South China Morning Post - Fashion & Luxury

Laura Jacobs thought she would never wear animal fur, having witnessed years of protests over its use in clothing – until suddenly she started spotting it all over New York. Jacobs fished out the long mink her grandmother left her years ago and took it to a Manhattan furrier to give it a second act. Fur “was stigmatised for so long”, Jacobs says, posing before a full-length mirr...

It’s not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis; it’s cerulean. That pivotal monologue in The Devil Wears Prada explained how haute couture created a million-dollar industry based on that most specific shade of blue. Cerulean derives from Latin caeruleus, encompassing “blue, dark blue, blue-green”, suggested to be a result of a dissimilation of caelulum (changing one of t...

On a summer day in New York’s Brooklyn borough last year, artist and couture designer Michaela Stark found herself in a studio surrounded by 175 cameras for a photo shoot unlike any she had done before. Clad only in her signature corsetry that binds the flesh, Stark stood in the middle as the cameras captured all angles of her body, simultaneously – part of a process known as ph...

As part of the ongoing Y2K revival, there has been a global resurgence in tooth gems – and the trend is steadily gaining traction in Hong Kong. These semi-permanent dental fixtures, which became popular among subcultures in the 1990s, are usually just a few millimetres in size and are applied to the surface of the tooth with an adhesive. Most Hong Kong establishments offering th...

Bryan Vander Dussen spent years as a dairy farmer before shifting to selling farm-raised beef. In the past year, he and his wife have been making another transition: cooking up recipes in their kitchen that turn organ fat from his animals into tallow balm that buyers are eager to slather on their skin. One of the tricky parts is coming up with formulas that don’t smell like pot ...