Hollywood fashion icon Grace Kelly's passion for Pringle knitwear revealed in new exhibition celebrating Scots firm's bicentenary

SHE was the Hollywood style queen who became a real-life princess.
Now one of the favourite items of clothing belonging to Grace Kelly is set to go on public display – and it’s not a couture ballgown or fur coat.
It is a simple black cashmere Pringle cardigan that she lovingly passed on to her eldest daughter, Princess Caroline.
It features in a new exhibition celebrating 200 years of Hawick-based knitwear firm Pringle of Scotland.
And the curator – fashion historian Alistair O’Neill – says Princess Grace of Monaco’s passion for Pringle was no public act.
The princess was one of several Hollywood leading ladies who publicly endorsed the brand, but Alistair reveals it was also her clothing of choice away from the limelight.
Grace’s daughter, Princess Caroline of Hanover, allowed students from London’s Central St Martins art school, where Alistair lectures, unprecedented access to her late mother’s private wardrobe.
They were also shown rare family snaps and home movies of Princess Grace dressed in the Pringle outfits she loved.
Alistair said: “It was a huge honour for us. One of the photos shows Princess Grace wearing sunglasses and was taken not long after her marriage.
“This is private image of a private moment and the Pringle garment she is wearing is part of her own private wardrobe.”
Alistair said that although Grace was known for glamour and sophistication on set, she also had a strong sense of practicality.
He added: “She purchased a lot of her Scottish knitwear at London’s Burlington Arcade and she liked to wear twinsets.
“In many ways her Pringle garments were a connection between her two lives – her life on camera and her private life.
“She liked twinsets as she liked the functionality of having two layers of knitwear.
“She might just wear the jumper while filming, then off camera, while waiting for her next scene, she could pull on the cardigan.”
Famed for her generous nature, Princess Grace was known to give away her clothes – including many of her Pringle favourites – to her family and friends.
The cardigan set to go on display in Edinburgh has been in Caroline’s wardrobe since her mother gave it to her several years before her death in a car crash in 1982. She was just 52.
Caroline said she had been delighted to work with Alistair’s fashion students on the project and even got in touch with her mother’s former laundress to research Grace’s wardrobe.
She said: “Marielle was our head laundress. She arrived at the palace just before I was born and she still remembers everything.
“We had a lot of trouble finding things because my mother gave a lot away to her friends and family. I pinched a few when I was 16, 17.
“In the last 15 years of her life, my mother dressed completely differently.
“She would have gone more for very warm clothes, because she was always cold,
“She would always have a scarf or a cashmere shawl.
“She had a lot of shawls from Pringle, she was such a faithful and enthusiastic customer.”
The Edinburgh exhibition marks the company’s bicentenary, tracing their evolution from a small hosiery firm founded by Robert Pringle in 1815 to an international fashion knitwear brand.
Other highlights of the exhibition include a 1933 outfit worn by golfer Gloria Minoprio, and a classic twinset designed by Otto Weisz.
Georgina Ripley, curator of modern and contemporary fashion and textiles at National Museums Scotland, said: “Pringle of Scotland has a long, rich and complex history, and has evolved to become one of the world’s top heritage fashion brands.”
Alistair added: “Fully Fashioned is a useful opportunity to not only mark Pringle’s 200th anniversary, but to demonstrate the centrality of knitwear to the modern wardrobe.
“The twinset has such an enduring sense of modernity about it, that it is exciting to be able to set this design classic into a broader context, showing how Scottish knitwear led the field in modernising the 20th century wardrobe.”
Fully Fashioned: The Pringle of Scotland Story’ runs from April 10 to August 16 at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Mall Leverages Augmented Reality for Spring Campaign

