opposite of what you think,” said James Aguiar, co-host of the “Full Frontal Fashion,” a television program that covers fashion shows.

Just when you would think things would be more conservative, there are likely to be more lavish, extreme displays on the catwalk, Aguiar said.

“If anything, people will be more desperate to get attention that they think is going to generate business,” said David Wolfe, creative director of the Doneger Group, a New York trend forecasting company, who also expects more theatre.

But while they may turn up the drama on the runway, there’ll be a big gap between what designers show and what they actually end up selling during the week.

U.S. consumers have curbed their spending in recent months as a decline in the housing market takes hold. Shopping over the Christmas retail season was the worst in five years, even hitting luxury names like Saks Inc, Tiffany & Co, Coach Inc and Richemont.

Designer Rebecca Taylor, whose women’s fashions are sold at high-end U.S. stores such as Bergdorf Goodman, Saks and Bloomingdale’s, said she expects fall 2008 to be more commercial as some retailers, still reeling from last year’s dramatic slowdown, take fewer risks.

“As traffic slows in the department stores, buyers are really looking for bankability,” Taylor said. However, her own orders have tripled over the last year and she expects to drive $5 million in sales between her runway show on Thursday and a trade show the following weekend. She declined to give a figure for last February’s show for comparison.

Retail consultant Sanjay Srikanth of management consultancy A.T. Kearney warned that Taylor’s expectation would be atypical, as buyers trim the size of their orders to keep inventories tight.