NEW EDITORIAL OPPORTUNITIES

by drevagliatte


Editorial Assistant – Print & Online (12 month contract)
Editorial Assistant – Fashion (6 month contract)
Editorial Assistant – Features (6 month contract)

Pigeons & Peacocks is a fashion and lifestyle magazine and website like no other. Published by LCF, the magazine is distributed internationally and has built up a loyal following worldwide due to its intelligently crafted inspirational content. We have three new opportunities open to London College of Fashion graduates.

Join us in one of our three new editorial roles and you will have the chance to gain valuable experience working on the production of both our online and print editions. These are highly creative roles.

You will be expected to work within a small team to support the editorial process, liaising with writers, photographers, designers and production staff; helping to generate ideas for content with detailed research; and tackling a range of administration. Your efforts will help us to produce our annual issue, keep our website and social media channels up-to-date and ensure that all courses and disciplines taught at LCF are represented.

With a relevant degree (or equivalent) and experience, you will be ready and equipped to take on this busy and varied role. You have a good understanding of the fashion industry as well as the editorial process. What’s more, you can work independently, drawing on your initiative when required. Good with people and great in a team, you will be an organised professional who is ready to work hard and learn.

Find the Editorial Assistant roles here:

LCF shows at London Fashion Week

by Nicole Mullen

Menswear from Na Di

Menswear from Na Di

The Royal Opera House’s high ceilings and beautiful Victorian features played host to 10 handpicked young designers at London College of Fashion’s highly anticipated MA13 show. Debuting for the first time at London Fashion Week, the show highlighted the importance of up-and-coming graduates acting at the forefront of fashion.

With guests such as singer Lianne La Havas and girl band Stooshe in attendance, as well as influential fashion editors, Simon Chilvers and Jess Cartner-Morley, the event was a must-see in a busy LFW schedule. Simon Chilvers later tweeted his support for one student, labeling Yi Xie’s digital dresses as a ‘tight collection with commercial bite’.

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Behind the Scenes: MA13 Press Shoot

by Nicole Mullen

Photography: Josh Brandao

It’s early on Sunday morning and Battersea, South London is being covered in a blanket of snow. Inside TIGI’s Bedhead Studio, the creatively minded are huddled together on lived-in Chesterfield sofas. Wooly hats are on and mugs of warm tea an extension of glove-clad hands. Saskia Reis, Producer and Creative Director for today’s shoot, has brought sandwiches and snacks for everyone to enjoy. “I’m a total people person,” Saskia tells me, in a thick, German accent. “I love to make things work with others”. If that means trawling through the slush to the nearest supermarket and stocking up on cake bars and kettle chips, Saskia’s only too happy to do it.

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We love College Shop

by Nicole Mullen

Photography: Katy Davies

Here at Pigeons & Peacocks, we know fashion is far more than frivolity and a frilly dress (although we do like a frilly dress too!). So, with the magazine being stocked it is just as well we were invited to pop along to the launch of London College of Fashion’s hotly anticipated College Shop.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks here’s a quick once-over of what College Shop is about: A launch pad for LCF’s talented alumni, College Shop is situated on Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street. Stock is rotated daily and everything is for sale. Kitted out with all white walls and stark lighting, the ground floor space is reminiscent of a photographer’s studio, with carefully edited pieces ready and waiting on the rails.

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Issue #5 out now

by cgush

Buy Issue #5 now

Featuring a brand new look, the usual lip-smacking burst of LCF-based inspiration and the freshest-to-deathest talent, this issue is the best one yet.

The magazine will be stocked by all good UK newsagents, including WHSmith, from July 16th 2012. It will be distributed internationally from August.

Editor’s Column No.2: Line Up

by hoxtonhero

Editor’s Column. Number 2.

All photography taken backstage at the MA press show 2011 by Morgan O’Donovan.

In a room at LCF there is a white wall, calico laid out on the floor and a table with three chairs, three notebooks and three glasses of water. I’m hid in the corner… not all that inconspicuously in blue fake fur and green hair. First the judges, ahem- tutors enter and take their seats. In the room next door there are about thirty models being scrambled and egged into garments- unfinished zippers are pinned by sweaty palmed students and with double sided tape and a prayer the first collection is sent into our room.

One by one for the rest of today and the rest of tomorrow nervous MA students will send in their line ups to be viewed by the tutors for the first time. All of the research and pattern cutting and steaming and long hours puzzling over shoulder pads with technicians now manifests in 10-12 garments per student. These are the bones of the final MA collections… the fashion vision that will appear polished and effortless and walk the V&A runway in two months, before dictating the direction of fashion. Let’s just say right now there’s more meat on the bones in some cases, and two months suddenly seems extremely close.

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Northern Style Heroes

by hoxtonhero

Leopard print, epileptic fits, floral pinnys and a taste of honey.