In order to let shoppers experience spring and summer fashion trends in news ways, Westfield created Future Fashion, a project that leverages virtual reality, social media, content, user-generated curation and digital avatars in order to get them to shop in-store. The installation will go live on March 27 at Westfield London, travel throughout April to Shepherd’s Bush, and then move to Westfield Stratford City.
Content and Connectivity Create New Shopping Paradigms
The three key themes that power this pop-up are S/S 2015’s most covetable trends: denim, floral and future modern. Each trend has been translated into a series of digital fashion experiences that will take visitors on a journey of the season’s trends through virtual reality and avatars. The components of the campaign are what make this interesting. They include:
Virtual Reality: Westfield has paired virtual reality headsets with gesture tracking technology. This allows users to see their own hands within the virtual world, making them directors in their own conceptual fashion journey.
Fashion Avatars: The technology will recognize the users’ shapes and represent them through fashion avatars that celebrate each of the trends as they make sweeping shapes and movements across a large screen.
Edit Me: After being immersed in the virtual journey of the season’s key trends, visitors will then be able to digitally curate products that fit these trends and can be found in retailers within the center. For the first time since its launch in 2014, Westfield’s Edit Me functionality will also include menswear.
In addition to the technology, the content hub aggregates Westfield’s social media content and features unique content that is designed to further engage the shopper in the form of quizzes, trend reports, tutorials and mobile focused videos.
The content that complements the technology is based on content that is generally widely successful in the fashion and retail verticals online. These include:
Style Quiz – What Denim Are You? Four denim styles are brought to life through faces made from denim. The style of each shopper is revealed through stop motion films when they speak to a camera about their style personality.
Trend Reports – Low-Fi / Luxe Style: A digital photographer and a fashion illustrator hit London’s streets to report on how people are styling themselves: low-fi or luxe. Shoppers can skim and interact with the imagery.
Video – Grow Your S/S 2015: Shoppers can watch Hyperlapse films showing the construction of three Spring/Summer 2015 looks translated into floral sculptures.
How-To – Accessorizing with Flowers: Shoppers can watch step-by-step film tutorials from leading hair stylists on how to add live flowers to their own undoes.
How-To – Choose Your War Paint: Shoppers can watch a series of stop motion makeup tutorials that animate the product from the page to the model in order to bring three key looks to life: graphic swipe, 90s minimal and contouring.
Myf Ryan, Westfield’s Marketing Director UK & Europe, shared:
The launch of the new season is such a prominent time for Westfield that we wanted to highlight the breadth of fashion offered at our centers and bring the top trends to life through technology. This event will take our shoppers on an incredible virtual journey, which pushes the boundaries of fashion and technology.
Retail Is No Longer Transactional, It Is Emotional
“Transactions are often the main conversion we look at, but shoppers are introduced to a brand in one place, the story deepens in another. They fall in love with a product in another and the ultimate purchase happens in yet another,” says Jeremy Bergstein of The Science Project.
When retailers combine the power of story and overlay it with social conversation and interactive technology, they can excite shoppers by adding value to their experiences. The excitement translates to engagement and connection—to a place, product or idea—thus becoming action. And that action is often a transaction that is not just financially based, but emotionally based. Not only has the brand achieved revenue, but it has built affinity and loyalty.
What are some of the ways your brand is leveraging technology in-store to create more dimensional, story-driven shopping experiences?

MY STYLE ICON: IN APPRECIATION OF SOLANGE'S FEARLESSNESS

The term "style icon" is one ripe for examination: Why do we worship others based on their clothes? How deep do these fascinations really go? And what if icons aren't exactly flawless? On the heels of our other digital mini-issues dedicated to segments of our collective psyches—from weed culture to how modern women think and talk about sex to why we're all just a little full of it—all week long ELLE.com will be exploring the pastime of finding ourselves in another woman's style. This article appears in the March 2015 issue of ELLE magazine.
I consider myself something of a fashionista, if anyone still uses that term. Mostly because I have an aversion to trends. So I love it whenever I get to do a double take when watching a celebrity prance along the red carpet. It's rare. Solange is the exception. This young Texan always brings the cool, the funk, the playful, the wild, the sexy, and her very own cultural zeitgeist—sometimes all in one outfit. She breaks all the boring rules about what constitutes "good taste."
Not only is she not afraid of color, it's her friend. She's the queen of color-blocking. I don't know anybody who better marries colors that were never even meant to be engaged: orange slacks, orange turtleneck under a cobalt blue coat with pink pumps. Grape and lime green. A white blouse is a canvas. She takes the idea of "mix and match" to a whole new level: Dare me?
She's convinced prints to accept one another, and if the public doesn't get it, it doesn't seem to matter to her. Solange dresses for Solange, not for them, which requires pounds of bravery and chutzpah and confidence in an age when celebrities are scrutinized down to their last piece of jewelry. Every star in Hollywood has a stylist, an army of wardrobe warriors who choose the same boring outfits from the same designers, awards season after awards season, only to see three other women dressed identically and then the question posed: "Who Wore It Best?" Who wore it best? Who cares?
I know I'm not alone among people who can't wait to see what Solange is going to break out on the red carpet—or her own wedding. That white dress and white cape were fierce. But those gold cuffs on both wrists made her look like a goddess.
Perhaps I feel this way because I feel like I am looking at a kindred spirit. When I was in high school, we were, in politically correct terms, "financially challenged." Even then I never liked wearing what everybody else was wearing. I may not have had Solange's level of style (or her clothing allowance), but I like to think I had her level of bravery. I was a pretty good seamstress; I used Butterick patterns, among others. I remember making a pair of wide-legged burgundy and gray bell-bottoms, which I wore with an inexpensive (okay, cheap) pink shirt-blouse with a burgundy tie I stole from one of my mother's boyfriends. I turned heads when I walked into a basketball game at my high school—no one could figure out where I'd bought the outfit. That's what I love about Solange. On the red carpet, the question is ubiquitous: "Who are you wearing?" The difference with Solange is that you actually care about the answer.
As women we tend to look to the past for our fashion role models. I find myself looking to the future. I'm no Solange, but I share her love for making a personal statement whenever she's out in public. She can sing. She can write. She's a model, an actress, a mother. And man, can she dress. I think that, years from now, we'll look at some of her fashion-forward ensembles the way we now look at Jackie Kennedy's. Hopefully Solange's, too, will find their place in some museum. Because when it comes to fashion, she is a work of art.

