Wishing you all a lovely late Summer 2026 - berry and jam making season is here !
Hello and welcome to the second incarnation of my fashion and style webpage A Blush of Rose, it's lovely to see you here and I hope you enjoy seeing and reading my reports and projects. I've had some time away in the last couple of years for family reasons to be a carer and putting family first and stepping away for a while has felt the right thing to do. Although just like everyone else, I've been looking to a hopeful future.
I'm planning to upload my first small reports in quite some time in August & October 2026 taking a look at two exhibitions I enjoyed in the past 18 months. Moving at a Tortoise pace perhaps, although I realise that my other commitments may not be obvious to readers. I can't tell you how wonderful it feels to know that my diary is starting to ease just a little, alongside family full time carer support and my heartfelt Stuarts and 'Missing Princes' project research which is also very important to me to progress to publication in Print and Media work. I can now look forward to being back with A Blush of Rose a bit more often and begin to publish here again if in a small way. There will be a gradual long range Haute Couture features catch-up from Autumn 2021 to Summer 2026 and onwards into the future at some stage but that's quietly in the pipeline for now :-) . I've been watching collections through the past few years and noting what I liked.
Thank you and it's so exciting to be able to prepare to start to come back. I'm grateful to my faithful readers, friends supporters for patience. I also have a lot work to be added in diary-style feature pages from 2021- early 2026 features and eventually it shall catch-up when other needs have settled down. A Blush of Rose is merely sleeping for now, though not quite in an enchanted castle in a forest! Which might be nice.....
You can still see most of my archive going back to 2009 when the Website began through a tab on the menu to the left hand side of the screen. This is when I first launched A Blush of Rose to record some of my interests in fashion and things I was doing around London and sometimes over in Paris going forward as they happened. This followed after first having the idea of the name and a web page in a flash about a year earlier in Spring or Autumn 2008 when walking in one of my favourite spots in Kensington Gardens one weekend. At that time I had no idea how to start a blog and had no computer even, so I started storyboarding by hand and thinking about the sort of things I wanted to cover and explore when I would be able to do this.
The older original site will always stay online as it represents so much work and things I hoped to achieve and enjoyed. Some new feature headings will appear below in due course with more recent work but hey, AW19-20 looked pretty good and will do for now until I get things fixed. I'm prioritising getting Haute Couture up to date as the craft element has always been a favourite of mine. After all the twists and turns of the past few years, I still love fashion, style and craftsmanship. Thank you everyone for your support :-) Angela
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Cartier
The V & A used their contacts - plus a lot of hard work from curator Asif Khan and the team behind him - to represent the astonishing hard work and 'know-how' brought to life by Maison Cartier and the Cartier family. Whilst the name remains hallowed in Jewellery design and workmanship, perhaps some of the intricacies, names behind the work, and patrons who allowed it to continue are starting to be forgotten. This show was a timely recollection of Houses' heritage and one of the most memorable Jewellery or Art shows in years.
Last Spring and early Summer - Cartier lit up the exhibition halls like never before and much of the collection had me spellbound by the craftsmanship as well as 'bathing' in the calm light of the stones. See my report in a new page in the left hand column under Cartier in 2025.
Here above a few of my images from visiting the exhibition. The main feature shows some more. You can toggle to find it in the menu to the left about midway down reading 'Cartier at the V&A Summer 2025'.
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London Fashion Week AW19-20 designer reviews
My seasonal chapters from London Fashion Week are online with a little bit more to add for autumn as we head into the season. Many reports include photography shot by me either at the Catwalk or Backstage.
To get us ready for the cooler weather here is a combination of monochrome woollen wraps, sweaters and coats and brightly coloured intarsia work from Johnstons of Elgin. They now have a thriving store open in Edinburgh and are one of Scotland's oldest and best known brands.
Head into autumn with CHANEL
Haute Couture showed this summer in Paris with it's schedule thankfully showing an extended line up of more designers. It's great to see this part of the industry resurgent as I hoped it would be a couple of years ago and amongst the pack with a set of high fashion classics was CHANEL. Set against a backdrop of a library superimposed on the Grand Palais, the collegiate vibe gave a lesson in classic styling.
Images (C) Chanel.
A look at the Bollinger Gallery re-opened at the V&A Museum.
The archive of jewellery housed by the V&A is one of the oldest parts of it's collection and thanks the the generosity of the Bollinger family, a larger number of objects are now on display in cases that show the pieces to much better effect. It's free to enter and you can spend as much time as you would wish, exploring and drawing objects or simply marvelling at craft from the ancient world up to today.
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Huishan Zhang - a look at one of the most exciting designers showing in London
Huishan is a fantastic talent, hand-picked by Delphine Arnault to spend part of his third year of univeristy study in the Atelier's of Dior in Paris. There is a classic look of elegance in his work that is hard to miss and whilst he's undoubtedly spontaneous in his creativity, his designs encompass both the classic and new in one easy moment.
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Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams - The V&A Museum, London.
After showcasing in Paris in 2017 the celebration of the 70 year milestone of the House of Dior came to London in late January 2019. My full article is on the Winter 2018-2019 page. This is part of my montage I shot in Paris of the first exhibition in September 2017 during Paris Fashion Week and something just as beautiful arrived in London for the V&A showcase with 60% of the collection featuring new dresses not shown in the Paris exhibition of 2017.
