Fantastical forest themes explored in Harrods' Christmas windows of last year have re-emerged in AW12 but with an organic, almost folkey, take on the luxurious wintry scenes such as that seen below:
Harrods, 2011, my own photo
More often than not the 2012 trend has looked on forest-residing animals for inspiration; replicating colours & textures and using woodland creatures as motifs on jewellery, knitwear, hardware etc.
The word Galactic has been widely used to describe one of AW12's most coveted trends;
GA-LAC-TIC [guh-lak-tik] - adjective
1. Astronomy.
a) of or pertaining to a galaxy
b) of or pertaining to the Milky Way
2. immense; huge; vast
As the second definition suggests, this is a vast trend and encompasses more than just stars and space, it incorporates futurism and the wilderness, merging the contrasting elements of organic life and futuristic geometric forms.
The below music video for Ke$ha's "Die Young", is a perfect example of this season's hottest imagery:
...and Ellie Goulding's "Anything Could Happen" video also seems to call upon this trend but with a slightly more discrete approach:
Influences for this trend can be traced from a myriad of sources:
Photograph: David Sims, Styled by McKenna
The new edition of Philip Utz's menswear biannual Man About Town is The Space Issue. For the new issue, Utz and creative directors Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag of M/M (Paris) pitted the homemade against the futuristic.
"The space theme was chosen because I wanted to break with the retro aesthetic that Man About Town had been championing prior to the Hedi Slimane issue, but also because I felt that it would take the writers, photographers and stylists out of their comfort zone to produce something less self-referential and more thought provoking that what most other men's books have to offer" Utz
The issue has combines unlikely bedfellows such as astrobiologists and stylists, computer programmers and fashion photographers. Further contributors include fashion world heavies Alasdair McLellan, Joe McKenna, Olivier Rizzo, David Sims and Willy Vanderperre.