‘Marigold Hotel’ Didn’t Need a Sequel, but the Follow-up Is Enjoyable Enough

With all due respect to everyone who earned it, and they are legion, I can see no real reason for a sequel to the delicious 2011 hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It was perfect the first time around. But the second jog around the track passes the time pleasantly enough. The senior set deserves a few crumpets with their tea, and Part Two, which takes up where the original left off, aims to satisfy.
The British pensioners who ran out of retirement funds, relocated to affordable rents in India and refused go home have now taken over the run-down hotel—and business is booming. Somewhere between 75 and death, they conduct guided tours of Jaipur, submit to regular health checkups to make sure nobody has died during the night, and exchange enough nursing-home barbs to keep late night BBC in commercials for years.
The illustrious cast is back, in case there’s someone out there who forgot there was such a thing as taste and talent alive in the world after this year’s embalmed and catastrophic Oscar show. Evelyn Greenslade (Dame Judi Dench) finds her talent for fabrics put to good use in a paying job sourcing Indian textiles for export. Muriel Donnelly (Dame Maggie Smith) has become a co-manager with Sonny Kapoor (Dev Patel), and when the second installment opens, they are speeding down an American highway in an open convertible looking for investment money to start up a second hotel. The outcome will depend on an official report filed by an independent, anonymous inspector who will arrive unannounced to take notes that could make them or break them.
Meanwhile, Evelyn and Douglas Ainslie (Bill Nighy) are flirting with the possibility of an octogenarian romance now that his awful wife Jean (Penelope Wilton) has filed for divorce. Norman and Carol (Ronald Pickup and Diana Hardcastle) are lurking after others, Madge (Celia Imrie) juggles two rich and randy boyfriends old enough to buy life insurance, and Sonny is preparing the hotel and the city outside the gates for his wedding to hotel bookkeeper Sunaina (Tina Desai).
In the midst of the fireworks, an enigmatic American arrives in the form of Richard Gere, a newcomer whom everyone believes to be the dreaded hotel whistleblower. Mostly, he falls (unconvincingly) for Sonny’s mother, Mrs. Kapoor (Lillete Dubey). A cast that big (there are more, too numerous to mention) needs room for character development, a necessary evil director John Madden quickly abandons in favor of plot twists and a storyline that consists primarily of vignettes. Curiously, although adding the length to more than two hours, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel clumps around like a club foot and depends hugely on the charms of its already established characters, most of whom have now become such old friends that the audience will forgive them anything.
The follow-up movie doesn’t have the same freshness, surprise or sense of discovery as the first one, but the characters are no less endearing. Judi Dench is warm and gentle and wise beyond her years. Maggie Smith helps enormously by padding out the meandering lack of excitement with her usual tart one-liners (“How was America?” “Makes death more tempting.”). Mr. Gere is to be congratulated for taking his rightful place as a member of the ensemble instead of hogging the show, but in the wedding sequence he gets a chance to demonstrate his dancing skills in a solo spot that proves his tap Terpsichore in Chicago was not a flash in the old panorama.
If I have mistakenly given the false impression that I didn’t like The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I apologize. It might lack the same thrill of discovery, but it’s as lively in tone and spirit as its predecessor, and a happy reunion with some swell folks whom are a pleasure to be around. A fine time is had by all, and that’s good enough for me.