Words: Leanne Cloudsdale and John William.
Illustrations: Marcus Oakley 

CILLA

Here in the UK, Cilla is as famous as the Queen. Her Majesty of Merseyside, Ms. Black is northern royalty and for decades has set an immaculate standard of self respect and preservation, kept by many Northern women of a certain age. Personally I think she’s better turned out than the Queen. Cilla’s not shy of a sequin or two (she knows when the cameras are on she needs to turn up the razzle dazzle!) but it’s not just for showbiz appointments and TV appearances she gets dolled up. She was on HRT-fest Loose Women the other week camping it up explaining how even to take the binbags out, she has to get fully “Cilla-d up.” Cilla-d up means polished head to toe: nails, hair, face, heels and a freshly dry cleaned and pressed trouser suit. She probably doesn’t get the beaded boleros and fur trimmed collars out for the neighbours but I wouldn’t put it past her.

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Poly Styrene: Non-Recyclable Plastic

by hoxtonhero

Poly Styrene on the cover of Smash Hits


Very sadly, earlier this year one of P&P’s heroes passed away. Poly Styrene – the beautiful frontwoman of ’77 punk group X-Ray Spex. We published this tribute to her in issue 4, but we want as many people to know about Poly as possible…

Oh Poly…you brace-faced doll. Ruler of the Riot Grrrls, Plastic Punk Princess of Pop. Warrior in Woolworths. I had been listening, and enjoying all the classic boy punk stuff. The been-to-Borstal sound… testosterone loaded guitar thrashing and little-boys-pretending-to- be-macho shouting. It sort of matched how I felt, but it was a bit like when you find a jumper in a charity shop that you think is exactly what you want, you put it on and it’s a bit disappointing, itchy and even though you know it doesn’t look that great you persevere with bloody-minded determinedness… that was how I wore boy punk. I really didn’t want to be a poser, and I did get it, it just didn’t answer all the questions I had at fifteen years old.

I bought a Live at the Roxy compilation reduced to £1 from Music Zone – a discount CD and video franchise up North. All my usual suspects were on it – Sham… Buzzcocks… Damned. It was a really hot summer and I put it on mega fuzzy loud when my parents were out and enjoyed the faster more fucked up versions of the punk sing along songs I already knew. Just wearing my underpants and left-over eye pencil (in ‘Prunella’ – half sweated down my face) I collapsed onto my bed to the closing white noise of I think it was an Adverts song. Clammy and hungry I was flat on my back when the crackle of the next song began, and I heard her voice
for the first time. “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard…” The next one and a half minutes were so violently blissful it felt like a succubus had taken hold of my wriggling teen frame. Jerking and twitching to the mad saxophone backed track, it all happened so fast.

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Chinoiserie Query

by Susie Lau

Louis Vuitton SS11 illustrated by Deborah Jameson

By Style Bubble’s Susie Lau. Illustration by Deborah Jameson.

After Rodarte SS11, I did my usual round of gauging opinion by asking a well-known Hong Kong fashion journalist what she thought and she said “I don’t think Chinese people will wear that” motioning to the neck to illustrate the high necks that had appeared on the dresses; resembling cheongsam collars. I, on the other hand was too dazzled by the Mulleavy sisters’ newly softened approach to notice any Chinoiserie notes of the collection that may or may not be Chinese women’s tastes.

Then just under a month later, Louis Vuitton closed the SS11 season of shows with a parade of glamped-up Chinese razz-ma-tazz femmes, rife with Mandarin collars, cheongsam-style dresses with thigh high splits, embroidery of bamboo, orchids and pandas – everything that conjured up a glamourized vision of an ‘exotic’ Chinese costume, filtered down from 1930s Shanghai straight to the 1970s where a laviscious intent lies beneath the clothes. From there, a more straightforward link to China, as the looming economic superpower and spending heavyweight was presented for us to speculate upon. Some reviewers interpreted the collection as an appeal to this market, which to me seems too generalistic a statement, and certainly contradicts what the journalist said about Rodarte.

To be fair, Rodarte’s collection in contrast to Louis Vuitton only really nods to Chinese detailing whilst retaining their usual mish mash of influences (an ode to emotive 70s suburbia-derived textures and a girlish naivete). I therefore only use Rodarte as a starting point to my query.

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In Tashion

by hoxtonhero

Photography by Gabriela Antunes

Horror beyond horrors! Has the beloved moustache gone the way of the winklepicker and mens’ sarong? By Rebecca Day

Once the defining feature of a man: the bastion of manliness… the manliest marker of masculinity… the moustache’s moment may have sadly been clippered. It’s the latest in a long line of mens’ classics to be embraced by all manner of douchebags. Last time it was the bow tie (R.I.P 2011) – overly casualised and commodified in that Lynx-scented Urban Outfitters way (like those Joy Division t-shirts with rhinestones or faux distressing and scoop necklines; or all three at once… Unforgivable.) For moustaches, like bow ties, should never, ever be worn with a white plimsole. The moustache has become the cliché of our time. An extra in the Being A Dickhead’s Cool video. It wasn’t always this way…

The possibility of having your very own moustache began around 30000 BC when flint razors were first fashioned, however, it didn’t catch on, and the Cavemen Days were relatively tash-less. The same applied to the Egyptians during 3000 BC, where they were forced to shave off practically all their body hair, although some rulers wore artificial beards (including one queen. That wasn’t the first queen to be seen sporting radical facial hair but more on that in a moment). The oldest portrait showing a shaved man with a moustache is an ancient Iranian horseman from 300 BC. What a trailblazer. It was only during the 1800s that moustaches really became popular, particularly in Europe.

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