Gallery de Vie is a store in Hong Kong that I wanted to check out for a while as it has a definite part to play in the whole 'indie' boutique development of Hollywood Road/Soho area. Walking around on streets and going into physical stores isn't really the normal shopping regime in Hong Kong given the mall culture that is hugely rampant be it huge glossy malls like IFC or Pacific Place or smaller underground malls like Ginza or Rise Commercial Building. After blipping around in malls for a while in HK, there was alas, only so much Christmas jingle music I could take (beware Scrooges, they take Christmas veeeery seriously over there... at least on a commercial level anyway...). So it was refreshing to physically walk into Gallery de Vie... and go through their selection of labels that are quite evenly spread between European (A*N*D, Swash), American (Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Creatures of the Wind) and of course Asian designers...
I love this crumbling wall at the back of the store that leads to the basement...
Gallery de Vie is also...erm...a gallery for and is currently hosting RCA grad Lilia Yip and her collection D.A. Acitivist in the basement. Rather than being a fashion collection, it's a series of garments and prints (by Mona Choo) that her observations of her environment...
In particular, Hong Kong labels get a lot of lovin' from Gallery de Vie and one such label has been plaguing the head for a while ever since a fluro bit of fluffiness landed on my desk in the form of this shopper tote that is covered with a mass of tangled up fluro orange thread and has since been taken on shopping excursions around Waitrose, needlessly grabbing attention. PLOTZ is the label responsible for this perfect bit of mess. Sing Chin Lo, the designer happens to be entirely Hong Kong trained but PLOTZ has already been presented in Paris and is pretty successfully stocked.
It was good to see a few more of PLOTZ's pieces from the A/W 09 'River Filled With Stories' collection and also to see that the tangled up thread has also been applied to the top half of shirts and dresses...
From Plotz' autumn/winter 09 collection came this pleated top (as shown in this ye olde photo that for some reason makes me look like a tourist standing in the middle of Newburgh Street). At Gallery de Vie though, I rummaged through the sales pile and came out with a PLOTZ piece from their S/S 09 collection that worn with bare legs and nothing underneath is officially my 'airy fairy' dress but for the sake of current climate, needs something underneath to withstand what is officially winter.
On an unrelated note (apologies for my relentless use of 'unrelated notes' lately...), my DIY dip-dye tight attempts should have been stowed away, given that in Hong Kong for a mere £2.50 in every cheapie mall, you can find dip dyed tights in all kinds of colours... here are the black-to-grey ones.
