Designer fashion magazine

Ones to watch - fashion designer Julien Macdonald and music group Two B. Free

RUMPELSTILTSKIN had a talent for spinning that was so great, he could turn straw into gold. But, as the story goes, nobody knew his name. Well, today there's a twenty-one-year-old Welsh designer whose talent for creating new forms of fabric is making his name, Julien Macdonald, widely known. Macdonald likes to experiment with new materials, chemical applications, and deterioration processes that give his fabric heavily textured qualities. His first big break as a fabric designer came during an internship with designer Koji Tatsuno in Paris. "I spent the first few weeks picking pins off the floor," recalls Macdonald. "One day, while I was on my lunch break, Koji looked through my portfolio and immediately asked me to create fabric for his Fall 1993 collection." Another big break came during a second internship in America (at this magazine), when he met New York designer Manolo. Their mutual admiration led Manolo to ask Macdonald to contribute to his 1994 Spring/Summer collection. "Once, when I was in a fishing village near Brighton, l asked some fishermen If I could cut bits from their nets," says Macdonald about one of the sources of his unique fabrics. He ended up unraveling the netting and knitting it into trousers for Manolo's show. This spring, Macdonald will show his first fashion collection, called Brother Julien's Ghetto Couture.

NAKED SOULS. The two 26-year-old musicians who are Two B. Free, Marko Kalfa and Javier ("just Javier"), are going to be really big pop stars for reasons most pop musicians don't like to admit: they like pretty music, and they make pretty music. They concur that when they first met, they felt as though they were the same person. Both were raised in sheltered working-class Catholic families, and both had the ambition to be singers. The two budding musicians had also been influenced by the same kinds of music: R & B, alternative, soul, funk. "You know, feel-good music, like Earth, Wind & Fire," says Javier. They quickly became roommates, combined their CD collections, and started trying out their ideas for songs on each other They decided to combine their styles to make their sound more powerful. "With each song we develop, we try to be two distinct voices that make sense together," say the pair, who are not signed to a label and as yet have no management. They particularly like the way a friend describes their music: "It's plush. It makes you feel like you're cruising in a limo on your way to nowhere in particular."