Portal4Fashion.com

Harper’s Bazaar UK has named who they believe to be Britain’s five most original dressers. Included on this years list is Rosie Oddie, singer from band The Odd Squad and 22-year-old daughter of Bill Oddie. Angel of the North sculptor Antony Gormley’s daughter Paloma, 22, is also named.  The magazine hails the duo for their “luxe eccentric” style, and has photographed them for the latest issue of Harper’s. Also named in the list is beer heiress Daphne Guinness, who the magazine described as “a walking work of art”, cross-dressing Turner Prize-winning potter Grayson Perry, and fashion empress Amanda Harlech.  I am not sure I agree with this list but most of those named would make my top 10.

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.”