‘Tis the season for great holiday parties and days spent lounging around your home, hiding away from the cold and recovering from your hangover. So, why wear sweatpants or dingy cotton pajamas on your days and nights off? London based designer, Olivia Von Halle, has created a brand of pajamas (or Pyjamas, if you’re British) that are glamorous enough for any New York fashionista on her off hours. Inspired by the lounging pajamas made famous by Coco Chanel in the roaring twenties, Olivia Von Halle’s brand has made bedtime a black tie affair.
Le Image Inc had the great fortune to interview globetrotting sleepwear designer, Olivia Von Halle. The British native, who started her fashion career as a trend predictor and luxury brand consultant in Shanghai, has been at helm of her eponymous brand since 2011. Her unique brand of luxurious sleepwear and robes has received the stamp of approval from the fashion elite of Vogue, Marie Claire and Elle magazine. And not to mention, David Beckham bought his style icon wife, Victoria Beckham, a pair of her very own last Christmas! Olivia was so kind as to answers our questions even amongst the chaos of the pre-Christmas shopping season (To get the best deals online for the holiday season, be sure to read our other article before Cyber Monday: https://www.leimageinc.com/blog/commercial-blog/best-days-to-do-online-christmas-shopping/). To get the inside scoop on these luxurious pajamas and her creative process as a designer, read our Q&A with Olivia Von Halle below!
Q: What colors inspired your fall/winter collection?
A: Our Autumn/Winter 2013 collection is inspired by Tsarist Russia – a time of amazing opulence and extravagance. We draw the colours for the collection from imagery we sourced from that period in Russian history. Chartreuse, forest green, ruby red and for the first time a beautiful deep blue – black. We are shooting the collection next month in a palace outside Moscow which is super exciting!
Q: Asian inspiration is also evident in several lingerie collections for this season. Olivia Von Halle has been a forerunner for this trend for a while in sleepwear. Does this inspiration come from your time spent in China as a trend forecaster?
A: Asia is a wealth of inspiration for any designer – it is a vast area and each region has its own unique aesthetic. I could take a different country in Asia and design collections inspired by just one region for years to come – there is so much to look at and be excited by. Living in Shanghai was an amazing opportunity as we were able to travel cheaply and easily all over Asia – I do miss popping to Tokyo for the weekend!
3. And finally, you design all of your own textile prints, which is so rare. How do you go about this process?
I normally wake up one morning and know exactly how my next collection will look – where we will shoot it, who will model the collection etc. With the print designer and pattern cutter we bring together lots of inspiring images which encapsulate the idea of the shoot, and then the print designer takes those and designs the original artwork. Once we have decided the colours and the scale together we send the artwork to the factory, who send us around 30 ‘strike offs’ . These are small swatches of fabric, each one with a different print option. We curate these down to a final five prints and three solid colours and build the shapes of the collection around the fabrics. It is time consuming and hard work but it means every season all the prints we have are exclusive to the brand, which means a lot to people.
To find out more about this fantastic brand, be sure to check out her website: http://oliviavonhalle.com/home
Read more